BORIS JOHNSON’S ERROR LADENED SPEECH ON THE BALFOUR DECLARATION, PART I
By David Musa Pidcock
Boris Johnson, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, 5:18 pm, 30th October 2017
With permission, Mr Speaker, I will make a statement on the Balfour declaration—issued on 2 November 1917 by my predecessor as Foreign Secretary, Lord Balfour—and its legacy today.
As the British Army advanced towards Jerusalem in the last 12 months of the first world war, with the aim of breaking the Ottoman empire’s grip on the middle east, the Government published their policy concerning the territory that would become the British mandate for Palestine. The House will recall the material sentence of the Balfour declaration:
“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
A century after those words were written, I believe that the Balfour declaration paved the way for the birth of a great nation. The state of Israel has prevailed over every obstacle, from the harshness of nature to the visceral hostility of its enemies, to become a free society with a thriving and innovative economy and the same essential values that we in Britain hold dear. Liberty, democracy and the rule of law have found a home in Israel—more so than anywhere else in the middle east. Most of all, there is the incontestable moral purpose of Israel to provide a persecuted people with a safe and secure homeland.
We should not brush aside how the pernicious extent of anti-Semitism in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—decades before the holocaust—created the necessity for the Balfour declaration. It was in 1881 that the most powerful adviser at the court of Tsar Alexander II vowed that one third of Russian Jews would be forced to convert, one third would emigrate and the remainder would be left to starve.
The moral case for establishing a ‘…national home for the Jewish people’ was to provide a haven from such horrors. So Her Majesty’s Government are proud of Britain’s part in creating Israel, and we shall mark the centenary of the Balfour declaration on Thursday in that spirit.
I see no contradiction in being a friend of Israel and a believer in that country’s destiny while also being profoundly moved by the suffering of those who were affected and dislodged by its birth. That vital caveat in the Balfour declaration—intended to safeguard the rights of other communities, by which, of course, we mean the Palestinians — has not been fully realised. In the words of Amos Oz, the Israeli novelist, the tragedy of this conflict is not that it is a clash between right and wrong, but rather a “clash between right and right”.
The Government believe that the only way of bringing peace is through a two-state solution, defined as a secure Israel, the homeland of the Jewish people, standing alongside a viable, sovereign and contiguous Palestinian state, the homeland for the Palestinian people, as envisaged by UN General Assembly resolution 181. For Israel, the birth of a Palestinian state would safeguard its demographic future as a Jewish democracy. For Palestinians, a state of their own would allow them to realise their aspirations for self-determination and self-government.
When the parties held their first peace conference in Madrid in 1991, the leader of the Palestinian delegation, Haidar Abdul Shafi, described those aspirations as follows:
“We seek neither an admission of guilt after the fact, nor vengeance for past iniquities, but rather an act of will that would make a just peace a reality.”
I believe that a just peace will be a reality when two states for two peoples co-exist in the Holy Land, and that is the goal we must strive to bring about.
The House knows the troubled history of the peace process so far. The truth is that no direct talks have taken place between the parties since 2014. But the US Administration have shown their commitment to breaking the deadlock, and a new American envoy, Jason Greenblatt, has made repeated visits to the region. The Government will of course support these efforts in whatever way we can, and we urge the parties to refrain from acting in ways that make the goal of two states ever harder to achieve. For Israelis, that means halting settlement activity in the occupied territories. The pace of construction has regrettably accelerated, notably with the approval of the first new housing units in Hebron for 15 years and the first completely new settlement in the west bank since 1999. For Palestinians, it means restoring full counter-terrorism co-operation with Israel, in line with UN resolution 2334, and implementing the recommendations of the Quartet report on curbing incitement.
Britain is one of the largest donors to the Palestinian Authority, with the primary aim of strengthening the institutions that would form the basis of any future Palestinian state. It may be helpful for the House if I set out the Government’s view of a fair compromise between the parties. The borders between the two states should be based on the lines as they stood on 4 June 1967—the eve of the six-day war—with equal land swaps to reflect the national, security, and religious interests of the Jewish and Palestinian peoples. There must be security arrangements that, for Israelis, prevent the resurgence of terrorism; and, for Palestinians, respect their sovereignty, ensure freedom of movement, and demonstrate that occupation is over. There needs to be a just, fair, agreed and realistic solution to the Palestinian refugee question, in line with UN resolution 1515. In practice, this means that any such agreement must be demographically compatible with two states for two peoples and a generous package of international compensation should be made available. The final determination of Jerusalem must be agreed by the parties, ensuring that the holy city is a shared capital of Israel and a Palestinian state, granting access and religious rights for all who hold it dear.
This vision of a just settlement finds its roots in another British-drafted document: UN resolution 242, adopted 50 years ago this November, which enshrines the principle of land for peace based on the 1967 lines. That essential principle has inspired every serious effort to resolve this conflict—from the Camp David peace treaty signed by Israel and Egypt almost 40 years ago, to the Arab peace initiative first placed on the table in 2002, which offers normal relations with Israel in return for an end to occupation.
I believe that the goal of two states is still achievable, and that with ingenuity and good will, the map of the Holy Land can be configured in ways that meet the aspirations of both parties. A century after the Balfour declaration helped to create the state of Israel—an achievement that no one in this House would wish to undo—there is unfinished business and work to be done. We in this country, mindful of our historic role, and co-operating closely with our allies, will not shirk from that challenge. I commend this statement to the House.
Emily Thornberry Shadow Foreign Secretary 5:28 pm, 30th October 2017
I thank the Foreign Secretary for advance sight of his statement. As we approach the centenary of the Balfour declaration, Labour Members are glad to join him in commemorating that historic anniversary and expressing once again our continued support for the state of Israel.
In 1918, Labour’s first Cabinet Minister, Arthur Henderson, said:
“The British Labour Party believes that the responsibility of the British people in Palestine should be fulfilled to the utmost of their power…to ensure the economic prosperity, political autonomy and spiritual freedom of both the Jews and Arabs in Palestine.”
The Labour party has adopted that position, not least in recognition of the egalitarian goals that inspired the early pioneers of the Israeli state. We think, in particular, of the kibbutz movement—a group of people dedicated to establishing a more egalitarian society free from the prejudice and persecution that they had experienced in their home countries. Even today, despite the challenges that I will address in respect of its relationship with the Palestinian people, modern Israel still stands out for its commitment to egalitarianism—in particular, its commitment to women and LGBT communities in a region where these groups are far too often subject to fierce discrimination.
Today, it is right to think about the successes of Israel, but we must also be aware that 100 years on, the promise in the Balfour letter cited by the Foreign Secretary—that
“nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”— remains unfulfilled, and we have more to do. I urge the Foreign Secretary to take the opportunity of the centenary to reflect once again on Britain’s role in the region, as his predecessor did 100 years ago, and ask whether we could do more to bring about lasting peace and stability in the middle east. Can we do more to ensure that the political rights, as well as the civil and religious rights, of Palestinian people are protected, just as Mr. Balfour intended all those years ago?
On that point, as the Foreign Secretary well knows, I believe that there is no better or more symbolic way of marking the Balfour centenary than for the UK officially to recognise the state of Palestine. We have just heard the Foreign Secretary talk in explicit terms about the benefits for both Israel and Palestine that the birth of Palestinian statehood would bring. Surely we can play more of a part in delivering that by formally recognising the Palestinian state.
I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman knows that in 2011, one of his other predecessors, William Hague, said:
“We reserve the right to recognise a Palestinian state…at a moment of our choosing and when it can best help to bring about peace.”— [Official Report, 9November 2011;
Vol. 535, c. 290.]
Almost six years have passed since that statement—six years in which the humanitarian situation in the occupied territories has become ever more desperate, six years in which the cycle of violence has continued unabated and the people of Israel remain at daily risk from random acts of terror, six years in which the pace of settlement building and the displacement of Palestinian people have increased, and six years in which moves towards a lasting peace have ground to a halt.
Will the Foreign Secretary tell the House today whether the Government still plan to recognise the state of Palestine and, if not now, when? Conversely, if they no longer have such plans, can the Foreign Secretary tell us why things have changed? He will remember that on 13 October 2014, the House stated that the Palestinian state should be recognised. The anniversary of the Balfour declaration is a reminder that when the British Government lay out their policies on the middle east in black and white, those words matter and can make a difference. With the empty vessel that is the American President making lots of noise but being utterly directionless, the need for Britain to show leadership on this issue is ever more pressing.
Will the Foreign Secretary make a start today on the issue of Palestinian statehood? As we rightly reflect on the last 100 years, we have a shared duty to look towards the future and towards the next generation of young people growing up in Israel and Palestine today. That generation knows nothing but division and violence, and those young people have been badly let down by the actions, and the inaction, of their own leaders. Will young Israelis grow up in a world in which air raids, car rammings and random stabbings become a commonplace fact of life? Will they grow up in a country in which military service remains not just compulsory, but necessary, because they are surrounded by hostile neighbours who deny their very right to exist? Will young Palestinians grow up in a world in which youth unemployment remains at 58%, reliant on humanitarian aid and unable to shape their own futures? Will they inherit a map on which the ever-expanding settlements and the destruction of their own houses make it harder and harder to envisage what a viable independent Palestine would even look like?
I do not know whether the Foreign Secretary agrees with the Prime Minister about whether it is worth answering hypothetical questions, but as we mark the centenary of the vital step taken by a former British Foreign Secretary in recognition of Israeli statehood, I ask this Foreign Secretary how he believes he will be remembered in 100 years’ time. Will the Government in which he serves be remembered for recognising the statehood of the Palestinian people and taking a similarly vital step towards correcting an historic wrong? I can assure him that if the Government are not prepared to take that step, the next Labour Government will be.
Boris Johnson, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for the spirit in which she addressed the questions. She asks, if I may say so, the right questions about the way ahead. The UK is substantially committed to the support of the Palestinian Authority and to building up the institutions in Palestine. British taxpayers’ cash helps about 25,000 kids to go to school, we help with about 125,000 medical cases every year and the Department for International Development gives, as she knows very well, substantial sums to support the Palestinian Authority with a view to strengthening those institutions.
