Salaam
More history
Arthur Balfour was anti semitic
Callous
There are strong reasons to suspect that Balfour was also anti-Semitic. In 1905, he pushed legislation aimed at preventing Jews fleeing persecution in Russia from entering Britain on the grounds they were “undesirable.”
One reason why Balfour may have been in favor of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine was that he disliked having Jews as neighbors. He once described Zionism as a “serious effort to mitigate the age-old miseries created for western civilization by the presence in its midst of a body which is too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or absorb.”
Balfour was often callous. He tried to justify the use of Chinese slave labor in South Africa’s gold mines and atrocities committed by British forces in the Sudan. He opposed giving aid to people at risk of famine in India.
Despite his apparent commitment to law and order, Balfour encouraged illegal behavior when it suited him. He was a staunch supporter of militant loyalists who insisted that Ireland’s north-eastern counties should not become independent from Britain.
When the Ulster Volunteer Force managed to smuggle 30,000 rifles from Germany into the north of Ireland, Balfour effectively approved the 1914 gun-running operation by telling the British parliament: “I hold now, and I held 30 years ago that if home rule was forced upon Ulster, Ulster would fight and Ulster would be right.”
It was extraordinary that a former prime minister should voice approval for subversion. Yet that stance did no harm to Balfour’s political career.
Within a few years, he was back in government as foreign secretary – it was in that role that he issued his declaration on Palestine.
The effects of that declaration were swift and far-reaching. Through pressure exerted by Chaim Weizmann (later Israel’s first president) and other senior figures in the Zionist movement, it was enshrined in the League of Nations mandate through which Britain ruled Palestine between the two world wars.
Herbert Samuel, himself a staunch Zionist, introduced a system of racial and religious discrimination when he served as Britain’s first high commissioner for Palestine from 1920 to 1925. Those measures facilitated and financed the acquisition by European settlers of land on which Palestinians had lived and farmed for many generations. Mass evictions ensued: more than 8,700 Palestinians were expelled from villages in Marj Ibn Amer, an area in the Galilee, as they were bought up by Zionist colonizers during the 1920s.
Balfour was unperturbed by the upheaval that he set in motion. Worse, he denied that any problem existed.
In 1927, he wrote “nothing has occurred” that would cause him to question the “wisdom” of the declaration he signed a decade earlier.
The remark says much about Balfour’s hubris. He was prepared to trample on an entire people and to dismiss their grievances as irrelevant.
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/david-cronin/racist-worldview-arthur-balfour