The tail wagging the dog

Who does whose bidding in Israeli-US relations?

The tail wagging the dog. By AI.

Israel is one of the most contentious, difficult, and wildly predictable elements in the Middle East, and it is the Middle East’s greatest success story. It is billboarded as the only democracy in the region, which it is, if what you mean is that it is the only country holding fair and free elections whose results are not a foregone conclusion. And that, these days, is the only test of democracy likely to hold up to scrutiny anywhere, let alone the Middle East (we await with bated breath developments in Syria). So, how can a democracy turn into a rapacious, genocidal monster? Simple: first, it requires that its entire electorate be rapacious, genocidal monsters (who can do no wrong, by dint of having been chosen by God) and, second, Israel does not exist.

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When people talk about the birth of Israel, they invariably point to the Balfour Declaration, a statement issued by the Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom, Arthur Balfour, as a declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations, in November 1917. It’s very short.

His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

In 1917, the will of the British to ensure the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country may have been somewhat greater than it is today. Nevertheless, quite how Balfour proposed following up on that quasi-guarantee escapes me in the here and now. In short, it wasn’t a guarantee. Nor, indeed was any part of the declaration.

Discussion of this document has frequently homed in on the use of the indefinite article (a) before the words national home. Whatever value the Balfour Declaration might have had in its time, it was noticeable that, when Boris Johnson enthusiastically showed the desk upon which it had been signed to the visiting Israeli prime minister, Mr Netanyahu’s reaction seemed to convey the yawn of a tourist who’d already been there, seen that, and got the teeshirt. And rightly so: the words contained in the declaration “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the … rights of … non-Jewish communities” have never been granted much more than lip service by Israeli administrations. Perhaps they prefer not to be reminded of Balfour.

The Balfour Declaration can be viewed as the result of behind-the-scenes manoeuvring by the Zionist movement, a non-intitutionalised, but nevertheless influential, circle of proponents working (some would think at the time, vaingloriously) towards a project whose fulfilment would come in 1948 with the declaration of the State of Israel (nay, perchance even the 2024 annihiliation of the Palestinian people, coupled with the invasion of southern Lebanon, the breaching of the 1974 ceasefire line with Syria, and, even then, total fulfilment may yet, for some, depend on outright victory in a war with Iran).

The UK government was agreeable to supporting the Zionists in their quest for such fulfilment for one, some or all of the following reasons:

i) because they viewed it precisely as being vainglorious, and liable to failure, but viewed their proponents as valuable allies;

ii) because of an impasse in the First World War resulting from the December armistice on the eastern front (to be followed by the second treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918), which had neutralised Britain’s ally in the Russian Empire, and, despite its having declared war on the Central Powers in April of 1917, the USA yet having to establish any foothold on the battlefield (which it would not do till the summer of 1918), Britain sought to break the stalement in the Levant in order to curry Zionist favour for the war effort: land as a reward for victory;

iii) because colonies are expensive, by whatever name—here, in the event, mandated territory—and the UK was keen to have a reliable partner to administer its foothold in the Levant once it had secured a victory over the Ottoman Empire;

iv) because there was a sentiment afoot that the actions taken from the late 19th century onwards, by national governments across the east of Europe against Jewish citizens (loosely, pogroms), had constituted an unworthy and unfair disadvantage against those people based on their religious conviction—hence, an expression of solidarity.

The second of these considerations won out tops when, within years, Britain had taken de facto possession of what was then called Mandatory Palestine, its authority being endorsed by the League of Nations two years later, in 1922. Some or all of the above four considerations, and more, may have played some part in directing the actions surrounding the Balfour Declaration. With many such declarations, what is not contained therein can be as important as what is. Although a statement of support, and of no legal validity other than that—i.e. none at all—the Declaration took on legal value when its terms became incorporated into Britain’s League of Nations Mandate for Palestine. That document set out the duties incumbent on the UK as mandatary under the League’s appointment. Its duty, according to article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, itself incorporated as part of the Treaty of Versailles, was to administer what would later be classified as the class A mandate territory (i.e. former part of the Turkish Empire) of Palestine under “a sacred trust of civilisation to develop the territory for the benefit of its native people.” While the Balfour Declaration, the Covenant of the League of Nations and the Treaty of Versailles would all come to assume legal authority in terms of public international law, it will come as no surprise whatsoever that the phrase sacred trust of civilisation to this day lacks any definition at all. But, boy, does it sound good, except, as I shall argue, I doubt it’s ever been translated into Hebrew.