When it comes to recognising that state, we judge, in common with our French friends and the vast majority of our European friends and partners, that the moment is not yet right to play that card. That on its own will not end the occupation or bring peace. After all, it is not something we can do more than once: that card having been played, that will be it. We judge that it is better to give every possible encouragement to both sides to seize the moment and, if I may say so, I think the right hon. Lady is quite hard, perhaps characteristically, on the current Administration in Washington, which is perhaps her job–
Boris Johnson, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
Indeed, and I am hard where it is necessary, but there is a job to be done. At the moment, as I think the right hon. Lady would accept, there is a conjuncture in the stars that is uncommonly propitious. I will not put it higher than that, but there is a chance that we could make progress on this very vexed dossier. We need the Americans to work with us to do that and we need them to be in the lead because, as she will understand, of the facts as they are in the middle east.
We need the Palestinian Authority, with a clear mandate, to sit down and negotiate with the Israelis and do the deal that is there to be done, and which everybody understands. We all know the shape of the future map and we all know how it could be done. What is needed now is political will, and I can assure the right hon. Lady and the House that the UK will be absolutely determined to encourage both sides to do such a deal.
Link to this speech Individually
Hugo Swire, Conservative, East Devon
Of course it is right to mark the centenary of the Balfour declaration, but as we have already heard, we often concentrate too much on the first part of the declaration at the expense of the second. Does anyone really believe that the statement—the very clear statement—that
“nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” has been adhered to? Does my right hon. Friend not agree that a positive way in which to mark this important centenary would be for the UK finally to recognise a Palestinian state, something many of us in this House believe would honour the vision of those who helped bring about the state of Israel in the first place?
Boris Johnson Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
I agree very much with my right hon. Friend that, as it were, the protasis of the Balfour declaration has been fulfilled, but the apodosis has not. It should have spoken of the political rights of those peoples and, by the way, in my view it should have identified specifically the Palestinian people. That has not yet happened, and it is certainly our intention to make sure that Balfour does not remain unfinished business. As I have said, we want to recognise a Palestinian state as part of a two-state solution, but we judge that the moment to do that is not yet ripe.
Chris Law Shadow SNP Spokesperson (International Development), Shadow SNP Spokesperson (Climate Justice)
While the historical context is complex, we have stressed the need to learn some important and relevant lessons from the Balfour declaration. There is plenty of room for lessons to be learned, and for historic and moral responsibilities to be assumed for the betterment of all the peoples of the middle east today. This must start with the recognition of the state of Palestine as a fundamental stepping stone towards a lasting two-state solution.
I welcome the Foreign Secretary’s words, at least in principle, on that solution. However, we deeply regret that the
UK Government have not fulfilled their commission in the declaration that, as we have already heard,
“nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”.
The consequence of this failure remains all too clear. We hope that the centenary of the Balfour declaration will serve as an opportunity for reflection and a reinvigorated peace process across the middle east.
The Scottish National party supports the European Union position of a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders, and we firmly encourage Palestine and Israel to reach a sustainable, negotiated settlement under international law, based on mutual recognition and the determination to co-exist peacefully. The SNP has consistently condemned obstacles to progress in the peace process, such as the indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israel or the continued expansion of illegal settlements in the occupied territories.
Opposition Members have repeatedly called on the UK Government to use their influence to help to revitalize the peace process. I repeat those calls and ask the Foreign Secretary what efforts he is making to use his influence to bring about a renewed effort to break through the political deadlock and bring an end to this conflict.
The Scottish Government have been clear that they would welcome a Palestinian consulate in Edinburgh. Will the Foreign Secretary take this opportunity to recognise formally a Palestinian state as a fundamental stepping stone to a two-state solution by enabling the opening of an embassy?
Boris Johnson Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
Of course we are doing everything in our power to push on with a two-state solution. I have spoken about the outlines of a deal that everyone can imagine—the land swaps for peace that can be arranged—but it is also vital that we remember that Israel has a legitimate security interest. If we are to get this done, I am afraid it is essential that not just Fatah and the PA, but Hamas as well, have to understand that they must renounce terror, their use of anti-Semitic propaganda and the glorification of so-called terrorist martyrs. They must commit to the Quartet principles, and then there is genuinely the opportunity to get both sides together.
The hon. Gentleman asks rightly about what this country is doing specifically to advance this, and we are engaged heavily in the diplomacy. Not only is the Israeli Prime Minister coming this week, as is proper, to mark Balfour, but Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, will come next year. We look forward to an intensification of contacts with them in the run-up to that visit.
Crispin Blunt, Conservative, Reigate
Does my right hon. Friend agree that the best route to rediscover the unique moral authority associated with the Zionist project, delivering after two millennia a safe place for global Jewry in the remarkable state of Israel, is for the state of Israel itself, secured by the support of the world’s pre-eminent power of 2017, to take on responsibility for the delivery of the unfulfilled part of the Balfour declaration by the world’s pre-eminent power of 1917, which it plainly is not in a position now to deliver itself, and for Israel to share the security and justice it has achieved for global Jewry with their neighbours?
Boris Johnson Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
I am grateful to my hon. Friend, and I recognise the great learning and expertise he brings to discussion of this issue and his passion for the cause of finding a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is something that I agree strongly is in the hands of this generation of Israeli politicians, and they are certainly aware of that. But it is also in the hands of the Palestinians, and as I said a moment ago, they must do certain things if we are to get this process moving. It is also vital, as my hon. Friend rightly observes, that the greatest patron, ally and supporter of Israel—the United States—should play its full role in moving this process forward.
Louise Ellman Labour/Co-operative, Liverpool, Riverside
The Balfour declaration recognised the rights of the Jewish people to national self-determination in their historic homelands, which go back more than 3,000 years. Does the Foreign Secretary believe that there are now new opportunities in the middle east to start again to try to secure a negotiated solution to this intractable conflict, so that the Palestinian people as well as the Jewish people can have their own states in the region?
Boris Johnson Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
I do indeed recognise the opportunity the hon. Lady identifies. I believe there is an unusual alignment of the stars. Effectively, we have the chance to proceed now with a version of the Arab peace plan that has been on the table since 2002. Nobody ever got rich by betting on a successful conclusion of the middle east peace process, but there is an opportunity and we must do whatever we can to persuade both sides that this is their moment for greatness. That is certainly the case we are making to both of them.
Jonathan Djanogly Conservative, Huntingdon
As we celebrate 100 years of the Balfour declaration, does the Foreign Secretary agree that this event can be regarded as an act of great diplomatic skill on the part of his illustrious predecessor, Lord Balfour, in so far as it triggered a process leading to the creation of Israel, thus providing a strong, stable, democratic and non-sectarian ally for the UK in the heart of the notoriously unstable middle east?
Boris Johnson Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
I agree totally with my hon. Friend. The Balfour declaration was an historic event that led to a giant political fact: the creation of the state of Israel, which I believe to be one of the most stunning political achievements of the 20th century. As I said, I do not think anybody in this House could seriously wish the undoing of that fact. Nobody looking at Israel—a democracy and a liberal, tolerant society in the middle east—could seriously wish away that achievement. We should celebrate the existence of the state of Israel—we certainly celebrate our relationship with the state of Israel here in this country—but we must recognise and accept that for others the fact of the Balfour declaration carries very different overtones. They remember it in a very different spirit, so it is important we mark this anniversary with sensitivity and balance.
Ian Austin Labour, Dudley North
The best legacy of the centenary of the Balfour declaration would be to make concrete progress towards the two-state solution we all want to see. Does the Foreign Secretary agree, in this centenary year, to support and properly invest in the International Fund for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, which could help us to take that big step? I desperately want to see a Palestinian state and have campaigned for that all my life, but it is very important that Members understand there is no legalistic, unilateral or bureaucratic route to that objective. It will not be achieved by being imposed from the outside or by unilateral declarations here or anywhere else. It will only be achieved by getting Israelis and Palestinians to work together to build trust, to negotiate and to compromise, and for economic development and trade in the west bank, and the reconstruction and demilitarisation of Gaza.
Boris Johnson Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
I completely agree with the aspiration the hon. Gentleman sets out. I believe that the future is economic interpenetration and mutual prosperity. That is why next year we are investing £3 million in co-existence projects of exactly the kind he describes.
Desmond Swayne Conservative, New Forest West
Is there anything we can do about illegal settlements beyond saying that we are very, very cross?
Boris Johnson Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend, who makes a valid point. Beyond our repeated statements of disapproval, Members may recollect that we led the way just before Christmas last year with UN resolution 2334, which specifically condemned new illegal settlements. The Prime Minister and I have been at pains to point out to Prime Minister Netanyahu, both here in London and in Jerusalem, our view that the settlements are illegal. That is a point on which we will continue to insist.
Tom Brake Liberal Democrat Spokesperson (Foreign Affairs), Liberal Democrat Chief Whip, Liberal Democrat Shadow Leader of the House of Commons
It is certainly right that the House celebrates the creation of the state of Israel, but it cannot celebrate—in fact, it must condemn—the failure of successive UK Governments to help safeguard the rights of Palestinians. Given our historical role, will the Foreign Secretary set out what single, concrete international initiative he intends spearheading to help secure a viable Palestinian state, and will he set out what conditions would have to be met for the UK to recognise Palestine?
Boris Johnson Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
I have been pretty clear with the House already that we see the most fertile prospects now in the new push coming from America, and we intend to support that. As and when it becomes necessary to play the recognition card, we certainly will do it—we want to do it—but now is not yet the time.
Andrew Murrison Chair, Northern Ireland Affairs Committee
Notwithstanding the challenges of unfinished business to which my right hon. Friend rightly referred, does he agree that centenaries can be a powerful way to draw people together, thoughtfully and respectfully, even where, as here, the history is complex and nuanced?
Boris Johnson Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
I strongly agree. It has been salutary for people to look back over the last 100 years at the many missed opportunities and at the reasons Balfour thought it necessary to make his declaration. It was not, as is frequently said, simply that Britain wanted to solicit American support in the first world war; it was genuinely because of a need, an imperative, to deal with the pogroms and the anti-Semitism that had plagued Russia and so many parts of eastern Europe for so long. It was vital to find a homeland for the Jewish people, and history can be grateful that Balfour made the decision he did, though we have to understand at the same time the injustice and suffering occasioned by that decision.
