Mahmoud Abbas is the president of the Palestinian Authority.
He is a gentleman, and he wrote an article that is a
gentlemanly piece. It came under the title: “Britain must atone for the Balfour
declaration – and 100 years of suffering” and the subtitle: “A century ago,
Arthur Balfour signed away Palestinians' homeland and initiated decades of
persecution. It is cause for humility, not celebration.” It was published on
November 1, 2017 in the British newspaper The Guardian.
What to make of something as hideous as the Balfour
declaration, and all that it spawned? Well, the way to come to terms with a
thought as staggering as this monstrosity is to delineate the dimensions of the
situation it has caused by comparing it against the things which are familiar
to us. So let's think up a story that should help us imagine what happened a
hundred years ago:
You place an ad in a newspaper to sell your television set.
Someone buys it and gives you ten bills of ten dollars each. You try to deposit
the money at the bank but the teller rejects one of the bills because it is
counterfeit. You absorb the loss because there is nothing you can do about it.
Well, the reason why you sold your TV in the first place was that someone had
offered you a higher quality brand new set at half the price. You buy this set
knowing that it is a “hot” item, which means it was stolen.
In the first instance, a crime had been committed by someone
unknown, but neither you nor the bank was culpable of a crime. In fact, you
were victimized, and the bank protected itself against being victimized. In the
second instance both you and the one that sold you the stolen item committed a
crime because both knew that the item was stolen. No one will dispute these
conclusions.
Let's now think up another story. Election time is
approaching, and your good neighbor decides to run for office. You talk to him
about the vacant land the authorities decided to turn into a public park not
long ago. You tell the neighbor you'll finance his campaign if he promises to
work toward rescinding the decision about the park because you need the land to
build a huge strip mall. He promises to do that for you, and you finance his
campaign. He wins the election and delivers on his promise. But there is a
hidden moral problem in this story.
It is that you're not a developer. You were hired to
represent the actual developer that financed the campaign, which he did by
paying the bills in your name. He did so because he is a foreigner, and there
is a law which says someone running for office must not accept donations from a
foreign individual or company. Everyone, including the neighbor, knew what was
going on but no one objected. Thus, a situation was created in which the spirit
of the law was violated even if its letter was not. Legality aside, the
question to ask is this: Who is responsible for the ethical misconduct in this
matter?
In his defense, the foreigner will say he brought money into
the community, and this will serve its citizens materially for generations to
come. You will say you only took advantage of a loophole in the law, and did
what you truly believed were in the best interest of the community in which you
grew up. As to the neighbor, he'll say, this is how the political sausage is
made in a democracy. He'll explain that money was equated with free speech,
which means that in this case, everyone had the chance to speak freely, and
they did. The net result was a triumph of democracy, not a breach of the moral
code.
Now we go back to the Balfour Declaration. The means by
which the words on a piece of paper became a reality, was that some people,
Winston Churchill among them, lobbied hard to hand a Palestine that was not
theirs to the Jews. They did so because they thought that the Jews were so
powerful in Russia and America , they will, in an act of quid pro quo,
persuade the two countries to intensify their war effort, thus help Britain 's
objectives.
When all was said and done, the Jews got what they wanted,
and paid for it with the pretense that they were powerful in Russia and America . Britain
got what it wanted in that it won World War One because Russia and America fought on its side. The
losers were the Palestinians whose stolen patrimony was used as “hot” commodity
to pay off the Jews for services they may not have delivered given that no one
proved they influenced the decision makers in Russia
or America .
And so, there is one more question to ask: Was there another
culprit in this affair? And the answer is: Yes, there was one. Here it is: The
thing they call democracy has been at the root of much evil during the
Twentieth Century. And here is why:
As culture progresses and new situations are created, they
bring with them good things and some bad ones. Society will very quickly
identify the bad things, will talk about them freely, and help curtail them.
Call this the force of societal tradition, and give it due credit for what it
can accomplish.
Because a system that's based on democracy feels compelled
to justify its existence by constantly making new laws, it will make a law to
outlaw the bad things that were already curtailed by the force of societal
tradition. The trouble is that no written law can cover all possible
contingencies. Thus, the law to outlaw the bad things will leave gaps known as
loopholes that some people will take advantage of. And because the law is there
to do a job, society will not interfere. It will sit on the sidelines like a
powerless spectator and wonder how it will all end.