An excerpt from, "A dangerous people to quarrel with’: Lloyd George’s Secret Testimony to the Peel Commission Revealed" By Oren Kessler, fathomjournal.com, July 2020:
Oren Kessler reveals the secret 1937 testimony given by David Lloyd George to the Palestine Royal Commission. Lloyd George had been prime minister during the 1917 Balfour Declaration, and had remained an unswerving Zionist ever since. He was one of nearly 60 witnesses whom the panel heard in private, and whose testimonies have been kept secret for eight decades. His appears here for the first time; it depicts a boisterous, at times embittered septuagenarian defending the Balfour Declaration on grounds of wartime strategy, and the need to appeal to worldwide Jewry, ‘a dangerous people to quarrel with,’ and ‘a very subtle race.’ Lloyd George was at once ‘Judeophobe and philo-Semite, militarist and appeaser, Zionist champion and Hitler enthusiast’ argues Kessler, author of Fire Before Dawn: The First Palestinian Revolt and the Struggle for the Holy Land, forthcoming from Rowman & Littlefield.
. . .
The motives for Balfour’s eponymous 1917 Declaration formed the heart of Lloyd George’s secret Peel testimony twenty years later. He had recently completed the last of his nine-volume memoirs of the Great War and used the section on the Declaration as the basis for his prepared remarks (the commission apparently exempted him from their ban on pre-written statements). His tone was unrepentant and combative – he was now a septuagenarian MP from North Wales of waning political relevance – even more so as his prepared text gave way to unscripted, impromptu answers. His greater admiration for Jews than Arabs is unmistakable, but so too are evaluations of Jewish power and cunning that if uttered today would end the most distinguished career.
Lloyd George met the commissioners in London in April 1937, eight months after they had begun their study and three months before releasing their report.
‘I should like to remind the Commission of the actual war position at the time of the Balfour Declaration,’ he began. ‘We are now looking at the War through the dazzling glow of a triumphant end, but in 1917 the issue of the War was still very much in doubt.’ The Russians, French and Italians were all defeated, demoralised and exhausted, he said. German U-boats had sunk millions of tons of Allied shipping from America and elsewhere. The Americans had recently entered the war but were still not in the trenches. Public opinion in the United States and Russia were crucial, ‘and we had every reason at that time to believe that in both countries the friendliness or hostility of the Jewish race might make a considerable difference.’
If Balfour had not issued his Declaration that November, Lloyd George suggested, the Kaiser might have beat him to it. It was made just days before the Bolshevik Revolution, and Germany was ‘equally alive to the fact that the Jews of Russia wielded considerable influence in Bolshevik circles. The Zionist Movement was exceptionally strong in Russia and America,’ he said – a vast exaggeration for a what was still a fringe, aspirational ideology – and the Germans were sparing no effort to court it. For nearly three years both warring blocs had striven to blockade the other’s supplies, and a Russia friendly to the Central Powers ‘would mean not only more food and raw material for Germany and Austria, but fewer German and Austrian troops on the Eastern Front and therefore, more available for the West.’
Immediately following the Declaration, ‘millions of leaflets were circulated in every town and area throughout the world where there were known to be Jewish communities. They were dropped from the air in German and Austrian towns, and they were scattered throughout Russia and Poland. I could point out substantial and in one case decisive advantages derived from this propaganda amongst the Jews.’
In this telling – in which the ‘Bolshevik’ and ‘Jew’ were virtually interchangeable – Balfour’s pledge directly prevented the movement of enemy’s food, arms and men, even after the new communist government signed a separate peace taking itself out of the war.
‘In Russia the Bolsheviks baffled all the efforts of the Germans to benefit by the harvests of the Ukraine and the Don, and hundreds of thousands of German and Austrian troops had to be maintained to the end of the War on Russian soil, whilst the Germans were short of men to replace casualties on the Western front. I do not suggest that this was due entirely, or even mainly, to Jewish activities. But we have good reason to believe that Jewish propaganda in Russia had a great deal to do with the difficulties created for the Germans in Southern Russia… the Jews in their subtle way managed to place every obstacle in the way of the Germans.’
