The best book on the Balfour Declaration is… Palestine the Reality by J.M.N. Jeffries Book Review: by John McHugo Palestine: The Reality appeared in 1939 but was largely forgotten soon afterwards. This may have been because most stocks of the book were destroyed in the Blitz. Jeffries was a respected war correspondent for The Daily Mail during the First World War. …
UK apology sought for British war crimes in Palestine
Tom Bateman, the BBC correspondent in Jerusalem, writes about the ‘imperial brutality’ meeted out by the British in supressing the Arab Revolt for 1936-39.
An interview between Mr Balfour and Justice Brandeis, During the Peace Conference in 1919 in Paris Mr. Balfour, Mr. Justice Brandeis, Lord Eustace Percy and Mr. Frankfurter. Mr. Balfour expressed great satisfaction that Justice Brandeis came to Europe. One of Balfour’s statements was “Palestine presented a unique situation. We are dealing not with the wishes of an existing community but are consciously seeking to re-constitute a new community and definitely building for a numerical majority in the future.…”
Prophet of Doom: E.T. Richmond, Palestine 1920-1924 by John Richmond I have recently discovered some records of the period my father spent as a member of Sir Herbert Samuel’s Civil Administration in Palestine. This replaced the Military Administration, known as Occupied Enemy Territory Administration (South), which had run the country since Allenby’s conquest of Southern Palestine and his occupation of Jerusalem in December 1917.
India, Palestine and the Balfour Declaration
How the Zionists hitched a ride on the Imperialist bandwagon General writings on imperial history seldom mention tiny Palestine in any detail, with the critical Palestine-India link barely identified. This piece attempts to reduce the analytic deficit, setting British Palestine policy in its broad global frame.
The 1929 Palestine Riots – A Conflicted Jewish Historiography by William M Mathew Mathew compares the work of two Jewish historians on the long-term effects of the inter-communal violence and harsh response by British forces which rocked Palestine in 1929. Where their accounts overlap Mathew explores their markedly different approaches. Mathew’s review follows in two parts.Part 1 is here and Part II here
Britain’s Secret Re-Assessment of the Balfour Declaration. The Perfidy of Albion, by John Quigley The British Cabinet’s confidential re-assessment in 1923 of the advisability of promoting a Jewish national home was later made public… Examining that re-assessment – as the present article attempts – will hopefully shed light on Britain’s eventual failure in Palestine and may contribute to an understanding of the genesis of the Arab-Israeli conflict that can inform present-day efforts at resolving it.
Britain’s Pacification of Palestine – The British Army, the Colonial State, and the Arab Revolt, 1936–9 by Matthew Hughes Book review by Ian Black The 1936–9 Arab Revolt against British rule in Palestine, and its suppression by the British army, was a precursor to the devastating war against the nascent Israeli state that the Palestinians lost a decade later. Matthew Hughes‘s extensively researched new study shows how, with a ruthlessly effective combination of brutality and ‘non-lethal oppressive collective punishment’, the British quelled the revolt and crushed any chance for effective Palestinian resistance against colonial rule.
The Balfour Declaration – Empire, the Mandate and Resistance in Palestine by Bernard Regan. Book review by John McHugo Bernard Regan shows us what Britain did (and what Britain thought it was doing) by issuing the Balfour Declaration, by incorporating it into the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, and by governing Palestine in a way intended to implement it. The declaration was, he tells us in the introduction, “first and foremost, the conscious endeavour of an imperialist power pursuing its own ambitions.” That is, sad to say, undoubtedly correct.
Palestine and Britain 1917-1948: Competing Policies, Creative Commemoration Talk by Peter Shambrook at the Balfour Project conference in Southwark Cathedral on 5th November 2016 entitled: ‘How will we mark the Centenary of the Balfour Declaration’
Balfour, Weizmann and the Creation of Israel by Charles Glass Charles Glass, writing in the London Review of Books in 2001, reviewed two books looking at the period of the British Mandate in Palestine. It was also published in the Guardian under the tilte: The Mandate Years; colonialism and the creation of Israel. Although written 15 years ago it touches on topics that are very little known in the UK today. The review is reproduced by kind permission of the London review of Books and Charles Glass
Book Review: The Hundred Years’ War On Palestine A history of settler colonial conquest and resistance By Rashid Khalidi Profile Books £25.00 Review by Tim Llewellyn In the midst of Jerusalem’s Old City, on the cusp of the Muslim and Jewish quarters, reposes the Khalidi family library, an archive of scriptures, literature and letters in Arabic, …
Palestine 1917-2017: Reflections on a refugee’s story, my great-grandfather’s war diary and the legacy of Britain’s actions in Palestine. Omah Amarah is 84 years old. From the amount of energy which sparks up as he gets started on his story you can sense his tale comes from the heart; this is no dry text book account of history we …