Luciana Berger Labour/Co-operative, Liverpool, Wavertree
In the same week we celebrate the centenary of the Balfour declaration, will the Foreign Secretary take the opportunity to condemn the actions in Abu Dhabi in recent days, when five Israelis who won medals at the judo grand slam were denied the chance afforded to other athletes of celebrating with their country’s flag and anthem during the awards ceremonies and when one athlete refused to shake the hand of an Israeli athlete? There can be no place for this type of discrimination. If we are to see peace, we have to acknowledge and support both the Israeli and the Palestinian people.
Boris Johnson Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
I completely agree. We condemn anti-Semitism and displays of such prejudice wherever they occur. The example the hon. Lady gives shows the paramount need to sort out this problem and end this running sore.
Jack Lopresti Conservative, Filton and Bradley Stoke
Does my right hon. Friend agree that not only is Israel a beacon of hope and democracy in the middle east but that our strategic partnerships in the fields of security and defence are vital to the safety of both our nations and should be enhanced and developed?
Boris Johnson Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
My hon. Friend is completely right. We have an intensifying commercial partnership with Israel. It is a country at the cutting edge of high technology of all kinds. We co-operate in financial services, aviation and all kinds of fields, as well as, very importantly, security and intelligence, as he rightly identifies.
Grahame Morris Labour, Easington
I welcome the Foreign Secretary’s measured tone in recognising the rights of Palestinians and the obligations that the Balfour declaration places on the UK Government. When he has dinner with the Prime Minister of Israel, may I suggest that he says that sustainable peace in the middle east can be built only on the basis of equal rights, equal dignity and respect for all, Israelis and Palestinians alike? On the UK Government’s role, will he point out that we will uphold the Geneva convention, which Britain co-wrote and ratified after the second world war, in that we will not trade with settlements that he himself has said are illegal? Finally, may I point out that the House considered the issue of recognition at length and, following considered debate, voted by 274 votes to 12 that the UK Government should recognise the state of Israel alongside the state of Palestine as part of our moral obligation to the Palestinian people, as set out in the declaration?
Boris Johnson Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
I certainly agree with the majority view of Members of the House that we must, in time, recognise the Palestinian state. I have to be honest, however: I do not happen to think that now is the most effective moment to do that. In that, we are at one with our partners around the EU. The hon. Gentleman makes a point about boycotts. I do not think that that is the right way forward. I do not think that boycotting Israeli products makes sense. The biggest losers would be the workers from Palestinian and Arab communities who benefit immensely from the economic activity generated by those Israeli companies.
Oliver Dowden Conservative, Hertsmere
As my right hon. Friend rightly says, we have a long way to go to achieve an end to violence and a two-state solution, but does he agree with me and many of my constituents that this anniversary is an opportunity to celebrate modern Israel, its vibrant economy, its liberty and diversity, its democracy and, above all, the fact that at a time of rising anti-Semitism, it still provides a safe home for the Jewish people?
Boris Johnson Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
I congratulate my hon. Friend on speaking up for his constituents. He is right to want to celebrate the existence of the state of Israel, though he must recognise that in celebrating the Balfour declaration we must also accept that the declaration itself, on 2 November 1917, today has different echoes for different people around the world, and it is important that we be balanced and sensitive in our approach.
Jim Cunningham Labour, Coventry South
For a change, will the Foreign Secretary tell me what the Israeli Government have to do to get a peace settlement? A lot of emphasis is put on the Palestinians. How does he think that Donald Trump can resolve the problem, when he has failed to put pressure on the Israeli Government to stop the settlements?
Boris Johnson Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
I think the hon. Gentleman answered his own question as he sat down. The Israeli Government need to stop the illegal settlements. They are not yet making it impossible to deliver the new map, but every time they build new units—as he knows, there are new units going up in Hebron in east Jerusalem—they make that eventual land swap more difficult and move us further from a two-state solution. That is the point we make to our Israeli friends—and, by the way, that is the point made by many allies around the world.
Philip Hollobone Conservative, Kettering
It is clearly true that residents of the occupied Palestinian territories do not enjoy the full civil rights promised to them in the Balfour declaration, but is it not also true that neither do the more than 800,000 Jews expelled from countries in the middle east and north Africa? We must remember that 21% of the population of the current state of Israel are Arab Palestinians, whereas there has been wholescale ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arab and north African countries, starting in 1948.
Boris Johnson Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
My hon. Friend has an excellent point and alludes to the third leg of the Balfour declaration. Balfour spoke of the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities and then of course of the rights of Jewish communities elsewhere around the world. As my hon. Friend rightly says, hundreds of thousands of them were expelled from their homes, too. They will also benefit from a lasting peace between the Arabs and Israelis. That is what we want to achieve and what we are pushing for.
Sharon Hodgson Shadow Minister (Public Health)
Does the Foreign Secretary agree that it is impossible to reject the Balfour declaration in its entirety, as some may seek to do, and support a two-state solution? Will he therefore join me in celebrating Balfour and commit to redoubling our efforts to achieve a two-state solution and peace in the region?
Boris Johnson Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
I certainly share the hon. Lady’s enthusiasm for and passionate belief in the vital importance of the state of Israel, which, as I told the House earlier, I believe to be one of the great achievements of humanity in the 20th century, given all the suffering the Jewish people had been through. It is a great immovable fact—I hope—of geopolitics. We also have to recognise, however, that in the course of creating that wonderful experiment, huge numbers of people suffered and lost their homes. Their wishes and feelings must also be respected. It is in that spirit that we mark Balfour today.
Andrew Percy Conservative, Brigg and Goole
Is it not the case that the rights of non-Jews in the state of Israel are 100% protected as per the Balfour declaration? Does the Foreign Secretary not agree that it would be wholly inappropriate and wrong for anyone to seek to use this centenary to perpetuate the myth and falsehood that the failure to establish a Palestinian state is wholly the responsibility of Israel, because to do so would be to deny the role of neighbouring Arab countries in 1948 in attacking Israel and preventing the existence of an Arab state, and also the failure of the Arab leadership to grasp peace plans as they have been offered?
Boris Johnson Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
My hon. Friend is completely right. That is why I speak in the terms that I do about the state of Israel. It is a pluralist society, a society that protects the rights of those who live within it. It is a democracy. It is, in my view, a country to be saluted and celebrated. My hon. Friend is, of course, also right in pointing to the many failures of diplomacy and politics that I am afraid have been perpetuated by the Palestinian leadership for generations. We have to hope now that the current generation of leaders in the Palestinian Authority will have the mandate and the momentum to deliver a different result.
Philippa Whitford Shadow SNP Spokesperson (Health)
Some Members will be aware that I spent nearly a year and a half in Gaza working as a surgeon in 1991 and 1992. I was there when the Madrid peace process started, and by half-past 4 in the afternoon, young men were climbing on to armoured cars with olive branches. When I came back four weeks ago, my feeling was that we were further from peace than we had been a quarter of a century earlier.
When I spent time on the west bank recently, I saw settlements expanding at an incredible rate. We blame America, and we expect America to come up with a solution, but people in Israel look to Europe, because they see themselves as part of Europe. I think the United Kingdom and Europe need to use their power to secure a new peace process, and part of that is to do with recognition. How can we talk about a two-state solution if we do not recognise both states?
Boris Johnson Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
Obviously, I have great respect for the work that the hon. Lady has done in Gaza, and I appreciate the suffering that she has seen there. There is no doubt that the situation in Gaza is terrible. As the hon. Lady knows, the UK Government do a lot to try to remedy affairs by supporting, for instance, sanitation projects and education, but in the end a trade-off must be achieved. The Israelis must open up Gaza for trade and greater economic activity to give the people hope and opportunity, but before that happens, Hamas must stop firing rockets at Israel. Hamas must recognise the right of the Israeli state to exist, and it must stop spewing out anti-Semitic propaganda.
Michael Tomlinson Conservative, Mid Dorset and North Poole
Last year I had the privilege of visiting Israel and the west bank with members of Conservative Friends of Israel. I am bound to say that I was disappointed by the lack of impetus, or of willingness, on the part of both sides to engage and get round the table. Does not the centenary commemoration present an opportunity both for the resumption of direct peace talks, and for the United Kingdom to continue to engage and encourage the fulfilment of that two-state solution?
Boris Johnson Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
I absolutely agree. I hope that both sides of the equation, the Palestinians and the Israelis, will study my statement with care, because I believe that it offers a way forward that would be massively to the advantage not just of their countries, but of the whole of the middle east and, indeed, the world.
Julie Elliott Labour, Sunderland Central
I welcome much of what the Foreign Secretary has said this afternoon, and the sensitivity with which he has said it, although I think he is making the wrong decision about recognition.
During his visit, will the Foreign Secretary raise with Prime Minister Netanyahu the issue of legislation relating to the annexation of settlement blocs in Jerusalem, which would displace 120,000 Palestinian people? That is clearly an impediment to the achievement of the viable two-state solution that is wanted by Members on all sides of the argument.
Boris Johnson Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
I can answer the hon. Lady’s question very briefly. I will certainly raise that issue, as I have raised the issue of illegal settlements in the past, directly with Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Colin Clark Conservative, Gordon
Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is deeply disappointing that the Leader of the Opposition will not attend a dinner to mark the centenary of the Balfour declaration?
Boris Johnson Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
I believe that it is disappointing. The vast majority of Members on both sides of the House have said this afternoon that this occasion is of huge importance to the world, because it marks an event in which our country played an enormous part—and, indeed, we still have a large part to play. One would have thought that the Leader of the Opposition would at least be interested in trying to achieve a solution to a problem that has bedevilled the world for so long, and would not, by his absence, be so blatantly appearing to side with one party and not the other. I must say that I find that unfortunate.
Andrew Slaughter Labour, Hammersmith
The Foreign Secretary’s refusal to treat Palestinians and Israelis equally, as shown by his refusal to recognise Palestine as a state alongside Israel, is exactly the reason the Israelis are building in Hebron and, last week, annexed further settlements in the Jerusalem municipality. What will the Government actually do to honour Balfour’s assurance to non-Jewish communities? So far, apart from warm words, all I have heard is that the Foreign Secretary seems to support trade with illegal settlements, that he is setting new conditions for the Palestinians, and that he is blaming the Palestinian leaders for their own occupation.
