Palestine The Reality

The Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which the British foreign minister expressed his support for a Jewish state in Palestine, was a document that profoundly affected the Middle East for the next 100 years. Palestine: The Reality is a vivid and personal account of the birth and significance of the Declaration, by a journalist, J.M.N. Jeffries who was intimately familiar with the dramatis personae in the story and with the relevant documents, some revealed in the book for the first time. Of the Balfour Declaration, Jeffries wrote: ...a text in which Zionists of all nationalities had collaborated was announced as the voice of Britain. They [the Arabs] were told that it was a pledge made to the Zionists: they were not told that the Zionists had written most of it. J.M.N. Jeffries exposes: * The real authors and progenitors of the Balfour Declaration, who used Balfour as a channel for their political aims, and their personal stories, motives, deceptions and conspiracies.* The broken promises to Britain's Arab allies that left the way free for the Declaration to become a tool for the Zionists, enabling them to dispossess the Palestinian Arabs of their homeland and replace it with a national home for the Jewish people. *The way Britain and France manipulated the newly-formed League of Nations and awarded themselves the mandates which gave them control of Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon. *The way in which the Balfour Declaration, originally just a letter viewing with favour the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, was incorporated into the mandate for Palestine, giving it a status that it it did not deserve. One of Jeffries' most startling revelations is that Britain ruled Palestine illegally, under a civilian rather than a military administration, from August 1920, to September 1923, a violation of international agreements to which it was a signatory.This civilian rule was illegal because a peace treaty had not yet been signed with Turkey, but the British bowed to pressure from Zionists who did not want military rule because it would have prevented changes in the Palestine constitution to allow Zionist immigration, self-rule, and Jewish development in Palestine.