How did we get here on Israel’s annexation plan? It’s all in the Balfour Declaration

Instead of pondering the issues around a possible delay, let’s remember that this is all about Israel’s existence as a state, writes Robert Fisk

Benjamin Netanyahu has called the Israeli government’s plans ‘another glorious chapter in the history of Zionism’ (AFP/Getty)

Let’s go back to Balfour. It’s not about whether Israel will annex the West Bank later this month or how much of it or how much more of it. It’s about the original 1917 British promise – or the original sin, if you were an Arab – and what it said in words.

For after the rigmarole about British “sympathy” and Zionist “aspirations”, the single sentence of the Balfour Declaration pledged that the cabinet in London viewed “with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”.

And the all-important words in this sentence were “national” and “in Palestine”. We can forget the nonsense about protecting the rights of “the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” because we had not the slightest intention of doing anything of the kind. That’s why – and readers might do well to take another look at this wretched document – Arthur Balfour preferred to avoid identifying these mysterious “non-Jewish communities” as either Arabs or Muslims or Christians.

So first, let’s deal with “national” – the adjective of “nation”, which in modern parlance means a state. At least, that’s what we have to accept, because if Balfour meant only a “nation” in the collective community sense of the word – meaning a “people” – then why would he use the words “Jewish people” after already supporting a “national” home for them? But the second and equally important expression is “in Palestine”. Because Balfour – which, in effect, meant the entire British wartime cabinet of 1917 – did not specify which bit of “Palestine” he was referring to when he wrote of the Jewish “homeland”.

The section that became Israel just over 30 years later? Or a larger portion than that? Or all of what would in 1920 become British mandate Palestine – that is to say, what is now Israel, the West Bank and the city of Jerusalem (and Gaza, which, for the moment and for obvious reasons, is another story). You could even argue that the “Palestine” to which Balfour referred in 1917 included Transjordan – what is now largely the Kingdom of Jordan on the other side of the Jordan river, later taken out of Palestine by the British.

So when Benjamin Netanyahu told Israelis two months ago that the extension of Israeli sovereignty into the West Bank would be “another glorious chapter in the history of Zionism”, his Zionist predecessor, Chaim Weizmann – who was deeply involved in the very wording and semantics of the Balfour Declaration – might surely have pointed out that this had already been achieved.

Had not the British talked about “Palestine” without making the slightest geographical boundary to the “national home” which the Jews would establish inside the future mandate? In other words, in 1917 the Jews might well have believed that the British were offering a much bigger “Palestine” – indeed, the whole of Palestine – than eventually came Israel’s way in 1948. In those days, of course, the “West Bank” did not exist in the nomenclature of Jewish people or Arabs.

The “non-Jewish communities” (the Muslim and Christian Arabs) in Palestine – to whom Balfour was not offering a “national home” – lived all over the land. But – and here was the frightening expression in the declaration – these people were not in the document said to live on the land. They merely “existed” there (as in “the rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”). They were a majority of the people in Palestine – but they were defined not by their identity, but by the identity of those who would create their “homeland” there. They were “non-Jewish”.

It all comes back, of course, to boundaries. If the British believed they had promised – or if the Jews believed they had been promised – all of Palestine, then what is all this nonsense about “annexation”? Have the Zionists forgotten the original undertaking of the Balfour Declaration? So now here comes the real threat to the very notion of “annexation”.

For if it effectively declares Israeli sovereignty over the rest of the old British mandate, what has the West Bank been since its occupation by Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war? This territorial conquest – in a conflict started by the Arabs – turned Israel into an occupying power, with all the legal obligations which should then burden the occupier.

But Israel’s argument, all along, was and is that the land is “disputed” – unless it is annexed, I suppose – since it was not anybody’s “sovereign territory” to “occupy” when the Israelis drove into the West Bank 53 years ago. Thus the very notion of an Arab “Palestine” may be construed as both a misnomer and a fraud. The Arab-Palestinian version of “Palestine”, according to the Israelis, does not exist because it does not have all the attributes of a state. We shall set aside for the moment the UN’s acceptance of its statehood. It is the definition of statehood that has remained the foundational rock of Israel’s refusal to accept the existence of Arab Palestine.