It was a highly specific, idiosyncratic explanation for a Declaration with worldwide, century-long implications, and one unlikely to persuade Palestine’s Arabs to willingly accept minority status.
But Lloyd George continued unfazed. Balfour had died in 1930, and now the role of Declaration spokesman fell to him.
Balfour did not envision the immediate creation of a Jewish state regardless of the wishes of Palestine’s majority, he said. ‘On the other hand, it was contemplated that when the time arrived for according representative institutions to Palestine, if the Jews had meanwhile responded to the opportunity afforded them by the idea of a National Home and had become a definite majority of the inhabitants, then Palestine would thus become a Jewish Commonwealth.’ Any notion of artificially restricting that growth ‘never entered into the heads of anyone’ engaged in the policy and would have been regarded as a ‘fraud’ upon those whom the Declaration addressed.
‘What about the Arabs? The Arabs have done well out of the allied victory. No race has done better out of the fidelity with which the Allies redeemed their promises to the oppressed races,’ he proclaimed. Owing chiefly to British and Allied sacrifices, the Arabs now had four independent states – Iraq, Syria, Transjordan and Saudi Arabia – ‘although most of the Arab races fought throughout the War for their Turkish oppressors.’
‘The Palestinian Arabs fought for Turkish rule,’ he emphasised, disregarding the 2,000 who had joined the British-sponsored anti-Ottoman revolt led by Hussein, Sherif of Mecca, and his son Feisal. Through Mark Sykes (of Sykes-Picot fame) and T.E. Lawrence (‘of Arabia’), he said, Britain informed Hussein and Feisal of the planned Declaration.
‘We could not get in touch with the Palestinian Arabs as they were fighting against us. The Arab leaders did not offer any objections, so long as the rights of the Arabs were respected,’ Lloyd George explained. ‘There was a twofold undertaking given to them, that the establishment of a Jewish National Home would not in any way, firstly, affect the civil or religious rights of the general population of Palestine; secondly, would not diminish the general prosperity of that population. Those were the only pledges we gave to the Arabs.’
The ex-premier challenged any critic of Britain’s Palestine policy to point to an instance in which non-Jewish civil or religious rights had been compromised, and he marshalled statistics on revenue, exports, wages, land prices, public health and a half-dozen other indicators of the land’s newfound prosperity. ‘There can be no doubt that the Arab population of Palestine has profited enormously by the Zionist enterprise.’
Chairman Peel asked if Balfour’s proclamation meant the Jews could ‘come in pretty nearly as they like,’ regardless of any negative effects on the Arabs.
‘Yes,’ said Lloyd George. ‘There is no doubt about that, from the words used by Lord Balfour, that it was contemplated by him that, in the course of political evolution, the Jews would have a majority.’ He said President Wilson, who had given his assent to the Declaration and made similar comments about a future ‘Jewish Commonwealth,’ felt likewise.
A possible recourse, one commissioner offered, was ‘to try the idea of division…’
‘That is surrender,’ Lloyd George interjected. ‘That is going back on our declaration.’
The British Empire seemed to be losing its nerve, he complained. He was the only Welshman ever elected premier, and ‘as an old Briton, who belongs to the most ancient race in the islands, I do not like it.’
Video Title: How Britain Started the Arab-Israeli Conflict | Free Documentary History. Source: Free Documentary - History. Date Published: March 3, 2021. Description:
The bitter struggle between Arab and Jew for control of the Holy Land has caused untold suffering in the Middle East for generations. It is often claimed that the crisis originated with Jewish emigration to Palestine and the foundation of the state of Israel. Yet the roots of the conflict are to be found much earlier – in British double-dealing during the First World War. This is a story of intrigue among rival empires; of misguided strategies; and of how conflicting promises to Arab and Jew created a legacy of bloodshed which determined the fate of the Middle East.
