00:02 Bernard Regan: Roland said — I just saw something about them — we were going to speak, please, in 15 minutes. I said, thank God for that. I spoke for an hour last night at Leeds University, which was, I think, more trying for the audience than it was for me, because always [?] I find it difficult to stop, because there are so many things that are connected to this. I suppose if I start at the provocative end of things: I think what the Balfour Declaration is really about — I'll give you the short version and then perhaps try and justify what the Balfour Declaration was really about — was about British imperialism writing itself a licence to act in the Middle East in whatever way it chose, and that had Zionism been non-existent, the British would have invented it. Yeah, that's a very blunt way of expressing it, but I think, really, if you go into the area, what happened in the discussions that took place and the attitude of the British — the discussions that took place with leaders of the Jewish community in Britain, and with Zionism — that in essence was really the net outcome.
01:02 And I think what's important, looking at the Balfour Declaration, is to put it in its context, and that context was essentially the inter-imperialist rivalry, which sped forward in the 19th century with the Congress of Berlin in 1882, when all the imperial powers got together to decide how they were going to carve up Africa — Africa in particular. But that was symptomatic of the actual expansion and extension of the whole imperialist agenda. There's an Indian historian, Irfan Habib, who expresses it as saying that the British were moving from a position of controlling Indian commodities to controlling the Indian market, and that in a sense expresses exactly what was taking place [in the late?] 19th century, and a competition which went on with Germany, with France, with other imperial powers, which was at the back of this.
02:05 And why, if you like, did they get concerned about the Near East, or Middle East, or whatever we want to call it — that area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf? Why was it something of importance to the British? Why did they consider this was something they wanted to actually have a stake in? And I think there are three reasons. They're interlocking reasons, but three critical reasons. We were talking about a rivalry which resulted in the beginning of the First World War, in the series of alliances, with the British, the French and the Russians — tsarist Russia — on the one hand, and on the other Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire on the other. And that competition between those two blocs, if you like — and the British very much underwritten financially by the United States of America, receiving financial aid, material aid to sustain it, although the US wasn't involved in the war — was a process that came to a particular challenge for the British in respect of the area of the Middle East, when they anticipated — they were concerned about the potential for the Germans, in conjunction with their allies the Ottomans, of being able to expand down towards the Suez Canal and cut off the Suez Canal and have control over it.
03:39 And that was considered as a real threat to the empire, because it was through the Suez Canal that the overwhelming majority of merchant vessels, and from the British point of view Royal Navy vessels, military vessels, were actually passing through. And as you probably know, there's a serial on the television at the moment about Aden, and about the British in the 1950s, 1960s. Aden was the other end of the Red Sea, so the Suez Canal and Aden were two pinch points in terms of the British being able to communicate with the Empire and being able to retain control over it. So the Suez Canal was critical. More than 50 percent of the world's vessels were British, so it wasn't just, if you like, their own trade, but the dominance of the world merchant fleet which was important to them as well.
04:10 In addition to that, they wanted to retain the land bridge between the two seas, the two areas of the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf, because in order to do that — because they could, for example, in necessity be able to send reinforcements to India much faster than going through the Suez Canal. They cut the time by something like two weeks. Now, concerned about this — why? Because at that time they anticipated that tsarist Russia wanted to extend its influence through Afghanistan. I mean, you know the story of the Great Game and what took place in the north-western area. Russia wanted to extend its influence towards [?] the Indian Ocean, because they wanted to have an ice-free port, which is, you know, as you know, in recent times, in relation to Crimea and so on, still an issue that Russia is kind of exercised about. And that was one of their preoccupations, and there was a real worry that Russia would extend its influence through Persia, Afghanistan, in order to do that.
05:13 On top of that, the Russians had a certain kind of place, a certain locus, in relation to Palestine and to the area of the Near East, for other reasons, and that was that under the Ottoman Empire, what were called capitulations or concessions were made by the Ottomans to various imperial powers, to enable them to act as patrons for various groups of communities. So for example, the Orthodox Church was under the patronage of tsarist Russia; Christians were in general under the patronage of the French. So both the French and the Russians had a sort of legitimacy in terms of the Ottoman Empire, in terms of how things operated, to say that they could go in and intervene [?]. That was something the British didn't have, and I think it was a factor that came into play in terms of Zionism and what they saw it potentially offering, as giving them some sort of locus, some kind of [inaudible] in that area, which would enable them to say, look, we're here to look after these people's interests.