Boris Johnson Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
It is wholly untrue to say that we have offered the Palestinians nothing but warm words. The hon. Gentleman should consider the huge sums that the UK gives to the Palestinian authorities, the massive efforts that we make to help them with their security concerns, and the intimate co-operation that takes place between the UK and the Palestinian Authority. We are doing everything in our power to ready the Palestinians for statehood, but we do not consider that they are ready for recognition yet. This is obviously not the moment, given the problems that Mahmoud Abbas is experiencing. We think that a much more productive approach would be getting both sides together and beginning the process of negotiation on the basis of the programme that I have outlined today, leading to a two-state solution. That is what we need.
Alex Chalk Conservative, Cheltenham
I welcome the Foreign Secretary’s measured statement, and his optimism about the prospects for a two-state solution with Israel, rightly, living in security. Does he agree, however, that the accelerated settlement-building is not just to be gently deprecated, but is truly egregious, illegal, and a growing obstacle to peace?
Boris Johnson Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
I totally agree with my hon. Friend, and that is the language that we have been using. It is what my right hon. Friend the Minister for the Middle East has said time and again during his trips to the region. Indeed, whenever representatives of either party have come to this country we have strongly condemned the building of illegal settlement units, and we have denounced the recent acceleration in the building of those units. We think that that is making it more difficult to achieve a two-state solution, but it is not yet impossible, which is why we want to seize this opportunity.
Layla Moran Liberal Democrat, Oxford West and Abingdon
I am proud to sit on these Benches as the first ever British Palestinian Member of Parliament. My family are from Jerusalem. They were there at the time of the Balfour declaration, but, like many others, they had to leave as part of the diaspora.
When it comes to recognition, the Foreign Secretary speaks of playing a card, but this is not a game. He speaks of a prize to be given for recognition, but it is not something to be bestowed; it is something that the Palestinians should just have. Can he not see how Britain leads the world on foreign policy? If we are to have a true peace process, we must ensure that both sides are equal as they step up to the negotiating table.
Boris Johnson Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
I strongly agree with the hon. Lady’s last point. I am full of respect for the suffering of her family in the face of what took place following the creation of the state of Israel, and I know that the experience of many Palestinian families was—and indeed still is—tragic, but our ambition in holding out the prospect of recognition, working with our friends and partners, and trying to drive forward the peace process leading to a two-state solution is to give Palestinian families such as her own exactly the rights and the future that they deserve, in a viable, contiguous, independent, sovereign Palestinian state. That is what we want to achieve.
Kevin Foster Conservative, Torbay
I know the Foreign Secretary will agree with me that a prosperous democracy where people can freely practise their religion in Israel is part of what we want to see ultimately in the Palestinian state as well. Can he confirm that he will use every opportunity of this centenary of the Balfour declaration to push forward that long-term goal?
Boris Johnson Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
Absolutely: that is the ambition and the goal, and clearly we hope that the state of which I just spoke will be a democratic, liberal state, just as Israel is.
Lindsay Hoyle Chairman of Ways and Means, Chair, Panel of Chairs
Let us have the busiest MP: Jim Shannon.
Jim Shannon Shadow DUP Spokesperson (Human Rights & Health)
As a friend of Israel, I look forward to the day when the Palestinian people can enjoy the security of a sovereign state on the successful conclusion of a negotiated two-state solution. One of the biggest obstacles to achieving that is the Palestinian Authority’s counterproductive unilateral steps to gain statehood recognition through international bodies, so will the Foreign Secretary join me in calling for the PA to stop those harmful measures and instead to express support for the renewal of direct peace talks, because that really is the only way forward?
Boris Johnson Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
By far the better way for the PA to achieve what it wants is not to go through international bodies, but to get around the table with the Israelis and begin those crucial negotiations.
HOWEVER BORIS! WHAT ABOUT ALL THE JEWISH OBJECTIONS TO THE BALFOUR DECLARATION
Made by the Honourable Edwin Samuel Montagu, son of the First Lord Swaythling. Who, at that time, was Minister of State for India.
THE UNACCEPTABLE FACE OF ZIONISM
It is obvious, that not all Zionists are Jews, but not so obvious is the fact that not all Jews are Zionists. Taheen Basheer in the introduction to his booklet ‘Edwin Montagu and The Balfour Declaration’ draws our attention to the fact that many prominent and influential Jews at the turn of the century were completely opposed to the Balfour Declaration both in fact and in principle, and that it was contrary to religious Law. He says:
When the Balfour Declaration, dated November 2nd 1917, was made public, very little was known about its motivations and the interplay of forces that had moved the British Government to promise the establishment of a “National home for the Jews that does not prejudice the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by the Jews in any other country”. [from the The Balfour Declaration]
The declaration included vague terminology like ‘the National Home’ which was susceptible to many contradictory interpretations, the ambiguity adding to the tense and secretive atmosphere surrounding the Declaration from its very inception, until the United Nations partition plan of 1947.
Significant among the documents made public in the spring of 1966 are three major memoranda presented by the Honourable Edwin Samuel Montagu, son of the First Lord Swaythling and at that time Minister of State for India, concerning his vehement opposition to the proposed declaration. The Cabinet papers covering the 1915 to 1920 period shed light on the role played by the Zionist movement in influencing British policy during that crucial period.
Montagu was not only a member of the British Cabinet, but was also a practicing Orthodox Jew and a leading personality amongst British Jewry. His basic opposition did not stem from pro-Arab sentiment, but rather out of his strong dislike for the principles and personalities of political Zionism, basing his rejection on the following points:
- Judaism is a Universal Religion and not a nationality.
- There is no Jewish Nation, only a Jewish Religion and tradition. Palestine is not the national home for the Jews, for the national home of every Jew depends on the country he belongs to and of which he is a citizen.
- Zionism is an untenable creed that sheds doubt on the loyalty and patriotism of Jewish citizens of the United Kingdom. He said: “If a Jewish Englishman sets his eyes on the Mount of Olives and longs for the day when he will shake British soil from his shoes and go back to agricultural pursuits in Palestine … he seemed to me to have acknowledged aims inconsistent with British Citizenship”. He also stated that he would almost be tempted to proscribe the Zionist Organisation as illegal and against British national interests.
- While acknowledging the fact that Palestine played a large part in Jewish history, he also stated that it played equally important roles in the history of Christianity and Islam. He maintained that the future of Palestine, as well as other parts of the former Ottoman territories, should depend on the will of its inhabitants and the exercise of self-determination. He also reacted the same way to the French proposals to establish a homeland in el-Hassa in Arabia.
- He questioned the authority of the Zionist Organisation to represent the Jewish people, and affirmed that in his estimation Jews of British birth were in the main anti-Zionist and that the majority of Zionists were foreign born trouble makers living in Britain.
- He considered the Balfour Declaration to be an Anti-Semitic act which also broke promises made to the Arabs.
23rd August 1917 E.S.M.” (Edwin Samuel Montagu)
[British Public Record Office, Cab. No. 24/24]
SECRET ZIONISM
The Anti-Semitism Of The Present Government (Circulated by the Secretary of State for India)
“1. I am sorry to bother the Cabinet with another Paper on this subject, but I have obtained some more information which I would like to lay before them.
- We have received at the India Office a series of valuable papers on Turkey in Asia from the pen of Miss Gertrude Lowthian Bell, the remarkable woman who, after years of knowledge gained by unique travel in these regions, is acting as Assistant Political Officer in Baghdad. She writes:-
‘Not least among the denationalising forces is the fact that a part of Syria, though like the rest mainly inhabited by Arabs, is regarded by a non-Arab people as its prescriptive inheritance. At a liberal estimate the Jews of Palestine may form a quarter of the population of the province, the Christians a fifth, while the remainder are Mohammedan Arabs. Jewish immigration has been artificially fostered by doles and subventions from millionaire co-religionists in Europe [the Rothschilds and Baron Hirsch]: the new colonies have taken root and are more or less self supporting…
The pious hope that an independent Jewish State may some day be established in Palestine no doubt exists, though it may be questioned whether among the local Jews there is any acute desire to see it realised, except as a means of escape from Turkish oppression: it is perhaps more lively in the breasts of those who live far from the rocky Palestinian hills and have no intention of changing their domicile.’
- The Cabinet has been informed that the French Government are in sympathy with Zionist aspirations. It has recently come to my knowledge officially that the French Ambassador has approached our Foreign Office with a proposal to establish a Jewish Nation in El Hasa in Arabia, oblivious of the fact that although this is technically Turkish territory, we have concluded so recently as 1915 a treaty which roughly promises to support Bin Saud and his followers in the occupation of that country…
[Treachery towards Arabs, Muslims and Islam has always been part of the Foreign Policy of the United Kingdom, United States, United Europe, and The U.S.S.R. All are one in this respect, as are all cats grey in the darkness of this godless crusade]4. I have obtained a list of a few prominent anti-Zionists. It will be noticed that it includes every Jew who is prominent in public life, with the exception of the present Lord Rothschild, Mr. Herbert Samuel, and a few others:
Dr. Israel Abrahams, M.A., University of Cambridge
Sir Charles S. Henry, Bart M.P.
Sir Lionel Abrahams, K.C.B.
J.D. Israel, Esq.
Professor S. Alexander, M.A., University of Manchester
Benjamin Kisch, Esq.
D.L. Alexander, Esq., K.C., J.P.
Rev. Ephraim Levine, M.A.
Captain O. E. d’Avigor-Goldsmid,
Chairman of the Council of Jews’ College
Joshua M. Levy, Esq.
Leonard L.Cohen, Esq.
Robert Waley Cohen, Esq.
Major Laurie Magnus
Dr. A. Eichholz
Sir Philip Magnus, Bart., M.P.
S.H. Emmanuel, Esq., B.A., Recorder of Winchester
Sir Alfred Mond, M.P.
Ernest L. Franklin, Esq.
C.G. Montefiore, Esq., M.A.
Professor I. Gollancz, M.A.,
Secretary of the British Academy
A.R. Moro, Esq.
Sir Mathew Nathan, G.C.M.G.
Michael A. Green, Esq.
