Why Some Germans Felt Betrayed by the Balfour Declaration

                                                 

Before one weeps too much over the sense of betrayal of some Germans to the announcement of the creation of a "Jewish Homeland" by British Foreign Minister Lord Balfour in late 1917, not a state note, although it was almost bound to become one, it is worth remembering who the most disapointed people were: the future backers of Adolph Hitler, who were at the core hardened militarists.

The people who felt most bitter about the Balfour Declaration were German militarists who correctly thought they almost won WWI, not democrats in the sense of people who believed in majority rule. That class of Germans Woodrow Wilson thought intrinsically dangerous, which is why he always tilted towards Britain and France n WWI if with formal neutrality, because they were both democracies, and ultimately which was no small reason for entering the war on the side of the Allies.

For all the people here on OS who want to protest the existence of NATO, if you are Jewish, you would seem to lack a certain common sense for doing so, as to not see that locking Germany into an alliance of democracies, plus Spain and Italy, is a good thing in an imperfect world.

Maybe the militarists in a general sense are right, we have them, Russia has them, the Chinese have them, the Israelis have them, that the survival imperative in the end dominates State actions.

Just be wary that when one accepts that survivalist premise at the core of militarism, modern German scholar Schweller has shown that it means you share much in common with fascists, not really a surprise when you think about the subordination of the individual to the State that is part and parcel of the militarist outlook: zero sim.

As to bitterness in some reactionary German quarters over the Balfour Declaration in 1917 creating the foundation of Israel, if you want history without illusions as to who Hitler really was, ask yourself this: How likely is it that an illegal Austrian immigrant would take over Germany, in many ways the most advanced nation in Europe in the late twenties, on the basis of charisma alone, if there were not circles of very, very powerful people who wanted that?

The answer of course is; it's not only unlikely, but impossible.

There was a tragedy in all of this worth remembering, namely, that over 15,000 Jews gave their lives for the Kaiser in WWI, their graves marked as usual with a Star of David.

Basically as to the German militarists bitterness, the British in the Balfour Declaration in 1917 that set in motion the creation of Israel sought to curry favor with Zionists, hoping that would assist in continued financing of the war; see A Peace to End All Peace by Fromkin for details, which involved a lot of British misconceptions that are amusing, if also had tragic results.

As to the tragic results of the Balfour Declaration, unfortunately for Eastern European Jews, who were basically trapped by poverty in Poland and authoritarian Tsars and Commissars in Russia, perceptions have a way of becoming reality, in this case in the sense that Germans in certain militarists quarters after Balfour percieved the Jews as an enemy allied to their enemy Britain.

On the theory of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," since the Arabs were the Jew's enemy, even though they are both in fact Semites versus Indo-European linguistic and somewhat ethnic descent, it was then natural for some Germans of a certain cast of mind to seek to pit the Jews against the Arabs in the Middle East by forcing them to go there.

This explains the use of anti-Semitism in fostering a populist militarist ideology in Germany like Nazism, if there was a substrate of anti-Semitism in Germany proper that wasn't trivial, if certainly before Hitler not as homicidal as in Russia, or even nearly as virulent as in Hitler's native Austria.

If you wanted to find the biggest anti-Semites in the world, prior to the Nazis, and since then, you went to Austria and especially Russia.

That was the function though of anti-Semitism in Nazism fundamentally, beyond its racist character and irrational hatreds, to make the Jews leave Europe and go to the Middle East, where their presence would poison British imperial relations with the Arabs, thereby undermining the British Empire, which is in fact what happened, more or less.

Of course, had the Germans been willing to accept British primacy in the internatioonal system in the first place in 1914, and hadn't insisted on demonstrating their conventional military superiority, then none of that would have come to pass in the first place, for those who like to conduct historical what if arguments, and something for the Chinese to consider too now.

This is just as those Arabs who wish to argue about 1967, 0r 1947 U.N. Partition, 0r 1939 White Plan, or even the Balfour Declaration itself are crying over spilt milk in effect.

On the other hand, perhaps it is of some comfort to modern Israelis if they realize that people didn't just hate them for irrational reasons, but rather have manipulated the possiblities of some latent hatred, but even more created such hatred for reasons of State that have a long pedigree historically speaking, and it is a fact that fear of extermination derivative of the Holocaust is not a small driver of current Israeli foreign policy, as to why care at all about the past.

As to the present, it seems fairly obvious that the Iranian government uses fear of a Zionist enemy in order to unify the people around a common enemy, maintaining the sense of national unity especially among the survivors of the war with Iraq, if of course that's a really dangerous game to play with a people and State of Israel that have a deep and totally understandable fear of where such manipulations of latent ethnic prejudice can lead.