Photo by Norman B. Leventhal Map | CC by 2.0
Listen to the voices nobody wanted to hear. Read the words of those whose painstaking work as part of the 1919 King-Crane Commission, national treatises and general assemblies were shelved in dusty oblivion just after the 1919 Paris Peace Conference by which time the fate of the Middle East had already been determined, Arab public opinion notwithstanding.
The Commission recognized … that definite encouragement had been given to the the Zionists by the Allies in Mr. Balfour’s often quoted statement, in its approval by other representatives of the Allies (my italics). If, however, the strict terms of the Balfour Statement are adhered to…it can hardly be doubted thatthe extreme Zionist Program must greatly be modified. For “a national home for the Jewish people” is not equivalent to making Palestine into a Jewish State; nor can the erection of such a Jewish State be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon the “civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.
The fact came out repeatedly in the Commission’s conference with Jewish representatives, that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, by various forms of purchase.
An American decision to send over a commission to determine public opinion in ‘Syria and Mesopotamia’ (Iraq and the Levant) was designed to have included Great Britain, France,…