J. Prag, Esq., J.P.
P.J. Hartog, Esq., M.A., Registrar, University of London
The Right Honourable Viscount Reading,
G.C.B., K.C.V.O., H.S.Q.
Henriques, Esq., M.A.
Captain Anthony de Rothschild
Captain Evelyn de Rothschild
New Court, St Swithin’s Lane, E.C.
Marion H. Spielmann, Esq.
Major Lionel de Rothschild, E.C.
Meyer A. Spielman, Esq.
Captain I. Salmon, L.C.C.
Sir Edward D. Stern
Sir Harry S. Samuel, M.P.
Lord Swaythling
Sir Marcus Samuel, Bart.
Sir Adolph Tuck, Bart.
Edmund Sebag-Montefiore, Esq.
Philip S. Waley, Esq.
Oswald J. Simon, Esq.
Professor A. Wolf, M.A., University College, London
Dr. Charles Singer, M.A.
33 Upper Brook Street, W.
Lucien Wolf, Esq.
Sir Isidore Spielman, Esq.
Albert M. Wolf, Esq.
Lord Cromer took pleasure in relating a conversation which he had held on the subject with one of the best known English Jews, who observed: ‘If a Jewish Kingdom were to be established at Jerusalem I should lose no time in applying for the post of Ambassador in London.’...two considerations rule out the conception of an independent Jewish Palestine from practical politics. The first is that the province as we know it is not Jewish, and that neither Mohammedan nor Arab would accept Jewish Authority; the second that the capital, Jerusalem, is equally sacred to three faiths, Jewish, Christian and Moslem, and should never, if it can be avoided, be put under the exclusive control of any one local faction, no matter how carefully the rights of the other two may be safeguarded.
I would beg the Cabinet to consider this matter as a practical proposition. I yield to no one in my admiration of the distinguished Russian, Professor Weizmann, who looms so large in our discussions. His services to the allied cause have been great. He is a scientist of repute. But on this matter he is near to being a religious fanatic. His enthusiasm for this cause have been the guiding principle of a large part of his life.
It is his overwhelming enthusiasm. How often do such enthusiasms lead to complete disregard of practical potentialities! How little likely is such an enthusiasm to take into account the susceptibilities of those who differ from him among those of his own religion, [let alone] those of other religions whom his activities, if successful, would dispossess.
I have chosen the above title for this memorandum, not in any hostile sense, not by any means as quarreling with an anti-Semitic view which may be held by my colleagues, not with a desire to deny that anti-Semitism can be held by rational men, not even with a view to suggesting that the Government is deliberately anti-Semitic; but I wish to place on record my view that the policy of His Majesty’s Government is Anti-Semitic in result, and will prove a rallying ground for Anti-Semites in every country in the world.
This view is prompted by the receipt yesterday of a correspondence between Lord Rothschild and Mr. Balfour.
Lord Rothschild’s letter is dated the 18th July and Mr. Balfour’s answer is dated August 1917. I fear that my protest comes too late, and it may well be that the Government were practically committed when Lord Rothschild wrote and before I became a member of the Government, for there has obviously been some correspondence or conversation before this letter. But I do feel that as the one Jewish Minister in the Government I may be allowed by my colleagues an opportunity of expressing views which may be peculiar to myself, but which I hold very strongly and which I must ask permission to express when opportunity affords.
…Zionism has always seemed to me to be a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom….I have always understood that those who indulge in this creed were largely animated by the restrictions upon, and [the] refusal of liberty to Jews in Russia. But at the very time when these Jews have been acknowledged as Jewish Russians and given all liberties [under Masonic Bolshevism], it seems inconceivable that Zionism should be officially recognised by the British Government, and that Mr. Balfour should be authorised to say that Palestine was to be reconstituted as the ‘National Home of the Jewish people’. I do not know what this involves, but I assume that it means that Mohammedans and Christians are to make way for the Jews, and that the Jews should be put in positions of preference and should be peculiarly associated
When the Jews are told that Palestine is their national home, every country will immediately desire to get rid of its Jewish citizens, and you will find a population in Palestine driving out its present inhabitants, taking all the best in the country, drawn from all quarters of the globe, speaking every language on the face of the earth, and incapable of communicating with one another except by means of interpreter. I have always understood that this was the consequence of building the Tower of Babel, if ever it was built, and I certainly do not dissent from the view commonly held, as I have always understood, by the Jews before Zionism was invented, that to bring back the Jews to form a nation in a country from which they were dispersed would require Divine Leadership. I have never heard it suggested by even their most fervent admirers, that either Mr. Balfour or Lord Rothschild would prove to be the Messiah…I would willingly disenfranchise every Zionist. I would be almost tempted to proscribe the Zionist Organisation as illegal and against national interest.
I deny that Palestine is today associated with the Jews or properly to be regarded as a fit place for them to live in. The Ten Commandments were delivered to the Jews on Sinai. It is quite true that Palestine plays a large part in Jewish history, but so it does in modern Mohammedan history, and after the time of the Jews, surely it plays a larger part than any other country in Christian history. The Temple may have been in Palestine, but so was the Sermon on the Mount and the crucifixion. I would not deny to Jews in Palestine equal rights to colonisation with those who profess other religions, but a religious test of citizenship seems to me to be only admitted by those who take a bigoted and narrow view of one particular epoch of the history of Palestine, and claim for the Jews a position to which they are not entitled.
If my memory serves me right, there are three times as many Jews in the world as could possibly get into Palestine if you drove out all the population that remains there now. So that only one-third could get back at the most, and what will happen to the remainder?
I can easily understand the editors of the Morning Post and of the New Witness being Zionists, and I am not in the least surprised that the non-Jews of England may welcome this policy. I have always recognised the unpopularity, much greater than some people think, of my community. We have obtained a far greater share of this country’s goods and opportunities than we are numerically entitled to. We reach on the whole maturity earlier, and therefore with people of our own age we compete unfairly. Many of us have been exclusive in our friendships and intolerant in our attitude, and I can easily understand that many a non-Jew in England wants to get rid of us…Palestine will become the world’s Ghetto. Why should the Russian give the Jew equal rights? [when] His National home is Palestine. Why does Lord Rothschild attach so much importance to the difference between British and foreign Jews? All Jews will be foreign Jews, inhabitants of the great country of Palestine…
I feel that the Government are asked to be the instrument for carrying out the wishes of a Zionist organisation, largely run as my information goes, at any rate in the past, by men of enemy [German] descent or birth, and by this means have dealt a severe blow to the liberties, position and opportunities of service to their fellow Jewish countrymen. I would say to Lord Rothschild that the Government will be prepared to do everything in their power to obtain for Jews in Palestine complete liberty of settlement and life on an equality with the inhabitants of that country who profess other religious beliefs. I would ask the Government to go no further.
23rd August 1917 E.S.M.” (Edwin Samuel Montagu)
[British Public Record Office, Cab. No. 24/24]
Foreign Secretary you say: “As the British Army advanced towards Jerusalem in the last 12 months of the first world war, with the aim of breaking the Ottoman empire’s grip on the middle east, the Government published their policy concerning the territory that would become the British mandate for Palestine. The House will recall the material sentence of the Balfour declaration: “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
CARVED TURKEY
| How and Why the East was lost |
| SECRET. |
| From Sir Gerard Lowther to Sir Charles Harding |
| (Private and Confidential) |
| Constantinople |
| May 29, 1910 |
Dear Charles,
Gorst’s telegram of the 23rd April about the rumored appointment of Mohamed Farid as delegate in Egypt of the Constantinople Freemasons, “said to be intimately connected with the committee of Union and Progress”, prompts me to write to you at some length on the strain of continental Freemasonry running through the Young Turk movement.
I do so privately and confidentially, as this new Freemasonry in Turkey, unlike that of England and America, is in great part secret and political, and information on the subject is only available in strict confidence, while those who betray its political secrets seem to stand in fear of the hand of the Mafia. Some days ago a local Mason who divulged the signs of the craft was actually threatened with being sent before a court-martial, sitting in virtue of our state of siege.
As you are aware, the Young Turk movement in Paris was quite separate from and in great part in ignorance of the inner workings of that in Salonica. The latter has a population of about 140,000, of whom 80,000 are Spanish Jews, and 20,000 of the sect of Sabetai Levi (zevi) or Crypto-Jews, who externally profess Islamism. Many of the former have in the past acquired Italian Nationality and are Freemasons affiliated to Italian Lodges. Nathan, the Jewish Lord Mayor of Rome, is high up in Masonry, and the Jewish Premiers Luzzati and Sonnino, and other Jewish senators and deputies, are also, it appears, Masons. They claim to have been founded from and to follow the ritual of the “Ancient Scottish.”
…The inspiration of the movement in Salonica would seem to have been mainly Jewish [Atatürk also came from Salonica], while the words “Liberté,” “Equalité”, and “Fraternité”, the motto of the young Turks, are also the device of Italian Freemasons… Shortly after the revolution in July 1908, when the Committee established itself in Constantinople, it soon became known that many of its leading members were Freemasons… it was noticed that Jews of all colours, native and foreign, were enthusiastic supporters of the new dispensation, till, as a Turk expressed it, every Hebrew became a potential spy of the occult (Balkan) Committee, and people began to remark that the movement was rather a Jewish than Turkish Revolution…”
The Gorst, mentioned by Sir Gerard Lowther to Sir Charles Harding was none other than Sir Eldon Gorst, who in 1907 had replaced Lord Cromer as Chief British Agent and Consul-General in Cairo, a post Cromer had held from 1883. Gorst had good reason to be concerned about the activities of the “Committee of Union and Progress”, because, according to ‘The Times History of The War’, [Vol 3, pages 281-3], during his tenure of office the Christian Premier, Butros Pasha Ghali, was assassinated by a student connected with that same Judeo- Masonic organisation, which as we now know, according to Sir Gerard Lowther, was serving strictly Jewish ambitions. The ‘Times History’ goes on to say:- “After the sadly premature death of Sir Eldon Gorst, Lord Kitchener was appointed in his stead.”
