Comment by killjoywashere | Hacker News Reader

Comment by killjoywashere | Hacker News Reader

Another fun bit of biochemical history: Chaim Weizmann (1) was a biochemist and staunch Zionist who gained the attention of First Lord of the British Admiralty, Winston Churchill, for cultivating a bacterium, Clostridium acetobutylicum, that could produce acetone, which was in short supply and required for the production of cordite, the key propellent in naval artillery during World War I. In gratitude for Weizmann's contribution to the war effort, George Lloyd asked him what Britain could do for him, to which he replied "not for me, but for my people", which begat the Balfour Declaration (2) establishing Britain's commitment to provide a Home for the Jewish People (3).

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaim_Weizmann

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration

(3) It is essentially lost to history that the Balfour Declaration also provided that the Palestinian people should not be displaced. It is also mostly lost to history that there was a great deal of politicking between Weizmann arriving in England and his audience with George Lloyd, including a world tour Weizmann orchestrated to promote one Albert Einstein.

> "It is essentially lost to history"

In practice, this is clearly true. But it is not for lack of trying, at least on some people's parts. I recently read 'A Peace to End All Peace', David Fromkin, which goes in depth into the background here, including Weizmann's role and the making of the Balfour declaration. A passage from the book's conclusion has stuck with me:

"It took Europe a millennium and a half to resolve its post-Roman crisis of social and political identity: nearly a thousand years to settle on the nation-state form of political organization, and nearly five hundred years more to determine which nations were entitled to be states. Whether civilization would survive the raids and conflicts of rival warrior bands; whether church or state, pope or emperor, would rule; whether Catholic or Protestant would prevail in Christendom; whether dynastic empire, national state, or city-state would command fealty; and whether, for example, a townsman of Dijon belonged to the Burgundian or to the French nation, were issues painfully worked out through ages of searching and strife, during which the losers—the Albigensians of southern France, for example—were often annihilated. It was only at the end of the nineteenth century, with the creation of Germany and Italy, that an accepted map of western Europe finally emerged, some 1,500 years after the old Roman map started to become obsolete. The continuing crisis in the Middle East in our time may prove to be nowhere near so profound or so long-lasting. But its issue is the same: how diverse peoples are to regroup to create new political identities for themselves after the collapse of an ages-old imperial order to which they had grown accustomed."

One big difference with the Middle East is that the present day borders were largely drawn up by foreign powers (England, France) rather than evolving organically as they did in post-Roman Europe. This is also a source of much of the ongoing conflicts in the region including Israel/Palestine.

TBF, England and France took hundreds of years drawing up their own borders between each other

Yes but they were active participants in that process (through wars, treaties, etc). It’s not like Russia came in, took a map, drew some lines, and gave France to the Bourbons and England to the Plantagenets.

That's one of the big points made in 'A Peace to End all Peace', I just felt my comment was too long as is. Here's how Fromkin puts it, edited down for length:

Some of the disputes, like those elsewhere in the world, are about rulers or frontiers, but what is typical of the Middle East is that more fundamental claims are also advanced, drawing into question not merely the dimensions and boundaries, but the right to exist, of countries that immediately or eventually emerged from the British and French decisions of the early 1920s: Iraq, Israel, Jordan, and Lebanon.

...

The disputes go deeper still: ... whether the transplanted modern system of politics invented in Europe—characterized, among other things, by the division of the earth into independent secular states based on national citizenship—will survive in the foreign soil of the Middle East. In the rest of the world European political assumptions are so taken for granted that nobody thinks about them anymore; but at least one of these assumptions, the modern belief in secular civil government, is an alien creed in a region most of whose inhabitants, for more than a thousand years, have avowed faith in a Holy Law that governs all of life, including government and politics.

> rather than evolving organically as they did in post-Roman Europe

You think the borders left after Rome fell were organic? They just used the old Roman province borders. Rome replaced the rule of every country it conquered and the conquest lasted so long that there was no trace of the old rule left, they all had to rediscover themselves afterwards, including figuring out how to redraw the borders.

> Palestinian people should not be displaced

This was always wishful thinking at best, and more realistically a lie.

Hmmm, those palestinian Arabs that made peace with the Jews in the 1948 civil war are still there; see

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghosh

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umm_al-Fahm

Doesn't prove much. The Jews needed the fertile lands that were very much settled, there were not all flocking there for some desert.

Quoting Ben-Gurion:

A people which fights against the usurpation of its land will not tire so easily. ... When we say that the Arabs are the aggressors and we defend ourselves — this is only half the truth. ... [P]olitically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves. The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country.

> It is essentially lost to history that the Balfour Declaration also provided that the Palestinian people should not be displaced.

It is equally essentially lost on most people today, that the Balfour Declaration did not create the state of Israel, nor did the United Nations create it, nor the UK, nor the US, nor was it post-war "resettlement plan" for displaced Jews by the Allies. To the contrary, Jews at that time were barred from entering the British Mandate.

Israelis declared themselves a state, similar to Americans declaring themselves independent of Britain, against the wishes of the UK. So it should also be noted that no "plan" for that region called for a civil war: but a civil war broke out. So it's revisionist shoehorning of the events that played out to say that they didn't match such and such of various plans that may have previously been made but never came to fruition. The cis-Jordan Arabs were not treated worse by the Israelis than they themselves were attempting to treat the Israelis; the Arabs did lose the military conflict, however, after which they displaced their own longstanding Jewish populations.

I continue to be amazed the things you learn on HN. When I was in Poland last summer I learned that a number of Jewish leaders there between the two world wars advocated for a Jewish homeland. But they were never able to convince the government to publicly declare that support. Despite the fact at the time Jews made up to 25% of Poland's population.

That's wrong. Polish state from 1926 onwards supported Zionists (in the years 1926-1939, Poland was ruled by the authoritarian Sanation movement).

Verified you are correct. Yet the museums I toured in both Warsaw and Gdansk gave me the exact opposite impression.

It also can't be overstated that Balfour himself was a staunch racist and antisemite. His motivation for passing the Declaration was at least in part the idea that if the UK gives the Jews their own country, the UK will have a powerful ally in the global Jewish conspiracy - and also encourage Jews to leave the UK and not manipulate in its politics, culture and economy.

From Balfour's own writing in 1919 cited in his Wikipedia article:

> [Zionism would] mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a Body [the Jews] which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb.

He's the best example how support of Zionism and antisemitism aren't mutually contradictory and can actually go hand in hand. It's likewise often lost on people that there was a Zionist project helping German Jews emigrate to Palestine with support of the German government even after Hitler came to power, although of course (like all migration) it ended with the beginning of World War 2. This isn't to say the Nazis were fond of this project but they didn't actively oppose it. They did however pass laws requiring emigrating Jews to liquidate their assets (i.e. sell off any businesses or property) and significantly limiting the amount of wealth they could transfer out of the country just like they later dispossessed (and subsequently re-privatized) Jewish business owners and confiscated their property during the Holocaust.

Pedantry: David Lloyd George, Prime Minister during the later part of WW I and for a time after.

I've heard that tour was also accidentally the reason Einstein became such a household name and face, tho I'm not so convinced this is true.

"Britain's commitment to provide a Home for the Jewish People ... in a place other than Europe" is the key detail that's missing here.

It wasn't like they all got together and said, you know, it's time we did the Jewish People a solid for once.

I'm not saying that this is a bad comment, or that it should not have been made; but at the same time, I am also a bit wearied to see that the HN comment section has achieved a Time To Palestine of 1 on this post.

Well, now I hate him. Thanks.

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