That, however, was the least of the difficulties thrown up by the Palestine Mandate. The British (to the disgruntlement of the French) had to some degree bought off the House of Hejaz, whose members were selected to form the royal houses of the nations into which the Turkish Levant was destined to be carved: Iraq, Transjordan and Syria (but briefly). Syria ended up as a French Mandate, as had been agreed under the clandestine Sykes-Picot Agreement, which was certainly not the first and not the last clandestine agreement to concern the country in question.

If the present action by Israel in Palestine has done anything, it has swept away the fudge. The fudge that started back with the Mandate:

i) it was not even certain what was meant by the term Palestine in terms of its precise borders;

ii) there were immediate wrangles, having agreed Arabic, English and Hebrew as national languages, what the name of Palestine (Filistina in Arabic) should be in Hebrew: nothing less than Land of Israel would be countenanced—Southern Syria was rejected out of hand, probably quite wisely;

iii) the agreements concerning the kings of Iraq and Transjordan (Jordan, as it would later become) danced diplomatically around the matter of Palestine, which was a region requiring, shall we say, more delicacy.

Why? Why the greater delicacy? Well, there was the region’s access to the Mediterranean Sea and, at the other end, to the Red Sea. As a region, it also lies slap in the middle of the entity that had been aspired to upon the inception of the Arab Revolt in 1916, when the Sheriff of Mecca had convened to help the British drive the Turks out of the Levant, in return for a pan-Arab nation, from what is now Saudi Arabia across to Baghdad. And, by the time it became a potential reality, the British were no longer so sure they wanted to help fulfil that particular dream. It’s a dream that some Arabs still cherish and which finds some kind of an outlet in the hopes of ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), which has declared a caliphate over more or less the overall Levant region (or those bits of it that it perfunctorily controls), albeit with a specific political objective and, for most, questionable methods. Nevertheless, Britain’s fudge stems from the fact that, even before it had acquired the position of Palestine mandatary, it had begun making utterances as to what it hoped might one day become of the territory entrusted to it—there we are, that’s how delicate one has to be when talking about promises that are not promised. On the other hand, Britain assumed, in terms of the very document into which Balfour’s declaration was incorporated, a duty of care and nothing less than legal promises towards the existing non-Jewish communities there. In terms of Sykes-Picot, Britain had agreed certain arrangements with France, which France rightly yanked Britain back into line on, when it appeared that Britain was about to gift Syria to the Arabs—of all people. That was not what France and the UK had agreed. And, it may sound surprising, but the sacrifice of two million British and French lives on a western front several thousand miles away granted legitimacy to what Sykes and Picot had laboured over in back rooms for three months between November 1915 and January 1916 in an endeavour to snaffle what didn’t belong to them and gift to a third party the rest of what they had questionable title to.

Sykes-Picot (named for the British and French diplomats who initially hammered it out) was a blueprint for the distribution of Levant lands once Turkey would have been defeated. In so far, it was not only pre-emptive but also presumptuous. It would be departed from, almost inevitably, in the course of the San Remo conference and the Treaty of Versailles, which followed the war’s end, but it was still instrumental in defining British-French relations post war and, unfortunately, also those between the British and the Arabs.