06:15 So the [inaudible] issue was not — it wasn't a casual thing. It's not just the kind of, you know, something, an afterthought. During the period of the war, from 1914 to '18, they reviewed British strategy in depth. They had a committee; they had a position paper [?] produced by Lord Kitchener, which was called "Alexandretta and Mesopotamia" — Mesopotamia is what they called Iraq at the time — which was talking about having control over that area and being able to ensure that they could move troops and so on swiftly to that, because Kitchener was concerned about India. Another document was produced by the de Bunsen Committee, which was another body that went into some detail into looking at what the British wanted to see after the anticipated defeat of the Ottoman Empire, in terms of the dispersal of the Ottoman Empire itself.
07:17 And Kitchener and de Bunsen both went further than that, because they were drawing in [?] what I think is the third major element, which is largely kind of [inaudible], and that is the question of oil. Oil — it's not a recent issue or concern that has come into play just within the last — post-war, post-Second World War, just within the last several decades. It began to become an issue from the beginning of the 20th century, and it was an issue because, as far as Britain was concerned, and leading members in the field, entrepreneurs, people investing in this area, there was some anxiety that the market was essentially dominated by the United States of America, which was then the major producer, to some extent by Russia and the oil fields in the Caspian, Baku there, and so on. And their anxiety was that they wanted to have access to and control over sources which the British could claim as their own.
08:20 The British Petroleum Company was set up in this period, about 1912. In 1912 Sir Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, voted [?] that the British Royal Navy would transfer from coal to oil, and that meant expanding the range of the operation of those vessels. So from a military point of view, a real game-changer — also changing the structure of the crewing of those ships, because 50% of the crew were actually just concerned with stoking the boilers and keeping the vessels going. So if you have oil, it makes a big difference in how you crew vessels, and so on. And these were real material interests which played into the actual developments of the war, the structure of the war, the British actually being able to wage that war.
08:50 Now, very quickly, what about the other interests, if you like, in this whole discussion? And that is, of course, we have to talk about Zionism and the emergence of Zionism — I know Roland will cover this in more detail. But certainly the pogroms that were taking place in Eastern Europe, Russia, in an understandable way led to a debate about how would people defend themselves. And what was very clearly the case was, despite the notes of sympathy which some of the politicians gave to the plight of Jews in Eastern Europe and in Russia, in practice people like Balfour, for example, in 1905 was enacting the first anti-immigrant legislation, the Aliens Act, in order precisely to keep Russian Jews out of Britain. And yet this was the man who later — I mean, it's interesting reading [inaudible]'s piece in The Guardian a few weeks ago on Balfour, where he said that Balfour was a hero to the Zionists. Well, that may well be true, but he wasn't a hero to the Jews, or there was no reason why he should have been, because on the contrary, his views were to exclude.
10:24 And in the beginning there were different views about what should eventually happen. So the territorialists simply wanted a piece of land on which they could establish a homeland, and that would suffice. There were others who had a more — what might, I suppose, be described as a more traditional religious view of Zionism, that it didn't necessarily conclude with Palestine as the homeland or indeed actually being established. It was a political movement nevertheless, and again, this is, you know, something we can take into a big discussion. But that was not something which was acceptable: in 1905 the Zionist movement rejected that kind of territorialism, as it was called, put forward. And then of course we begin to get, in the course of the war, an acceleration of the discussion around Palestine as a possibility [?] [inaudible — gap in captions].
11:42 So that situation of Zionism — the transition, if you like, in terms of the British relationship to it, and the relationship of the War Cabinet in terms of that, was really accelerated by the developments that were taking place on the ground in the region [?], especially when it followed after two significant sets of negotiations. On the one hand, negotiations that took place with the Sharif of Mecca, Hussein, which was the discussion to establish an Anglo-Arab anti-Ottoman alliance, in order particularly to attack and thwart the potential for German troops to be deployed on the Hejaz railway, which ran down through Damascus and through Jordan and down to Mecca and Medina — and they wanted to attack that in order to prevent reinforcements being sent by Germany.