Here we return to the ultimate irony of the entire Israeli colonial project in the West Bank. For if President Abbas’s pitiful version of “Palestine” – the West Bank and Gaza – lacks the vital attributes of statehood, so does Israel. For what country on earth cannot tell its own people – let alone the rest of the world – where its eastern border lies? Does it run through the centre of Jerusalem? Round the east of Jerusalem? Round the edge of the largest Jewish colonial enterprises in the West Bank – built, as we must always remind ourselves, almost entirely on the land of other people (the Arabs)? Is this to be the new “eastern border” of Israel about which Netanyahu has been threatening the Palestinians – with Donald Trump’s and Jared Kushner’s encouragement, of course – over recent months?

But if this “annexation” is now to be in stages – if it can consume a settlement there, an “illegal outpost” somewhere else (this last phenomenon being one of the more laughable of Israel’s excuses for land-grabbing), then it still fails to define the location of Israel’s eastern border. Netanyahu’s new annexation, if it’s going to be piecemeal, salami-sliced, gobble-by-gobble, will only be another temporary eastern border of Israel, a half-hearted frontier waiting for the creation of yet another “sovereign” demarcation which will itself also be temporary.

In other words, if Israel wants an eastern border, it’s got to tell the world where the very final frontier is going to be. Then it will have all the attributes of statehood. And it can’t do that – and Netanyahu can’t do that – because the apartheid state which Israel’s critics claim it to be then immediately comes into existence. For the moment that Israel actually tells us that the whole of the line of the Jordan river (not just the northern bit) is the border of Israel, then the Arabs of the West Bank will be living without rights or votes within Greater Israel.

It’s intriguing just how the objections to Netanyahu’s plans – if we are to take them as seriously as we regard Trump’s administration as lunatic – have been phrased these past few weeks. The European Union has dwelt upon the illegality of such a land-theft. Boris Johnson – who has both praised and condemned the Balfour Declaration in a few short years, depending on whether he was looking for new trade deals with Israel – has now said in his Israeli newspaper article that he “is immensely proud of the UK’s contribution to the birth of Israel with the 1917 Balfour Declaration”.

But with the exception of two measly references to “justice” – for both Israelis and Palestinians, of course – his entire thesis is based upon the idea that the annexation proposals “will fail in their objective of securing Israel’s borders [sic] and will be contrary to Israel’s own long-term interests.” It would, he wrote, be “a violation of international law”. And annexation would be a gift to antisemites (“those who want to perpetuate the old stories about Israel”).

Not once, ever, does Johnson say that the principal reason for opposing the annexation of the West Bank is that it is wrong and immoral, a criminal act of mass territorial theft which will leave an entire people – or “non-Jewish communities”, as Balfour would have said – without the homes and land which they legally own. This – not some minutiae of international legislation – is why so many millions of people around the world are aghast at Israel’s determination to seize this territory.

And until the “civilised” western powers call Israel out on this immorality – this cruelty – then Netanyahu can huff and puff about annexation to his heart’s content and even put up the new but temporary frontier wire without the slightest fear.

So instead of pondering why Netanyahu and Gantz may be divided over their colonial project – of how frightened they are of a Joe Biden victory and thus must press ahead, or how fearful they are of a Trump defeat and thus must put their new colonial plans on hold, of what economic ant-bites the EU can inflict on Israel’s economy or how deeply Johnson cares about its security – let’s remember that this is all about Israel’s existence as a state.

To have a state, it must have borders. But to stake its claim on a frontier which encompasses the whole West Bank undermines the morality upon which the finally-created state – with all its necessary attributes – will exist. That’s the crux of the matter.

Perhaps we prove this when we journalists and commentators and analysts spend as much time reporting and discussing the alleged corruption charges against Netanyahu – which he denies – as we do the impending and massive state crime of stealing forever another people’s land and property.