It was supposed to be, and to remain, a closely guarded secret, but, as with all secrets involving three parties (Russia was in on the act), it was susceptible to being betrayed if one of the three didn’t quite get his way. Russia didn’t, in the form of the October Revolution, and it was they who blabbed the whole thing to the Manchester Guardian, a fact that, as that newspaper reported, embarrassed the British, dismayed the Arabs and delighted the Turks. Dismaying the Arabs was understating things: they were livid. After all, they had been promised an Arab state from Mecca to Baghdad in return for risking their lives in the cause of the British Empire. Tsk, had they only but dwelt awhile on that word: empire. Sykes-Picot has soured relations between the French and the British, on the one hand, and the Arab peoples, on the other, to this day. Palestine itself is not a core part of Sykes-Picot, but, as already stated, it was the undefined destiny of Palestine that was as much a part of that agreement as the precise boundaries and definitions (and misplaced description of where the city of Sidon was even located) that it did contain: again, omissions can speak volumes.

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Over the past 15 months since October 7th, there has been much talk of babies. Beheaded babies, of which President Biden of the US had seen actual photographs, and could not believe what he was seeing. Partly the reason for that is that he wasn’t seeing them. He never saw a photograph of a beheaded baby. I sometimes try to understand how someone can brandish such patent lies. But then I feel sorry for him. He relied entirely on a description by someone who said he had seen the photos, someone he thought he could trust to tell the truth: the prime minister of Israel—an Israeli with the same penchant as Biden himself as an American: opportunist. But the prime minister of Israel had misled the president of the US. It caused embarrasment; it should also have made more people livid. One baby had reportedly been torn by the bare hands of a Hamas miltant from the womb of its dead mother. That too is, by all accounts, mere fabrication. It is sad that the suffering, pain and loss of many Israelis who were indeed attacked on October 7th has been diminished by the exaggerated tales of errant heads of state, wanting to score points over their opponents rather than drive down to the truth of the matter. No one must ever forget that October 7th saw a great deal of Jewish suffering. But not as much as has followed in Palestine.

The Old Testament of the Bible contains a story of a baby. In the First Book of Kings, a tale is told of two women who live in the same house, each with an infant child. It comes to pass that one of the children gets smothered (presumably by accident) but each of the mothers claims the remaining child as her own. By some means or another, it is contrived (and contrived is what most commentators regard the story as being) for the matter to end up the subject of a petition to no lesser a person than the King of Israel and Judah, Solomon by name. The king considers the arguments of the two mothers and proposes a compromise: he would have the baby split in two, and each mother would get one half of the cadaver. One mother agrees; the second declines and withdraws her petition: sooner her opponent win than that the child go to the slaughter over the heads of the dispute. The king awards the baby to the second woman.

The story is known as the Wisdom of King Solomon, but it’s predicated on one pretty callous assumption on his part: that the woman whose child it was not would in fact want to condemn the child to death. Maybe he just knew that, so he was in fact doubly wise. What the tale presents is, according to Wikipedia, this: the procedure is actually a concealed emotional test, designed to force each woman to decide between her compassion for the baby and her will to win. It’s a good analysis of the judgment of Solomon, and it serves as a good starting point for this reappraisal of Palestine. How appropriate: the very locus in which Solomon exercised such incisive wisdom all those years ago.

Palestine, then, is our baby. Let us for a moment leave aside considerations of the ethnic cleansing. Let us assume it has never taken place. Neither the Nakba, nor the lawn-mowings, nor Cast Lead, nor Protective Edge, nor Brothers’ Keeper, nor the blockade, nor, nor, nor. And let us place ourselves in 1948, the last day of the Mandate: 15 May 1948. Here we are and before us lies a baby: the territory of Mandate Palestine. To which of the plaintiff mothers should we award the child? To the Jew, or to the Arab? We could pursue the analogy and say that we order the baby divided into two halves. Each mother will receive one half of the baby. If we pursue this analogy through the successive history, we can detect tendencies on the part of the putative Jewish and Arab mothers: one of them is prepared to split the baby; one of them sets its sights on possessing all of the baby, and that is a finding that may yet confound the wisdom of King Solomon, but for this: you cannot split a baby and leave it in life, but you can split a territory and give life to both halves. (You may cite that as the Wisdom of Vincent.)