12:46 And also there was the aspiration of the Arab leadership for the independence of the Arab world. In the [?] period in time there have been changes; there were different political currents within the Arab world, particularly in Palestine, Syria, Lebanon. Some wanted to remain within the Ottoman Empire but have more autonomy; some wanted to create a pan-Arabist perspective; some wanted then subsequently to create an Arab nationalist perspective looking at discrete areas. But the original position that was taken [?] in 1915, in a document called the Damascus Protocol, was to seek the independence of the whole of the Arab world, to create Arab nations within it. And that was defined by a line which roughly went approximating to what is currently the border between Syria and Turkey, the border between Persia and what is now Iraq, the whole of the Arab peninsula with the exception of Aden, and then coming back up the Red Sea and back straight across to the Mediterranean. So it encompassed Syria — what is now Syria, Palestine and Lebanon — as well as the areas of Iraq, Jordan, and all of the countries of the peninsula.
13:48 And that was what Hussein set out [?] in his letter to McMahon, explaining what the aspirations were. And the anticipation of the Arab leadership, and within the Arab world, was that that was going to be the quid pro quo, if you like, the payoff by the British for allying with them in the struggle against the Ottomans, in terms of that negotiation. However, almost simultaneously the British were conducting discussions with the French, and that discussion was about the division of the areas of influence between what essentially we now describe as Syria, Lebanon on the one hand, and the southern areas of Turkey, and the areas below a line which was drawn, which would include Jordan, Mesopotamia/Iraq, and of course the rest of the Arab world. And that was a line drawn by Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot — the Sykes-Picot line — which was describing, and literally was a line drawn on a map, describing those two areas of influence.
14:51 The interesting thing is that when they do that, they didn't say simply [?] that Palestine would be part of the British sphere of influence. Rather, it would be under international auspices, and that it would be responsible for ensuring that the holy places of Islam, of Judaism and of Christianity were protected and were accessible to all the pilgrims of those traditions. And that in addition to that, however, the British would have a discreet little area around Haifa and Acre, which would be ports that would form the terminal for a potential oil line running from Mosul, up in the north-east of Iraq, across to Haifa, which would then, like Gibraltar and Malta, if you like, be a refuelling base for the British fleet operating in the eastern Mediterranean, going through the Suez Canal into the Indian Ocean.
15:54 So it was [inaudible]. It wasn't really until 1916, or later in 1916, when Mark Sykes turned round and said [?] to the government, well, actually the French have got ambitions on Palestine. And there was, running through — a thread through all of the Cabinet discussions, and there's a very interesting book on the negotiations about the oil line, by James Barr, called *A Line in the Sand*, which I recommend — this really was: the British Cabinet was concerned all the time about what the French were up to. They didn't want the French anywhere near the Suez Canal, so they were forever thinking of ways in which they could push them out [?]. So on the one hand, as I said, they were saying one thing to the Arab leadership; on the other, they were negotiating with the French, and that was how they were operating.
16:54 So what of [?] the Palestinians? Because they are, I think, very often completely neglected in this story, completely ignored, by and large. Palestinian opposition to Zionism, or to the colonisation which took place in Palestine, can be traced back at least until 1882, in Afula [?], when sales of lands took place and Palestinian peasants and farmers and families lost their lands and lost their livelihoods. And that came about — and this is, you know, one of the kind of shifting plates within the whole kind of conjuncture, if you like — that came about during the course of the First World War [?] was because of the change in the land laws which were taking place. But the opposition to that, not only then but in books, in literature, in newspapers, was produced and disseminated throughout the whole of the Arab world, and people understood very well what the threat of Zionism was. They were conscious, they knew about it, they even predicted the likelihood of war taking place, in journals and books and these newspapers.
17:57 Despite there being a relatively low level of literacy in Palestine, these newspapers were read in cafés, were known about by Palestinian society. In 1921 a justice of the peace [?] of Palestine called Haycraft produced a report on one of the [inaudible] places where the deaths occurred, saying that in his opinion actually the Palestinian people in the villages in themselves knew more about politics than their equivalents in Britain did at the time. So this idea — and then there were many congresses, many attempts to formulate a very clear position calling for self-determination and calling for an end to British rule, calling for an end to settlement and colonisation, and calling for the right of the Palestinians to self-determination.
18:59 So Balfour is very much, as I've said, in essence an imperial project, an imperial project which was designed to meet the British interest. And its vagueness — and we could go into talking about the wording of it — what was designed [inaudible] was literally to give that licence to the British without having any specific commitments. And of course to this day it remains one of the plagues of the fortunes of the Arab world in the Middle East area. Thanks.
---