Anstruther Mackay on Palestine in 1920

A kindly soul sent me this gem written long ago in another world of experience.  The author appears to have been the military governor of at least part of Palestine under British occupation and before the Mandate.  His views are his own.  I suppose this piece is widely known but it was not so for me.  It has a kind of Agatha Christie "feel" to it and reminds me of the painful conversation I once had with a prosperous Christian Palestinian merchant friend concerning his father and grandfather's business in Jerusalem.  By the time we finished up our talk I was "wired" with enough "'ahwa turkiya" to keep me awake for days.  He was in tears and begging me to take some of the old invoices and correspondence that filled the cabinets in his office.  He wanted me to have them as proof of the existence of what he believed to have been a better world, one in which Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived and traded together in the Holy Land.

http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/bookauth/zionism/mackay.htm

Comments

[Matthew]

The more things change, the more they remain the same. Money quote:

"From these causes; and the fact that, although the British officer is often unable to speak Arabic, the Zionist Jew can nearly always speak English, the Arabs now feel that the administration has fallen more and more under the influence of the Zionist Commission, which has succeeded in creating an impression among the Moslems and Christians that the Jews are all-powerful in the British Foreign Office, and that, if an officer shows himself sympathetic toward the Arabs, his removal can be secured."

[William R. Cumming]

Absolutely incredibly insightful analysis. Hope your readers that believe otherwise will document their concerns.

[Matthew]

This is also an interesting thought experiment:
http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/01/04/what_if_egypt_jordan_and_syria_had_won_the_six_day_war

[eakens]

"Dear Lord Rothschild"

that's where he went wrong...

[LeaNder]

Off topic but important:

http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=2507>Norman Finkelstein's top headline

Greece stops US arms shipment to Israel

[b]

Great read, thanks Colonel.

A question:

How much money (war loan?) did Britain get from Rothschild for signing the Balfour declaration?

[mike]

German dairy farmers in pre-WW2 Palestine - Gadzooks!!! That must be an interesting story. I assume he meant Wilhelma and not Hilhelma, or was that what the local Arabs called it??

This same religious group at one time also had a sub-group in Buffalo NY.

[ritamary]

This is a very important document, required reading for those who blindly accept the Zionist claim to what is now called Israel. The ongoing distortion of historical facts related to the creation of Israel is appalling.

[Keith]

There was no large scale persistent racial violence in the northern states of the USA until the Great Migration. This does not indicate that source of racism in these northern states is African-Americans. It is easy to be relatively magnanimous to a token minority.

[Clifford Kiracofe]

What about the Khazars?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazars

[David Habakkuk]

Apparently Anstruther Mackay was military governor of Ramleh, or al-Ramla.

According to the entry on the district on the PalestineRemembered.com website,

'Soon after the city's occupation, the Zionists made an agreement with its inhabitants that they could stay. But soon after, the Zionists reneged on their promise and detained over 3,000 men in a concentration camp, and on the same day they started looting the city. On July 14th, 1948, the city's inhabitants were ethnically cleansed (forcible expulsion) out of the city. From the 17,000 Palestinians who used to call al-Ramla home, only 400 people were allowed to stay.'

(See http://www.palestineremembered.com/al-Ramla/al-Ramla/index.html.)

But of course they have their own axes to grind!

[Ormolov]

Come on, Colonel,

Everyone knows that Palestine was an empty desert wasteland when the Zionists finally reclaimed it in 1948. I mean, there hadn't been any human occupation there in... let's see... okay, well, there were a few Palestinians there in 1948, but they willingly left because they...

I mean, who would want to live in a clay house beside the Mediterranean for thousands of years with a bunch of scrawny old olive trees anyway?

It's sad, just scrolling through a brief history of Palestine for five minutes, to see how many empires have taken Jerusalem and how each one has dealt with the competing claims of its minorities. Although there has been a long history of massacre and betrayal, there has also been an alternate tradition of fellowship among all these peoples. Without that charitable tradition, the warring factions would have exterminated each other long ago. The mere fact that Palestinians and Jews still live and claim Jerusalem as their own proves that the survival of both peoples has been better handled many times in the past, and can be done so again.

[Adrian]

Ah, The original Balfour declaration....known by few Americans, but quoted line and verse by every educated Arab....

[Mark Gaughan]

I found reading "One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate" (2000) by Tom Segev to be very informative about the beginning of the state of Israel.