It is a feature of negotiation, so called splitting the difference. Rapprochement is achieved in a negotiated settlement by each of the parties granting a concession that constitutes a compromise on its initial (credible) position. Some call it horse-trading, others finesse. But from starting positions of ten and 20, parties will generally gravitate towards 15. However, two kinds of parties have absolutely no interest in negotiating techniques: (a) those in which a baby is involved, by which the compromise involves slicing it in two; and (b) those who are more accustomed to simply claiming babies as their own without challenge or opposition.

The disinclination of (a) can arise from an aversion to the sight of blood, from a love of the baby in question (as with the true mother in the tale of the judgment of Solomon) or, more generally, from the fact that any negotiated settlement between two parties and affecting the rights of a third party cannot but fail properly to take account of the interests of that third party: to wit, the baby itself. When third party rights have a central role to play in the negotiation that is being undertaken by two other parties, the question of whether they may act in utter disregard of those third-party rights or whether they have a benevolent duty to safeguard those rights, as some form of trustee or guardian, will be governed by that aspect of Solomon’s Wisdom as cited by Wikipedia: an emotional test, designed to force each to decide between their compassion for the baby and their will to win. So that those who fall under (b)—acknowledging only their own rights—also tend to be those who lack compassion. Compassion is when you grant a right without having to. And those who don’t think they have to do anything for others don’t negotiate. When you fight for land, you must conquer not only the land itself—for which you also must exercise compassion—you must also exercise compassion for those who occupy it. Otherwise you are a rapist.

The disinclination of (b) (those who are more accustomed to simply claiming babies as their own without challenge or opposition) can arise under two circumstances: (i) where that party recognises an immutable right, on which they will brook no compromise because compromise would be unconscionable—the baby’s right to live, in our case; or (ii) where that party recognises no rights at all, bar those it asserts as its own.

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In French, the direct cognate of politician is politicien, and it can be as derogatory in its origin as the English has become in certain usage. It translates more or less as wheeler-dealer, or, if you prefer, politican (the commoner French expression for a proper politician is homme politique, for a man, or femme politique, for a woman). But the question at the core of the matter here is whether the British, as mandatary for Palestine, acted as politicians (doing the right thing) or as politiciens (hacks). I don’t know. But I think that it’s fair to assume that they saw only one prime beneficiary as emerging from their custody of Palestine: Britain. They will have put nobody’s interests above Britain’s, regardless of the fine wording of things like League of Nations Mandates. It simply beggars belief to presume otherwise. After all, it was their job as British civil servants to serve Britain. Now, in any job, there is more to the job than just the job itself. You have to be able to get along with the rest of the department. Wear nice clothes. Not spag into a spitoon. Have a bath every now and again. Basics, standards for being in the job, and the same goes in diplomacy. Even though you have to wear a tie and cough into a handkerchief, there are certain parties with interests in what you do who will approve or disapprove of what you do as a third party but who may yet have direct interests in what you do. Except they cannot but plead with you to act in such a way as favours them. Those parties get what they want out of what you do when (a) their doing so benefits Britain, and (b) their doing so is a happy coincidence resulting from what you do. So, as an example, in the Middle Ages, shitting in the middle of the field you were working saved you having to traipse off to the nearest water closet, which was about five hundred years away, but benefited the land by spreading nutrients for next year’s crop. All analogy aside, Britain, in whatever guise, was best interested, especially after the loss of two million soldiers, in serving Britain. Whoever else got served along the way could count themselves lucky. And none were luckier than the Zionists.

The achievements of the Zionists did not fall like manna from heaven. They were hard fought and there were a good many fracas in the years between 1920 and 1948, between the existing non-Jewish communities and the Jewish communities in Palestine. Quite enough that, when David Ben-Gurion made his declaration of Israeli independence the day after the Mandate ended, the Nakba began in earnest.

