Chapter 143. Zion and Palestine: Zionism, the Balfour Declaration, Israel and the Palestinian Question

No modern political question carries more religious weight than the one that began when a secular Viennese journalist proposed a state for the Jews and the British Empire promised them a “national home” in a land holy to three faiths. The library’s sources range from documentary history (Stein), a mainstream survey (Slavicek) and a defence of Zionism (Vaknin), through Palestinian and anti-Zionist histories (Khalidi, Suárez, Loewenstein) and a realist critique (Mearsheimer and Walt), to polemical and conspiratorial literature (Reed, John, Makow, Icke, Grove, Duke). The chapter sets these out side by side, each attributed to its author, and ends with Heisman’s philosophical reading and Keshe’s prophecies.

From Der Judenstaat to Basel and Balfour

Slavicek gives the mainstream sequence. After The Jewish State (1896), “in 1897 Herzl organized the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, to discuss how to translate his ideas regarding Jewish statehood into reality”. It “attracted widespread Jewish support… particularly in Eastern Europe”. Her chronology continues: “1917 Great Britain’s Balfour Declaration supports a ‘Jewish National Home’ in Palestine. 1920 Great Britain is given a mandate” [Slavicek, Israel, #63054, chs. 1-3, Chronology]. Armstrong’s chronology of Islam places the declaration next to the Turkish War of Independence (1919-21), after which Atatürk “adopts radical secularizing and modernizing policies (1924-28)” [Armstrong, Islam, #68695, Chronology]. Read from the Muslim side, the promise of a Jewish home and the dismantling of the last Islamic empire belong to the same decade.

Issitt and Main define Zionism as “a nationalist movement that supports the existence of a Jewish state in the area generally called the ‘Holy Land'”, its name “derived from ‘Zion,’ the Hebrew term for Jerusalem”. They note “many separate and ideologically distinct movements within the larger Zionist fold, including political/secular Zionist organizations” [Issitt and Main, Hidden Religion, #66220, ch. 3]. The movement is conventionally divided into political, religious, labour (Ben-Gurion) and revisionist (Jabotinsky) Zionism [Wikipedia: Zionism].

The Balfour Declaration: Documents and the Lobbying Thesis

Stein concludes that “British motivations had been far from simple: a delicate balance between quite different interests, tempered by sentiments as recognizable as they were difficult to explain”. He also records the later verdict that, “measured by British interests alone, it was one of the greatest mistakes in our imperial history” [Stein, The Balfour Declaration, #64873]. The sentiment was biblical. Stein quotes a British statesman who recalled being “taught far more about the history of the Jews than about the history of my own people… We used to recite great passages from the Prophets and the Psalms” [#64873, ch. 8]. He also shows how unsettled the idea of a Jewish nation was inside Jewry. A 1917 conference record (which Stein notes “is not a verbatim report”) warns that “if it was intended to create in Palestine a Jewish nation eo nomine, care must be taken to explain the sense in which the term was used, because there was much misunderstanding, among Jews of the West, and some fear”. Stein traces the same debate back to Sokolow’s “Reminiscences of the First Zionist Congress” (Zionist Review, October 1917) [#64873, ch. 2].

Robert John, whose book the library shelves under conspiracy literature, reads the same archive (Wilson, Brandeis, Weizmann, Rothschild) as a record of organised pressure. He cites the letter of 17 May 1917 in The Times from Alexander and Montefiore, who approved Jewish settlement “but… could not favor the Zionists”, and the Chief Rabbi’s repudiation of it. He adds that “on 18 July, such a statement, approved in the United States, was forwarded by Lord Rothschild to Lord Balfour” [John, Behind the Balfour Declaration, #39567]. Stein sees imperial calculation meeting Protestant sentiment. John sees drafts passing between London and Washington before Balfour signed.

National Movement or Colonial Project

Vaknin writes: “Zionism is undoubtedly a typical 19th century national movement, promoting the interests of an ethnically-homogeneous nation. But it is not and never has been a racist movement”. He concedes that it “always regarded itself as both a (19th century) national movement and a (colonial) civilizing force” [Vaknin, The Crescent and the Cross, #60291]. Suárez argues the reverse. In his view, “Zionism’s treatment of Jews as a ‘race’ apart was a hallmark of classic anti-Semitism”, and Herzl answered Jewish critics by decreeing “No true Jew can be an anti-Zionist” [Suárez, State of Terror, #64499, Part I]. Suárez also rejects the word “conflict”. He cites an anthropologists’ task force for whom the word “assumes that the parties involved have comparable access to resources” [#64499, Part III].

1948: Independence and Nakba

Slavicek writes: “Within 24 hours of the proclamation of the State of Israel, the first Arab-Israeli War, or the War of Independence, as it is known in Israel, began”. She judges the Palestinians “the big losers”, with Gaza and the West Bank taken by Egypt and Transjordan under a partition plan “vehemently rejected by the Arab world in November 1947” [Slavicek, #63054, ch. 4]. Armstrong: “Israeli forces inflict a devastating defeat on the five Arab armies who invade the new Jewish state. Some 750,000 Palestinians leave the country during the hostilities and are not permitted to return” [Armstrong, Islam, #68695].

Khalidi dates the expulsions earlier: “the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began well before the state of Israel was proclaimed on May 15, 1948” [Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, #62730]. Loewenstein quotes “Yehoshua Verbin, commander of the military government that ruled over Arab citizens between 1948 and 1966”: “We expelled around half a million Arabs, we burnt homes, we looted their land—from their point of view—we didn’t give it back, we took land …”. He links the remark to Baruch Kimmerling’s thesis [Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory, #66445, ch. 3]. Suárez’s central thesis is that militia terrorism created the state. He cites British reports (“[Jewish] outrage succeeded outrage”) and Irgun notices “threatening that the hands of any Arabs raised against the Jewish cause would be cut off”. He quotes Hagana documents boasting of “500 explosions” in a single night and argues that the evidence shows “the Jewish Agency was complicit in the terror” [Suárez, #64499, Parts I-II].

