Ian Black

“Jews, notably, were defined as a ‘people’, while others, not even identified, were referred to only as ‘communities’. It was an extraordinary phrase that echoes down the decades and explains why Balfour is remembered a century later by Arabs as the architect of perfidy and disaster.16 Zionists, for opposite reasons, revere his memory; Balfour Street in Jerusalem is still the site of the official residence of the Israeli prime minister. The reservation had been inserted in the text to meet the strong objections raised by Lord Curzon, the former British viceroy of India and, as lord president of the council, an influential member of the war cabinet. Curzon – reflecting contemporary perceptions about the map and identity of the region – had referred to the ‘Syrian Arabs’ who had ‘occupied [Palestine] for the best part of 1,500 years’, and asked what would become of them. ‘They will not be content either to be expropriated for Jewish immigrants or to act merely as hewers of wood and drawers of water to the latter’, he predicted with the help of another then familiar biblical reference.17 The declaration’s second reservation – about the rights of Jews in other countries – was a response to the opposition of Edwin Montagu, the secretary of state for India, even though he was not in the war cabinet. Montagu was a Jewish grandee who feared that an official expression of sympathy for Zionism in fact masked anti-Semitic prejudice and would undermine the hard-won position of British Jews and their co-religionists elsewhere in the world. However, it did not weaken his vehement opposition, any more than the words about ‘non-Jewish communities’ assuaged Arab fears. Over time, Jewish attitudes to Zionism would change significantly; Arab attitudes, by and large, did not.”
― Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017

“By February 1947 the Labour government in London had effectively given up an increasingly unpopular burden that was costing the lives of British troops and police in a ‘senseless, squalid war’, as Winston Churchill, now in opposition, put it.5 It decided to submit the Palestine question to the UN and in May the fledgling world body established a Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). During their visit to the country the committee’s members witnessed the so-called ‘Exodus affair’, when 4,500 Holocaust survivors on board an old American passenger ship were detained as illegal immigrants and deported back to Europe. The favourable publicity that ensued for the Jewish cause went some way to offsetting revulsion at Jewish terrorism. That peaked the day the Exodus arrived in France, when two abducted British sergeants were hanged in retaliation for the execution of Irgun fighters. In a grisly sequel, their booby-trapped corpses were blown apart as they were being cut down in an orange grove near Netanya. The Arabs boycotted UNSCOP – their ‘cold malevolence’, as a Jewish official put it, in sharp contrast to the ‘warm reception by the Yishuv’.”
― Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017