The French quit the Lebanon and Syria officially in 1946 (the two had declared their independence during the war). The House of Hejaz had been successfully implanted in both Baghdad and Amman, and, with certain reservations, both branches of the royal house were inclined to favour Britain. By 1948, India had gone from the Empire, and the strategic importance of the Levant as a link in the chain between London and Delhi had been superseded by events (and fast aircraft). One major interest that remained for the British was in Iran, where the UK controlled the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later BP), and in Iraq (the former Mesopotamia Mandate), where, in the Second World War, they had secured the city of Mosul, a centre of oil production in that country. But Palestine had no proven oil resources (there is some Gaza oil, in the Mediterranean Sea, which Israel has calmly been poaching), and with the post-war emphasis on the motor car as Everyman’s reward for the years of austerity, Britain was happy to quit Palestine once Israel had taken over the reins of power. Yes, I really think Israel was the second mother in Solomon’s wisdom. Because they as good as negotiated nothing. The art of compromise—so vaunted and so valued in tiny Belgium, which has been a victim of all-or-nothing invasions twice in its short existence—knows no equivalent in tiny Israel. Whose existence has also been short. The thing is that the second woman only got the baby by giving it away: out of compassion. But Israel didn’t get Israel out of compassion. It got it by snatching it from the true mother, who it then evicted. I do wonder what Solomon would have said, whether he would have followed the views of the International Court of Justice—judicial precedent, so to speak.

The early Zionists were not naturally drawn to London as a sphere within which they deemed they could advance their cause. There were influential Jews who had been there, however, since the Zionist movement got underway in the 1880s, and they found a sympathetic ear in Britain’s wartime leader, David Lloyd George. Britain was not exactly a shooting star in those days—its imperial credentials were well established—but a series of meetings hosted by men of consequence and discretion resulted in Balfour’s declaration—no mean feat by anyone’s standards. When Jews started to settle in Palestine, evicted in the pogroms of eastern Europe, Levant Arabs regarded the incomers as Europe’s jetsam, in pretty much the same way as Europeans regard those now migrating in the opposite direction—as a nuisance rather than a threat. The kind of rhetoric akin to they’re taking over is seen by most as arrant hyperbole, therefore little did the Arabs then regard an influx of Jews as literally being just that.

What the Arabs failed to see, as did the British (who weren’t particularly looking) but that one other nation did see was how the Jews in Palestine displayed opportunism. The Arabs were men of their word: honour is a high virtue among them. A bargain may be hard negotiated with Arabs, but it is one in which, certainly at the relevant time, one’s faith could be placed. Likewise, an Englishman’s word was his bond, and no words, however indeterminate their meaning, bound the English more than those of Arthur Balfour. While it would be nonsense to say a Jew cannot be trusted, the key aspects of the growth of the nation of Israel have been marked by a singular propensity: to strike when the iron is hot, carpe diem; if you like—opportunism.

The declaration of Israeli independence in the immediate wake of the ending of the Mandate and the pre-emptive strike that marked the 1967 war (the Six-Day War, which began with Israel destroying the entire Egyptian air force) demonstrate the desire to gain the upper hand whilst the opposition is looking the other way. It was a tactic that the Egyptians would borrow in the 1973 Yom Kippur War: proving that even the holiest of festivals cannot be immune from the ravages of conflict. In all the actions taken by Israel against the Gaza Strip, they were all provoked. Yes, of sorts. It’s a little like locking a man up for no reason and then punishing him every time he sneers at the guards. The retaliation to the provocations were always disproportionate. As if Israel wasn’t seeking to put down dissent, but simply waiting for an excuse to assert its predominance: to grab the baby. It is noticeable that with the victory of what we still presume are democratic forces in Syria, within a day Israel had moved in to secure a military advantage out of the absence of viable resistance to that country’s rebellion. Far from calling Israel Southern Syria, Syria will perhaps yet become Northern Israel.

