So It Is Written, So Let It Be Done - Lord Rothschild Reads The Balfour Declaration

thenewyorker  |  Yet Britain, however formidable its power, did not conjure up the Jewish national home with magic words. Since the Ukrainian pogroms of 1881, about thirty-five thousand settlers had come to various colonies in Ottoman Palestine, most funded by Baron James de Rothschild, half of whom stayed. About ninety thousand acres of land had been purchased, and new winemaking towns were dotting the Palestinian landscape: Rishon LeZion, Zichron Ya’akov. The real reason Weizmann had rejected East Africa in 1905 was that a national home in Eretz Yisrael was, however embryonic, becoming an established fact. By the end of 1905, with the arrival of five thousand socialist cadres from Russia—the so-called Second Aliyah, or ascent—Labor Zionism had its ideology, the beginning of its revolutionary infrastructure, and its leadership, including David Ben-Gurion, who was later Israel’s first Prime Minister. In 1909, Tel Aviv, the first modern Hebrew-speaking city, had been founded just north of Jaffa. That same year, a Labor Zionist group inspired by Ben-Gurion’s hero, A. D. Gordon, founded the first of the kibbutzim near the Sea of Galilee. Weizmann’s mentor, Asher Ginsberg (known by his pen name, Achad Haam), visited a collective settlement in Palestine in 1911. He wrote in an essay for Zionist readers the next year, “So soon as the Jew from the Diaspora enters a Jewish colony in Palestine he feels that he is in a Hebrew national atmosphere . . . half-complete, extending only to children . . . but going on.” (Weizmann stayed at Ginsberg’s home in London—the latter made his living as the sales representative of Wissotzky tea—during the negotiations leading to the Declaration.)

The Declaration, then, only crystallized for the great powers what seemed a workable cultural transformation—of Jews, but also of a part of the Palestinian landscape. By the time of the Balfour Declaration, there were as many as fifty thousand Zionist settlers, whom the Turks had tried, and failed, to suppress. (The chaos of the Soviet Revolution was bringing thousands, and would bring tens of thousands more.) Indeed, the most prominent, or conspicuous, Arab leaders seemed somewhat reconciled, too. In 1918, Weizmann travelled to Aqaba to meet Feisal; neither yet knew the full extent of Britain’s intentions to take Palestine for itself. Weizmann supported a larger Hashemite federation, and Feisal, the Arabs’ champion, Jewish “closer settlement and intensive cultivation of the soil”—so long as “Arab peasant and tenant farmers shall be protected in their rights.” Feisal, meanwhile, told the Times of London that December, “Arabs are not jealous of Zionist Jews, and intend to give them fair play; and the Zionist Jews have assured the Nationalist Arabs of their intention to see that they too have fair play in their respective areas.” The socialist-Zionist method of settlement, so disdained by the British yet so suited for incubating Hebrew culture, was bound, however, to encroach upon “Arab peasant and tenant farmers,” known as fellaheen. (The riots of 1921 had been incited, in part, by the purchase of vast lands in the Jezreel Valley, which was accomplished in a manner that had displaced, and enraged, thousands of fellaheen.)

Putting the Balfour Declaration into practice—so the Colonial Office stated—presumed an “equality of obligation” to both sides. It was another matter to presume “fair play.” As Balfour admitted in a secret memorandum in August, 1919, “So far as Palestine is concerned, the powers have made no statement of fact that is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which, at least in the letter, they have not always intended to violate.” The British were straight about one thing: the Declaration did not presume a Jewish state, which Weizmann himself could not yet envision. Building a novel Jewish nation was challenge enough; how this nation’s home might fit into larger Middle Eastern structures and machinations seemed a secondary consideration. But while the British occupation army still had the power to end Zionist colonization with brute force, it was too late to neatly nip it in the bud. By 1922, as Balfour addressed the Lords, the Jewish population had reached nearly eighty-five thousand.

The Zionist Plan For The Middle-East

globalresearch  |  The following document pertaining to the formation of “Greater Israel” constitutes the cornerstone of powerful Zionist factions within the current Netanyahu government,  the Likud party, as well as within the Israeli military and intelligence establishment. 

President Donald Trump had confirmed in January 2017 his support of Israel’s illegal settlements (including his opposition to UN Security Council Resolution 2334, pertaining to the illegality of the Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank). The Trump administration expressed its recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. And now the entire West Bank is being annexed to Israel. 

Under the Biden administration, despite rhetorical shifts in the political narrative, Washington remains supportive of Israel plans to annex the entire Jordan River valley as well the illegal settlements in the West Bank.

