This great gift was later attenuated and hobbled by Foreign Office and international antipathies, and shrunken also by the seething hostility of the Arabs.
But the fact remains: Israel today only exists because of the actions of the British. We did all that despite - according to you - hating and despising European Jewry.
You're welcome.
Britain needed cordite made from acetone in WWI. Otherwise when its ships fired, they gave off smoke. The Germans saw the smoke and sank the ships. They could have cut down all the trees in UK and would not have had enough acetone to supply the needs of the navy. In steps Chaim Weizmann, chemist, with a formula for biological production of acetone. The UK government said name your reward. Palestine, said Weizmann eschewing personal riches.It’s yours, they said. But at that point they were offering nothing since they had not been able to crack the Turkish defences and there was no guarantee they would ever be able to. That’s history coming forward.
But the fact remains: Israel today only exists because of the actions of the British. We did all that despite - according to you - hating and despising European Jewry.Balfour was an alibi for British ambition in the region, the British opposed the Ottomans for their own reasons, and it was the Israelis, not the British, who liberated Jerusalem in 1967.
Sounds like Britain has won WW I singlehandedly. Do I sense a touch of complex of superiority in you, my friend?
And, of all people, it is you who hectors on history?
"and freeing Jerusalem from the Muslims, it set aside certain captured lands (all present-day Israel and Jordan) to be a Jewish homeland. This great gift was later attenuated "
A gift? This is more that elitist. Have you gifted Afghanistan to the Afghans when you left? Or Iraq to the "Iraqis," which never existed before. Look at the maps of your country from 1945 and 2000: have you "gifted" one quarter of the Earth's surface to the respective inhabitants, or did you run home with tail between your legs because your Empire has crumbled. Its people no longer identified with colonial enterprise, and became only slightly less socialist than the Soviets. Why do you single out Palestine as a "gift?" A bit patronizing, isn't it?
It is a pleasure to see a Brit who is proud of his heritage. British colonialism, in particular, has indeed civilized much of the world (compare, for instance, Barbados and Haiti). But your knowledge and view of the Britain's proud history may benefit from further study and analysis, respectively.
“But the fact remains: Israel today only exists because of the actions of the British. We did all that despite - according to you - hating and despising European Jewry.”
Actually, the mid-19th Century saw a dramatic increase in Jewish immigration to the Holy Land, well before the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The creation of a Jewish Homeland there was really inevitable. After the Napoleonic wars, Jews were more free than ever before since the Bar Kochba revolt to return to our one true home.
The fact is that in payment for the Palestinian brigades that played a key role in overthrowing the Ottoman Empire, Lord Balfour made a meaningless declaration that British policy immediately geared up to undermine every way possible, from the setting aside of the election of Mufti of Jerusalem in favor of the anti-Semitic Haj Ali Husseini to the White Paper that called for the exclusion of desperate Jewish refugees during WW II on the grounds, inter alia, that they may be German spies, to the total settlement and immigration freeze in 1947 to the destruction of the Jewish Quarter by Arab League troops acting under the direction of British officers.
“You’re welcome.”
“Hitler killed Six Million. Oyeah! Oyeah! The Sixth Airbourne will kill sixty million if you don’t bloody behave well.” British Graffiti quoted by Menachem Begin in Revolt!
Gee, thanks.