Sir Eldon Gorst, it seems, was instructed to avoid friction and “incidents.” He attempted a policy of conciliation which apparently did not meet with success. He was nevertheless able to detatch the Khedive from the Extremist Nationalist Party and curb the licence of the extremist press. After the appointment of Kitchener, it says, the extremist Nationalists lost ground and fled to Turkey, but the Khedive and the Ottoman Special Mission continued their intrigues. Sedition was scotched, but not killed. It does not mention how, when and where Gorst died.
DEBT ON THE NILE
The reason for Britain being in Egypt, was as usual material self-interest. Having opposed the Suez Canal project to begin with, once it had become a fact of commercial life, the City of London had to make sure it was not held to ransom by the French. The ‘Times History’ states:
“Great Britain had been opposed to the construction of the Suez Canal, which opened a new and shorter route to India to the Mediterranian Powers. Its completion made the fate of Egypt largely dependent on the will of the leading Sea Power – Britain.
In 1857 Lord Beaconsfield [Disraeli] purchased [with the aid of the Rothschilds] 176,602 original founders’ shares from the [financially] embarrassed Khedive. England having thus acquired a definite stake in the country was bound to intervene both in the management of the Canal and in the organization of Egyptian Finance.
The problem of Ottoman-Egypt, like Ottoman-Turkey itself, was one of indebtedness to the European Powers, primarily France and England. The Khedive, like the Sultan, was heavily in debt, and having become financially embarrassed was forced to sell his shares [but not necessarily] to Lord Beaconsfield in 1875.
The Khedive was deposed by the Sultan of Turkey in 1879, with anarchy resulting under his successor Tewfik, with military mutiny inspired partly by the very real grievances against foreign usurers and corrupt officials. Great Britain intervened on behalf of the Khedive and restored order at Tel-el-Kebir in 1882… There were indeed several occassions on which her statesmen contemplated the withdrawal of the Army of Occupation, but after the failure of the Anglo-Turkish negotiations of 1886-1887 it was recognised that this could only be effected, if at all, after many years.
Inspite of the jealousy of France, whose politicians had allowed themselves to be manoeuvered into an attitude of hostility towards England by Germany, the hostility of reactionary elements and of the Khedive Abbas II., who succeeded his father Tewfik in 1892, the financial bondage in which Egypt was held by international jealousies, the abuse… and the fact that none of the Great Powers had definitely recognised our special position and interests in Egypt, our influence increased.
…Six years later came the Anglo French agreement of happy augury, by which France, in return for concessions in Morocco and elsewhere, recognised England’s special interests in Egypt, while England undertook to make no change in the political status of the country. The other European Powers, except, of course, Turkey, some sooner, some later, recognised the occupation…”
Egypt, it must be remembered, was still part of the Ottoman- Islamic Empire. And the Khedive only ruled by the Firman of 1879. He was not empowered to sell off the family silver or the Suez Canal.
“The Khediveate was hereditary in the House of Muhammad Ali according to the law of primogeniture. But the same Firman debarred the Khedive from the raising of loans without the consent of the Sultan, and of keeping an army of more than 18,000 men in time of peace, nor could he conclude any treaty beyond certain commercial conventions with any Foreign Power. At the Sublime Porte Egypt was regarded as an autonomous Ottoman province ruled by an hereditary Govenor-General appointed by the Sultan, though possessed of greater independence than other Ottoman ‘Valis’.”
It seems hardly surprising that the Caliph of Islam was upset by these carryings on, and it is also clear that no government should ever borrow any money from foreigners to conduct public works, like the Suez canal. It should always increase its own domestic money supply at zero interest and end up with assets and not liabilities, which give those same foreign powers a built-in time bomb, which could be activated when a pretext was required to invade and occupy a country.
The events described here were also predicted by the last Prophet of Islam – Muhammad, who warned that the forces of Anti-Christ would come and divide their lands like a roasted sheep at a feast, or in this case – carved Turkey? The entire world is now at the mercy of these same ‘Banksters’, not only the Islamic community. The New World Order is just the old one in disguise.
The Judeo-Masonic machinations of Turkey’s Finance minister and betrayal of Palestine have yet to be fully investigated together with those of the Bahai Movement, and if not all, most of the current Sufi movements. Sheikh Abdel Kadir al Murabit alias Sheikh Abdel Kader as-Sufi (aka Ian Dallas) is now promoting Nietzsche amongst his followers, and in the light of their history the Sufi groups with Turkish links are to be viewed with some scepticism.
Sir Gerard’s warning from his vantage point at the British Embassy in Constantinople endorses Lady Queenborough’s contention that the powers that had taken over Turkey constituted an Occult (Masonic) Theocrasy. In her book of that title, in the section concerned with Associations of the 20th Century, Chapter CXIII, page 585, entitled ‘The Young Turk Movement’, she makes the following observation:-
“Not till 1900, when the Grand Orient virtually took over the Young Turk Party which was composed chiefly of Jews, Greeks and Armenians, did this movement assume a serious aspect.”
Vicomte Leon de Poncins in ‘The Secret Powers behind the Revolution’ [page 66], giving the history and origin of the ‘Young Turk’ Movement, adds the following information, taken from the Masonic organ of the Grand Orient:-
“The Acacia (October 1908) A secret Young Turk council was formed and the whole movement was directed from Salonica. Salonica, the most Jewish town in Europe – 70,000 Jews out of a population of 100,000 – was specially suited for the purpose. It already contained several Lodges, in which the revolutionaries could work without being disturbed. These Lodges are under the Protection of European diplomacy. And as the Sultan was without weapons against them, his fall was inevitable… On the 1st May, 1909, the representatives of 45 Turkish Lodges met in Constantinople and founded the ‘Grand Orient Ottoman’. Mahmoud Orphi Pasha was nominated Grand Master…
A short time after a Supreme Council of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rites was also founded and recognised by the French and Italian authorities.” [In April 1908 Tel Aviv was founded]
According to Coil’s Masonic Encyclopedea, The Grand Orient of France and Italy [preparing for the onslaught against the strongly Christian Caliphate of Russia] established similar Lodges in St Petersburg and other cities, which provided a similar networking platform in the Bolshevik Revolution. Kerenski’s entire government were members. These lodges were closed in 1911, but re-opened again to carry out their original objectives, as pure political clubs without rituals.
“To complete this information”, says Lady Queenborough, “we may add that two of the Salonica lodges, those of Macedonia and Labour & Lux were connected with the Grand Orient of Italy and France.”
The above extracts, are from official documents, one from Sir Gerard Lowther of the British Embassy in Constantinople, the other, from an official Masonic publication. Both confirm that the City of Constantinople fell to an army of between 70,000 and 80,000 occult Masonic Jews and 20,000 crypto-Muslim Jews, without a shot being fired.
Furthermore these events were clearly foretold by the Prophet Muhammad 1300 years beforehand, who also warned of The Great War within 6 years of its occurrence, with the emergence of the Anti-Christ one year later.
In Sahih Muslim, Abu Hurairah reported that the Prophet Muhammad inquired: Have you heard of a city, of which part is in the sea? Yes, they said [understanding him to mean Constantinople]. He said: “ The Last Hour shall not occur until 70,000 of the children of Isaac shall attack it. When they will come to it they will land down, but they will not fight with arms, nor shower it with arrows. They will only say: ‘There is no god but Allah, and Allah is the Greatest’, and one of its sides will fall. They will recite it for the second time: ‘There is no god but Allah, and Allah is The Greatest’, and another side of the city will fall. Afterwards they will recite for a third time: ‘There is no god but Allah, and Allah is the Greatest’, and then it will be opened to them, and they will enter it and acquire booty. While they will be dividing the spoils, a proclaimer will come to them and say: Verily Dajjal/Anti-Christ has come out. Then they will leave everything and return.”
In Mishkat al-Masabih another Hadith is quoted with the following addition: “Within six years look to ‘The Great War’. Then after one more year the emergence of the Dajjal (or Anti-Christ) and Revolution which would enter every Arab House, followed by mutual hostility between the Arabs.”
Within six years of the ‘Young Turk’ revolution of 1908 and the fall of Constantinople to the 70,000 Jews as prophecied, the Great War began on schedule. By November 1st 1914, Britain had declared war on Turkey – within the time frame specified by The Prophet Muhammad – peace be upon him. Other significant events resulting from the fall of the Islamic Caliphate and the rise of the Jewish Caliphate are as follows:-
On January 5th 1915 the Turkish army was defeated in the Caucasus. On August 29th Italy declared war on Turkey. On December 13th French and British troops occupied Salonika. The Arab Uprising in 1916, the Balfour declaration in 1917, and the Bolshevik revolutions in the same year, brought with them terror on a massive scale. Following the fall of Jerusalem on December 9th 1917, came the destruction of the Turkish army at Megido (Armageddon) on September 19th 1918, culminating in the ‘Peace to end all peace’- conferences on January 18th 1919, and here again we see the same well-tried conspiracies at work.
Before moving on, I wish to give a third and final account of the Young ‘Turk’ revolution. This time from ‘The Times History of the War’ [Vol XIV, Chapter CCXVII, page 308]. This establishes conclusively and contrary to Professor Norman Cohn’s statements in ‘Warrant for Genocide’ that there is and always was a Judeo-Masonic Conspiracy with a strong anti-Islamic, anti-Orthodox Judeo/Christian tendency at work in the world; responsible for all past and present trials and tribulations.
The Times History says:- “In European Turkey the Spanish Jews, or Sephardim, as they call themselves, found two conditions essential for their prosperity – a benevolent government and a country in a low state of economic development. They settled in the chief commercial centres – Constantinople, Uskub, Sarajevo and above all Salonika – and rapidly supplanted Greeks, Venetians, Genoese and Ragusans.”
WANDERING JEWS
“ The settlement of the Sephardim in Rumelia was a noteworthy epoch in the history of the Jews, for it marked the first retracing of their steps in the direction of Zion. But these Sephardim never girded themselves for the final stages of the road.”
“Salonika, with its 80,000 Jews [70,000. on page 11, Vol XII] speaking their inherited Spanish dialect, was already a Jewish home; and who could expect a Jew, with his history of wandering behind him, to abandon lightly so fair an asylum? Loyalty and material interest combined to make the Sephardim stay where they were and stand by the Turks. They became linked to the Turks more intimately through a crypto-Jewish Moslem community, the Dönme, descended from Sephardim converted in the seventeenth century.”
