Israel's Historic Rothschild Dynasty Connection Revisited: Part 2

Lord Walter Rothschild: Recipient of UK Imperialism's 1917 "Balfour Declaration"

Israel’s Historic Rothschild Dynasty Connection Revisited: Part 2

During World War I, members of the Rothschild dynasty in the UK also used their special influence to get Lord Balfour of the British imperialist government’s foreign office to write a Nov. 2, 1917 letter to Lord Walter Rothschild, which noted that the UK cabinet had approved a “declaration of sympathy” with “Zionist aspirations” (but which also stated, however, “that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” the Palestinian Arabs, who still then composed 93 percent of Palestinian’s population and still owned 95 percent of Palestine’s land in 1917). As the 1994 book, The Rothschilds: A European Family, which Greg Heuberger edited, recalled:

“…After Turkey had entered the war on the side of Germany in 1914, the two Zionist leaders Chaim Weizman and Nahum Sokolow tried to whip up support in Great Britain for a…homeland in Palestine…The Zionists were dependent…on the aid of…the Rothschilds, with their high public profile and their contacts to English politicians.

“Alongside Edmond and his son James Armand, Lord Walter Rothschild, his sister-in-law Rozsika, his brother Charles and his mother avidly supported the Zionist cause after the outbreak of World War I.

“The joint efforts culminated in the declaration made by Lord Balfour, the British Foreign Minister, that the government would support setting up a national homeland for Jews in Palestine. The declaration was passed on to Lord Walter Rothschild on Nov. 2, 1917 in the simple form of a letter…”

Ironically, as Lenni Brenner noted in his 1984 book, The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir, “in 1914, after meeting Balfour for the second time,” Zionist movement leader Weizman “wrote to a friend that” Balfour “told me that he once had a long talk with Cosima Wagner in Bayrouth and that he shared many of her anti-Semitic ideas.’”

Then-Democratic U.S. President Woodrow Wilson asserted during World War I that his administration supported the right of national self-determination for colonized peoples around the globe. Yet the 95 percent of the people who lived in Palestine in 1917 who were Palestinian Arabs, of non-Jewish religious backgrounds, were not allowed to democratically determine whether or not Palestine should be transformed into “a homeland” for the Zionist movement, before Lord Balfour sent his Nov. 2, 1917 letter to Lord Walter Rothschild.

So, not surprisingly, “a formal reading of the Balfour Declaration by a British official in Palestine in February of 1920…sparked large demonstrations in Palestinian cities” in opposition to the UK imperialist government cabinet’s November 1917 “declaration of sympathy with…Zionist aspirations” in Palestine, according to the Palestine Book Project’s 1977 book, Our Roots Are Still Alive: The Story of the Palestinian People. And on both the third anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, on Nov. 2, 1920 and the second anniversary of the day UK imperialist troops entered Jerusalem, on Dec. 9, 1920, Palestinian Arabs demonstrated, Palestinian “Arab shops closed their doors,” Palestinian Arab “newspapers appeared with black borders,” and Palestinians “draped black crepe paper on their houses and flew black flags” in “a day of mourning” to express Palestinian opposition to the UK imperialist government’s support for the Rothschild family-backed Zionist movement’s settler-colonialist “aspirations” in Palestine, according to the same book.

 (end of part 2)