Bear in mind: The Greater Israel design is not strictly a Zionist Project for the Middle East, it is an integral part of US foreign policy, its strategic objective is to extend US hegemony as well as fracture and balkanize the Middle East.  

In this regard, Washington’s strategy consists in destabilizing and weakening regional economic powers in the Middle East including Turkey and Iran. This policy –which is consistent with the Greater Israel–  is  accompanied by a process of political fragmentation.

Since the Gulf war (1991), the Pentagon has contemplated the creation of a “Free Kurdistan” which would include the annexation of  parts of Iraq, Syria and Iran as well as Turkey

According to the founding father of Zionism Theodore Herzl, “the area of the Jewish State stretches: “From the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates.”  According to Rabbi Fischmann,  “The Promised Land extends from the River of Egypt up to the Euphrates, it includes parts of Syria and Lebanon.”

When viewed in the current context, including the siege on Gaza, the Zionist Plan for the Middle East bears an intimate relationship to the 2003 invasion of  Iraq, the 2006 war on Lebanon, the 2011 war on Libya, the ongoing wars on Syria, Iraq and Yemen, not to mention the political crisis in Saudi Arabia.

The “Greater Israel” project consists in weakening and eventually fracturing neighboring Arab states as part of a US-Israeli expansionist project, with the support of NATO and Saudi Arabia. In this regard, the Saudi-Israeli rapprochement is from Netanyahu’s viewpoint a means to expanding Israel’s spheres of influence in the Middle East as well as confronting Iran. Needless to day, the “Greater Israel” project is consistent with America’s imperial design.

“Greater Israel” consists in an area extending from the Nile Valley to the Euphrates. According to Stephen Lendman,

“A near-century ago, the World Zionist Organization’s plan for a Jewish state included:

• historic Palestine;

• South Lebanon up to Sidon and the Litani River;

• Syria’s Golan Heights, Hauran Plain and Deraa; and

• control of the Hijaz Railway from Deraa to Amman, Jordan as well as the Gulf of Aqaba.

Some Zionists wanted more – land from the Nile in the West to the Euphrates in the East, comprising Palestine, Lebanon, Western Syria and Southern Turkey.”

The Zionist project has supported the Jewish settlement movement. More broadly it involves a policy of excluding Palestinians from Palestine leading to the annexation of both the West Bank and Gaza to the State of Israel.

The Project of “Greater Israel” is to create a number of proxy States, which could include parts of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the Sinai, as well as parts of  Iraq and Saudi Arabia. (See map).

According to Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya in a 2011 Global Research article,   The Yinon Plan was a continuation of Britain’s colonial design in the Middle East:

“[The Yinon plan] is an Israeli strategic plan to ensure Israeli regional superiority. It insists and stipulates that Israel must reconfigure its geo-political environment through the balkanization of the surrounding Arab states into smaller and weaker states.

Israeli strategists viewed Iraq as their biggest strategic challenge from an Arab state. This is why Iraq was outlined as the centerpiece to the balkanization of the Middle East and the Arab World. In Iraq, on the basis of the concepts of the Yinon Plan, Israeli strategists have called for the division of Iraq into a Kurdish state and two Arab states, one for Shiite Muslims and the other for Sunni Muslims. The first step towards establishing this was a war between Iraq and Iran, which the Yinon Plan discusses.

The Atlantic, in 2008, and the U.S. military’s Armed Forces Journal, in 2006, both published widely circulated maps that closely followed the outline of the Yinon Plan. Aside from a divided Iraq, which the Biden Plan also calls for, the Yinon Plan calls for a divided Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria. The partitioning of Iran, Turkey, Somalia, and Pakistan also all fall into line with these views. The Yinon Plan also calls for dissolution in North Africa and forecasts it as starting from Egypt and then spilling over into Sudan, Libya, and the rest of the region.

“Greater Israel” would require the breaking up of the existing Arab states into small states.

“The plan operates on two essential premises. To survive, Israel must

1)  become an imperial regional power, and

2) must effect the division of the whole area into small states by the dissolution of all existing Arab states.

Small here will depend on the ethnic or sectarian composition of each state. Consequently, the Zionist hope is that sectarian-based states become Israel’s satellites and, ironically, its source of moral legitimation…  This is not a new idea, nor does it surface for the first time in Zionist strategic thinking. Indeed, fragmenting all Arab states into smaller units has been a recurrent theme.” (Yinon Plan, see below)

Viewed in this context, the US-NATO led wars on Syria and Iraq are part of  the process of Israeli territorial expansion.

In this regard, the defeat of US sponsored terrorists (ISIS, Al Nusra) by Syrian Forces with the support of Russia, Iran and Hezbollah constitute a significant setback for Israel.