What fosters this opportunism is the backing of the greatest opportunist of all time: the United States. The US has long experience in snatching land from other people and I’m sure there is something within the psyche of Americans, whether they descend from the Pilgrim Fathers, or from the conquistadors of the Spanish Empire or from eastern European immigrants via Ellis Island to end up grabbing land in Oklahoma, that tells them that the Land of Opportunity is synonymous with Something for Nothing. It translates into a sympathy for others who think like-mindedly, and especially when the brotherhood established between such nations lends itself to mutual benefit: the military presence that the US garners for itself through the agency of Israel costs Washington, D.C. far less than invading the country itself would have done. And we need no longer speculate on whether the US would ever contemplate invading Israel. For we await with bated breath to see how cogent its sabre-rattling vis-à-vis certain other parts of the world is concerned. The US will not shy from getting its way and the interplay between these two playground bullies over the past 15 months has been partly shocking to the core and partly greatly entertaining, with questions like What kind of munitions will Biden refuse to send and when will he say enough is enough?

It is not for nothing that I cited Wikipedia above on the wisdom of King Solomon. How do you think King Solomon would have resolved the differences between the two plaintiffs? Would cutting the baby—Palestine—in half have resolved matters? I am inclined to answer yes for the Arab plaintiff; and to answer no for the Israeli, for I do not believe that Israel can satisfy itself with what it achieves, whatever that might be. It could not satisfy itself with regaining the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and could barely bear losing the Sinai Desert, but it was a temporary possession and fairly useless, for that. Now, it cannot be satisfied with razing the Gaza Strip to the ground, with emasculating the Palestinian Arab population: it wants Syria. It wants the Lebanon. It wants Iran. It says so, to the US, and has been saying so since 2021 at least. So much has been superseded by events in that article by Jason Farbman; and so much is reconfirmed by its dated quality.

Israel does not exist, I wrote at the end of the first paragraph. Of course Israel does exist. It has existed since God gave it to the Israelites, and bestowed immunity on them for crimes against the humanity that He also created. It existed in the minds of Zionists for 70 years before it existed as a member of the United Nations, at least in the minds of the United Nations, if not in the mind of the member. But it does not truly exist now, despite maps and gazetteers and newspapers proclaiming the words Israel and Israeli. They are precisions. Like Alabama is a precision. Or Wichita. Or Chattanooga. Labels that tell you where precisely. But the where is the same in all cases: the United States of America. My mother and father were proud imperialists: they were born into the British Empire and it was dead before they were. In the early 1980s, they attended a family wedding in Manila, the Philippines. The bride’s uncle was the then Minister of Justice. He was a wise man and by all accounts a competent judicial minister. He remarked to them that the British Empire may be a thing of the past, but that the British passport still commands commensurate respect. I wasn’t there, but I imagine they preened themselves. After all it was without contention the truth, and it was intended and taken as a compliment. The thing is this: the British called their Empire an empire. Rightly or wrongly, they took a pride in it and exported tea and cricket to it and talked about fair play and the playing fields of Eton and top-hole and all that. They didn’t deny it was there: they parked a ruddy frigate at the harbour entrance to tell everyone it was there.

So why can’t the United States come clean and admit that they committed the genocide of the Palestinian Arab race for their own damned selfish reasons? Why can’t they just broadcast to the world their own selfish intentions, that they will squeeze Netanyahu for all he is worth to them and then abandon him to his fate prostrate before the lords and justices of what is left of Israel’s true and upright judicial system? What, too honest, too undiplomatic? Sorry, calmly standing by and endorsing the slaughter of the young, the old, the disabled, the truth-bringers and the life-savers of poor, beleagured Gaza isn’t brutally frank enough?

They say he is complicit who stands by and does nothing. Well, I didn’t do nothing. I voiced my opposition as loudly as I knew how to. And if you hear the wails of despair now the carnage is all but complete, then those are mine allied with those of the compassionate of this world. But beware you think to hear the strains of Biden’s weeping. For it will be at best opportunistic.