“The Dönme were represented by [Turkey’s finance minister] Djavid Bey, the financier, on the Committee of Union and Progress, and through Oriental Free Masonry, which they controlled, the Salonika Sephardim were associated from the beginning with the Young Turkish movement. In Turkey as in Hungary, and from the same mixed motives of gratitude and ambition, they threw in their lot with the ruling race, and they supplied the intellectual element in the new Turkish Nationalism.”
“The author of the standard exposition of the ‘Pan-Turanian Movement’, who calls himself by the pure Turkish name of ‘Tekin Alp’, is believed to have been a Salonika Jew; and there is also reason to suppose that the secularising, anti-Islamic tendency which is so remarkable a feature in Pan-Turanianism was partly the effect of this Jewish influence.” 80
In 1881 the Ottoman Debt had been consolidated and reduced to £160,000,000 Sterling. It was administered by a commission of the Public Debt, representing the creditors and under the control of France and England. The Commission ran the State Monopolies on Salt, Tobacco, etc., as well as the collection of various taxes. “ The whole system impaired Turkey’s sovereign rights.” [The Diaries of Theodor Herzl, page 139]
On June 17th 1896, on the Orient Express, that other wandering Jew, Theodor Herzl wrote in his Diaries: “Nevlinski believes that the Sultan’s only salvation lies in an alliance with the Young Turks – who for their part are on good terms with the Macedonians, Cretans, Armenians, etc., and in putting through reforms with their help. He had given this counsel to the Sultan in a report.
I [Theodor Herzl] said, that in addition to this program he should provide with Jewish help, the means to carry it out.”
“Let the Sultan give us that parcel of land [Palestine] and in return we would set his house in order, regulate his finances, and influence world opinion in his favour…”
“Unprepared as I was, I merely said to him that we were figuring that we could give some 20 million pounds for Palestine…We devoted 20 million Turkish pounds towards the regularisation of the Turkish finances. Of that sum we give two millions in exchange for Palestine – the amount being based on a capitalisation of its present annual revenue (T80,000). With the remaining 18 millions we free Turkey from the European-controlled Commission.” [Sir Vincent Henry Pensalver Caillard was one of the heads of the Ottoman Public Debt Council]
“The first four categories of bond-holders are induced by the privileges we grant them – viz: increased rates of interest, extension of amortisation period, etc. – to agree to the suppression of the Commission.” [The Diaries of Theodor Herzl, pages 140-141]
The above confirms the following statement by the former Bank of England director Lord Stamp: “Banking was conceived in iniquity and born in sin. Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them with the power to create credit, and with a flick of the pen they will create enough money to buy it all back again. Take this power away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine would disappear, and they ought to disappear, for then this world would be a happier and better world to live in. But if you wish to remain the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, then continue to let bankers control money and control credit.”
GUILT-EDGED INSECURITY
A warrant for genocide
As previously mentioned, Norman Cohn’s Warrant for Genocide, The myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, prove beyond all reasonable and reasoned doubt that the eminently capable Dramatist, Playwright, Journalist, Feuilletonist, and short story writer Theodor Herzl was in fact the most likely plagiarist who stole the ideas embodied in them, and used them to bring about the devastating conditions through which ordinary, innocent every day Jews were sacrificed to form the ‘guilt-edged’ purchase price of Palestine, referred to as “ The currency of the Holocaust”. Jim Allen’s play ‘Perdition’ was banned because it exposed the co-operation between the Zionists and Nazis towards this end.
Nor was it by accident that Adolph Eichman was an honoured pre-war guest of the Zionists in Palestine, long before his Jerusalem trial in 1961. Blood and Land had been the joint ideology of both Zionist and Nazi alike. Neo-Nazi and Ashkenazi?
By June 1895 Herzl had already stated to Baron de Hirsch, that he had decided to abandon his existing plan for the emancipation of Jews and a Jewish National Home in Palestine because of the apathy among the mass of poor Jews. He then hit upon the master plan, which he estimated correctly, would enable the Zionists to obtain Palestine through the sympathy generated by the mass sacrifice of some of these same “poor Jews”. The media images of those, when coupled with their global-Masonic power to influence, would eventually wring out of the guilty consciences of Britain, Europe and America that ‘little parcel of land’ with the promise of money and political advantage, to those who acquiesced.
The post script in his letter to Baron de Hirsch on June 18th 1895 exposes his design, not, of course, mentioned by Professor Cohn. However Cohn’s publication does include some valuable data which ought to be studied by all those who are interested in establishing the truth of both the Holocaust and the price paid by Arabs, Jews and British servicemen for Palestine. Because of his ‘ignorance’ of the letters and telegrams of Sir Gerald Lowther, The Acacia of 1908, the Times History of the War, and the Masonic aspects of the Young Turk and Bolshevik Judeo-Masonic Lodges, and Herzl’s diaries, professor Cohn’s Conclusions in ‘Warrant For Genocide’ must be rejected.
Oil and the origins of the ‘War to make the world safe for Democracy’
By F. William Engdahl, 22 June, 2007
Abstract:
At first almost unnoticed after 1850, then with significant intensity after the onset of the Great Depression of 1873 in Britain, the sun began to set on the British Empire. By the end of the 19th Century, though the City of London remained undisputed financier of the world, British industrial excellence was in terminal decline. The decline paralleled an equally dramatic rise of a new industrial Great Power on the European stage, the German Reich. Germany soon passed England in output of steel, in quality of machine tools, chemicals and electrical goods. Beginning the 1880’s a group of leading German industrialists and bankers around Deutsche Bank’s Georg von Siemens, recognized the urgent need for some form of colonial sources of raw materials as well as industrial export outlet.
With Africa and Asia long since claimed by the other Great Powers, above all Great Britain, German policy set out to develop a special economic sphere in the imperial provinces of the debt-ridden Ottoman Empire. The policy was termed “penetration pacifique” an economic dependency which would be sealed with German military advisors and equipment.
Initially, the policy was not greeted with joy in Paris, St. Petersburg or London, but it was tolerated. Deutsche Bank even sought, unsuccessfully, to enlist City of London financial backing for the keystone of the Ottoman expansion policy—the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway project, a project of enormous scale and complexity that would link the interior of Anatolia and Mesopotamia (today Iraq) to Germany. What Berlin and Deutsche Bank did not say was that they had secured subsurface mineral rights, including for oil along the path of the railway, and that their geologists had discovered petroleum in Mosul, Kirkuk and Basra.
The conversion of the British Navy under Churchill to oil from coal meant a high risk strategy as England had abundant coal but no then-known oil. It secured a major concession from the Shah of Persia in the early 1900’s.
The Baghdad rail link was increasingly seen in London as a threat to precisely this oil security. The British response to the growing German disruption of the European balance of power after the 1890’s was to carefully craft a series of public and secret alliances with France and with Russia—former rivals—to encircle Germany. As well, she deployed a series of less public intrigues to disrupt the Balkans and encourage a revolt against the Ottoman Sultan via the Young Turks that severely weakened the prospects for the German Drang nach Osten.
The dynamic of the rise of German assertiveness, including in addition to the Baghdad rail, the decision in 1900 to build a modern navy over two decades that could rival England’s, set the stage for the outbreak of a war in August 1914 whose real significance was a colossal and tragic struggle for who would succeed the ebbing power of the British Empire.
The resolution of that epic struggle was to take a second world war and another quarter century before the victor was undeniably established. The role of oil in the events leading to war in 1914 is too little appreciated. When the historical process behind the war is examined from this light a quite different picture emerges. The British Empire in the decades following 1873 and the American Century hegemony in the decades following approximately 1973 have more in common than is generally appreciated.
Oil and the buildup to the Great War
In trying to sort out the myriad of factors at play in Eurasia on the eve of the First World War it is important to look at the processes leading to August 1914, and the relative calculus of power at the time. This means examining economic processes, including financial, raw material, population growth— in the context of relations among nations, and political and–as defined by the original and influential English geopolitician, Sir Halford Mackinder–geopolitical forces–a political economy or geopolitical approach.
It was common in the days of the Great War to speak of the Great Powers. The Great Powers were so named because they both were great in size and wielded great power in the affairs of nations. The question was what constituted “great.” Until 1892, the United States was not even considered enough a contender at the table to warrant posting a full Ambassador level diplomatic mission. She was hardly a serious factor in European or Eurasian affairs. The Great Powers included Great Britain, France, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Czarist Russia. After its defeat of France in 1871, Germany too joined the ranks of the Great Powers, albeit as a latecomer. Ottoman Turkey, known then as the “sick man of Europe” was a prize which all Great Powers were sharpening their knives over, as they anticipated how to carve it up to their particular advantage.
In 1914, and the decades following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, it was almost axiom that there was no power on earth greater than the British Empire. The foundations of that Empire, however, were far less solid than generally appreciated.
The pillars of Empire
Approaching the end of the 1890’s, Britain was in all respects the pre-eminent political, military and economic power in the world. Since the 1814-15 Congress of Vienna, which carved up post -Napoleonic Europe, the British Empire had exacted rights to dominate the seas, in return for the self-serving “concessions” granted to Habsburg Austria and the rest of Continental European powers, which concessions served to keep central Continental Europe divided, and too weak to rival British global expansion.
British control of the seas, and, with it, control of world shipping trade, was one of the pillars of a new British Empire. The manufacturers of Continental Europe, as well as much of the rest of the world, were forced to respond to terms of trade set in London, by the Lloyds shipping insurance and banking syndicates. While Her Royal Navy, the world’s largest, policed the major sea -lanes and provided cost-free “insurance” for British merchant shipping vessels, competitor fleets were forced to insure their ships against piracy, catastrophe and acts of war, through London’s large Lloyd’s insurance syndicate.