David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, claims in the Romanian edition of his book that in 1948 “almost ninety-four per cent” (“aproape nouăzeci şi patru la sută”) of land in Israel was Palestinian-owned. He says this land was then confiscated into the “Jewish National Fund”, and he quotes an eyewitness calling the Israeli shelling of refugees at Qana “a massacre” [Duke, Trezirea la realitate, #51999]. The figures are his.

The American Dimension and the Laboratory Thesis

Mearsheimer and Walt argue that the scale of US support “cannot be justified on strategic or moral grounds”. In the chapter “A Dwindling Moral Case” they test the arguments from shared “democratic values” and from Israel as “a weak and vulnerable David facing a powerful Arab Goliath”. They hold that supporters of Israel “have every right to advocate their positions, and it is wrong to question their loyalty”, and that it is “equally legitimate” to say that AIPAC and the ADL are not neutral [Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, #75004, chs. 3, 7]. Loewenstein’s thesis, as his subtitle puts it, is that Israel “exports the technology of occupation”. It tests weapons and surveillance “technology on Palestinians, and then promote[s] them around the world”. He traces arms sales “to disreputable regimes from the outset” and notes that the Uzi was sold “in more than ninety countries” [Loewenstein, #66445, Introduction, ch. 1].

The Polemical and Conspiratorial Literature

Reed dates “the true start of this affair” to 458 BC, when “the petty Palestinian tribe of Judah… produced a racial creed”. He writes that “a master-race, if there be one, must itself be God”. Since in his account the northern Israelites rejected Judah’s creed, “the use of the name ‘Israel’ by the Zionist state… is in the nature of a forgery” [Reed, The Controversy of Zion, #64653, chs. 1-2]. The Modern Day Serpent People of the Bible (author styled “Unknown Hebrew”) holds that Ashkenazim “are not Shemites” but Japhethites and Khazars. It cites Koestler that the Khazar story is “the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated” [Unknown Hebrew, #68765]. The reference shelf reports that mainstream genetics and history reject the Khazar thesis [Wikipedia: Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry]. Duke’s own book cites blood-group studies (Bonné-Tamir et al., 1977, 1979) that found no significant difference between Jewish populations of Iraq, Libya, Germany and Poland [Duke, #51999].

The Rothschild narratives start from the fact that the letter was addressed to Lord Rothschild. Icke adds that “researchers say that the letter was in fact WRITTEN by Lord Rothschild and his employee, the banker, Alfred Milner” [Icke, Was Hitler a Rothschild, #38035]. Grove compiles references on the Rothschild colonies and on the Zionist activity of Balfour’s niece Blanche Dugdale [Grove, The Truth About the Rothschilds, #52023, ch. 20]. Makow stresses that the Cabinet acted “over the strenuous objections of its only Jewish member, Edwin Montagu”, and calls Zionism “a way to advance British imperialism and the Masonic ‘New World Order'” [Makow, Illuminati, #64886, p. 131].

Heisman and Keshe

Heisman calls Judaism the “source of the original monotheist insight” that “had to combine contradictory values”. It was a step towards “a transcendence of biology: God”, taken by people who “could not fully escape being biological” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, “PART II part 64”]. Secularised, the paradox becomes liberal egalitarianism, and Israel-Palestine is a case where it remains unresolved. He cites Herzl: “our enemies have made us one… It is only pressure that forces us back to the parent stem”. He concludes that “through the invisible walls of anti-Semitism, gentiles… have helped” preserve the Jews [#38252, “PART II part 104”].

Keshe’s statements take the form of prophecy. In KSW 388 he says “the state of Palestine… includes state of Israel”, which survives only “as part of a nation… the One nation One Planet” [Keshe, KSW 388, #378100]. In KSW 513 (23 November 2023): “there will not be a state of Israel or Palestine in the coming time… Judaism is coming to an end by itself through diminishing numbers” [Keshe, KSW 513, #378225]. In KSW 508 he asks Iran’s leadership to help “the Palestinians to get out of the prison created by the ‘gun policy’ of the United States… and the madness of the Jewish leaders” [Keshe, KSW 508, #378220]. In KSW 632 he claims that “7 Rabbis of Jerusalem run Judaism” and links them to Netanyahu [Keshe, KSW 632, #378344]. KSW 608 speaks of “the last days of the 6,000 years of anarchy” and says of the occupiers that “they shall have no home” [Keshe, KSW 608, #378320].

Key points

• The agreed chronology: Herzl (1896), Basel (1897), Balfour (1917), the British Mandate (1920), statehood (1948) and some 750,000 Palestinian refugees (Slavicek, Armstrong).
• Stein finds British motives “far from simple”. John reads the same archive as evidence of lobbying.
• Vaknin calls Zionism non-racist nationalism. Suárez calls it racialising and argues that terrorism made the state.
• Khalidi and Loewenstein (quoting Verbin) date ethnic cleansing to before 15 May 1948. Slavicek frames 1948 as a war of independence against invading Arab armies.
• Mearsheimer and Walt find US backing unjustified on strategic and moral grounds. Loewenstein describes the export of occupation technology.
• Reed, Makow, Icke, Grove, Duke and the Serpent People text offer master-race, Rothschild and Khazar narratives. The reference shelf reports that mainstream genetics rejects the Khazar thesis [Wikipedia], while Duke himself cites blood-group studies finding no significant difference between Jewish populations [#51999].
• Heisman treats Israel-Palestine as Judaism’s unresolved biological paradox. Keshe prophesies that neither state will survive separately.