Credit and bills of exchange from the banks of the City of London were necessary for most of the world’s shipping trade finance. The private Bank of England, itself the creature of the pre-eminent houses of finance in the City of London as the financial district is called–houses such as Barings, Hambros, and above all, Rothschilds–manipulated the world’s largest monetary gold supply , in calculated actions which could cause a flood of English exports to be dumped mercilessly onto any competitor market at will. Britain’s unquestioned domination of international banking was the second pillar of English Imperial power following 1815.[1]
London– a City built on gold
British gold reserves were very much the basis for the role of the Pound Sterling as the source spring of world credit after 1815. “As good as Sterling” was the truism of that day, which was shorthand for the confidence in world markets that Sterling itself was “as good as gold.”[2] After a law of June 22 1816, gold was declared the sole measure of value in the British Empire. British foreign policy over the next 75 years or more, would be increasingly preoccupied with securing for British private banks and for the vaults of the Bank of England, the newly mined reserves of world gold, whether in Australia, California or in South Africa.[3]
The London gold market had expanded with the famous discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in California in 1848, and the Australian discoveries three years later, to become the world’s dominant gold trading center. Gold merchant houses such as Stewart Pixley and Samuel Montagu joined the ranks of brokers. Rothschild’s added the role of becoming the Royal Mint gold refinery besides their banking business, along with Johnson Matthey. The Bank of England would certify “good delivery” status for these select gold fixing banks of the City, an essential element of growing international payments settlements in gold.[4]
After 1886 weekly shipments of gold from especially South Africa, which comprised some two-thirds of the total in the years prior to the war, were offloaded at the docks of London, making the London gold market the unchallenged world leader.[5]
By 1871 England was joined in its gold standard by other industrializing countries, who found enough gold from their foreign export trade to link their national currencies as well to the gold standard. In 1871 Germany, on the wave of her victory over France, with its reparations in French gold, proclaimed the birth of the German Reich with Chancellor Bismark as the decisive political power. Gold was made the backing for the Reichsmark. The German Reich acquired 43 metric tons after 1871in reparations from France, helping Germany to quadruple its gold stock immediately after 1871, giving the liquidity for the unprecedented expansion of German industry. By 1878 France, Belgium and Switzerland had followed Germany and England on to the new gold standard for international trade. Czarist Russia, a major gold producer also used gold in its official reserves.[6]
In 1886 vast finds of gold were discovered in Transvaal. British prospectors streamed over the border from the Cape Colony, earlier annexed by Britain. Cape Colony Prime Minister was a British miner, Cecil Rhodes, who held a vision of an African continent controlled by England from the Cape to Cairo. As nationalist Boers became ever more assertive of their independence from the British in the 1890’s it was clear in London that they must take South Africa by force. The financial future of the City of London and the future of the Empire rested on that conquest.
By 1899 when the Anglo-Boer War broke out, a war for control of the gold of Transvaal, the region had become the world’s largest single producer of gold.[7] Rhodes’ mines were the largest operators. French and German investors also had large stakes, but British miners controlled between 60 and 80% of the mine output.[8] The bloody victory of England in that war, ensured the continued domination of the City of London as the “world’s banker .” The serious loss of industrial hegemony by Britain after 1873 was largely obscured by her role in grabbing the vast gold reserves discovered in 1886 in Transvaal.
British Empire’s onset of economic decline
Behind her apparent status as the world’s pre-eminent power, Britain was slowly deteriorating internally. After 1850 a sharp rise in British capital flowing overseas took place. After the US Civil War and with the emerging of German and Continental European as well as Latin American industrialization in the early 1870’s, this flow of capital out of the City of London became massive. Britain’s wealthy found returns on their money far greater abroad than at home. It was one consequence of the 1846 Corn Law Repeal, the introduction of free trade in agriculture to force cheaper wages and to feed that labor with cheaper foodstuffs imported from Odessa, the United States, India and other foreign suppliers.[9] Buy Cheap, Sell Dear had become the dominant economic pattern.[10]
After 1846, wage levels inside Britain began falling with the price of bread. The English Poor Laws granted compensation for workers earning below human subsistence wage, with income supplement payments pegged to the price of a loaf of wheat bread. As bread prices plunged, so did living standards in England.
As a consequence, while the merchant banks and insurers of the City of London thrived, domestic British industrial investment and modernization, which had allowed England to lead the industrial revolution after the introduction of Watt’s improved steam-powered engine in the 1760’s, stagnated and declined after 1870.
One consequence was the shift in economic weight from the industrial north of England—Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle, Liverpool– south to London and the financial and trade services tied to the growing role of the City in international finance. From trade in “visibles” like coal, machines and steel products, Britain shifted to a nation earning from what were termed “invisibles,” or financial return on overseas investment and services.
Britain increased its dependence on imported goods following the introduction of free trade. From 1883 to 1913 the Sterling value of her imports rose by 84%. The real effect of the shift to import dependence was obscured by the phenomenal success of earnings from invisibles. In 1860 Britain led the world in coal production, the raw material feeding her industry and fuelling her navy, with almost 60% of the total. By 1912 that fell to 24%. Similarly, in 1870 England enjoyed an impressive 49% share of total world iron forging output. By 1912 it was 12%. Copper consumption, an essential component of the emerging electrification transformation, went from 32% of world consumption in 1889 to 13% by 1913.[11]
The final quarter century of the 1800’s was the beginning of the end of the hegemonic position of Britain as the world’s dominant economic power.
In 1873 a severe economic depression, dubbed in English history the Great Depression, spread, persisting until 1896, almost a quarter Century, a decisive period in the development of the forces leading to the Great War in 1914. The 1873 depression led to the further decline of British industrial competitiveness. Price levels went into steady fall or deflation, profit margins and wages with it. Huge sums of capital remained idle or went abroad in search of gain.
While the crisis in England was severe, the effects outside Britain were short-lived. By the mid-1890’s the German Reich was in the midst of an economic boom unlike any before. The rival German and other Continental economies were rapidly industrializing and exporting to markets once dominated by British exports. [12]
By the 1880’s Britain’s leading circles and advocates of Empire realized that they needed to not only send their entrepreneurs like Cecil Rhodes to mine the gold to feed the banks of the City of London. Increasingly, they realized a revolution in the technology of naval power was required if the Royal Navy was to continue its unchallenged hegemony of the seas. That required a radical shift in British foreign policy. The revolution in technology was the shift from coal to oil power.
After the 1890’s, though little publicized, the search for secure energy in the form of petroleum would become of paramount importance to Her Majesty’s Navy and Her Majesty’s government. A global war for control of oil was shaping up, one few were even aware of outside select policy circles.
A revolution in Naval Power
In 1882, petroleum had little commercial interest. The development of the internal combustion engine had not yet revolutionized world industry. One man understood the military-strategic implications of petroleum for future control of the world seas, however.
In a public address in September 1882, Britain’s Admiral Lord Fisher, then Captain Jack Fisher, argued to anyone in the British establishment who would listen, that Britain must convert its naval fleet from bulky coal-fired propulsion to the new oil fuel. Fisher and a few other far-sighted individuals began to argue for adoption of the new fuel. He insisted that oil-power would allow Britain to maintain decisive strategic advantage in future control of the seas.
Fisher argued the qualitative superiority of petroleum over coal as a fuel. A battleship powered by diesel motor burning petroleum issued no tell-tale smoke, while a coal ship’s emission was visible up to 10 kilometers away. It required 4 to 9 hours for a coal-fired ship’s motor to reach full power, an oil motor required a mere 30 minutes and could reach peak power within 5 minutes. To provide oil fuel for a battle ship required the work of 12 men for 12 hours. The same equivalent of energy for a coal ship required the work of 500 men and 5 days. For equal horsepower propulsion, the oil -fired ship required 1/3 the engine weight, and almost one-quarter the daily tonnage of fuel, a critical factor for a fleet whether commercial or military. The radius of action of an oil-powered fleet was up to four times as great as that of the comparable coal ship.[13]
In 1885 a German engineer, Gottleib Daimler, had developed the world’s first workable petroleum motor to drive a road vehicle. The economic potentials of the petroleum era were beginning to be more broadly realized by some beyond Admiral Fisher and his circle.
By 1904 Fisher had been named Britain’s First Sea Lord, the supreme naval commander, and immediately set to implement his plan to convert the British navy from coal to oil. One month into his post, in November 1904, a committee was established on his initiative to “consider and make recommendations as to how the British Navy shall secure its oil supplies.” At that time it was believed the British Isles, rich in coal, held not a drop of oil.
The thought of abandoning the security of domestic British coal fuel in favor of reliance on foreign oil was a strategy embedded in risk. The Fisher Committee had been dissolved in 1906 without resolution of the oil issue on the election of a Liberal government pledged to work for arms control. By 1912, as the Germans began a major Dreadnought-class naval construction program, Prime Minister Asquith convinced Admiral Fisher to come out of retirement to head a new Royal Commission on Oil and the Oil Engine in July 1912.
Two months later on Fisher’s recommendation, the first British battleship using only oil fuel, the Queen Elizabeth, was begun. Fisher pushed the risky oil program through with one argument: “In war speed is everything.” Winston Churchill had by then replaced Fisher as First Lord of the Admiralty and was a strong advocate of Fisher’s oil conversion. Churchill stated in regard to the Commission finding, “We must become the owners or at any rate the controllers at the source of at least a proportion of the oil which we require.” [14]
From that point, oil conversion of the British fleet dictated national security priority to secure large oil reserves outside Britain. In 1913 less than 2% of world oil production was produced within the British Empire.[15]
By the first decade of the 20th Century securing long-term foreign petroleum security had become an essential factor for British grand strategy and its geopolitics. By 1909, a British company, Anglo-Persian Oil Company held rights to oil exploration in a 60-year concession from the Persian Shah at Maidan-i-Naphtun near the border to Mesopotamia. That decision to secure its oil led England into a fatal quagmire of war which in the end finished the British Empire as the world hegemon by Versailles in 1918, though it would take a second World War and several decades before that reality was clear to all.
Germany emerges in a second industrial revolution
Beginning the 1870’s the German Reich, proclaimed after the Prussian victory over France in 1871, saw the emergence of a colossal new economic player on the map of Continental Europe.
By the 1890’s, British industry had been surpassed in both rates and quality of technological development by an astonishing emergence of industrial and agricultural development within Germany. With the United States concentrated largely on its internal expansion after its Civil War, the industrial emergence of Germany was seen increasingly as the largest “threat” to Britain’s global hegemony during the last decade of the century.
After England’s prolonged depression in the 1870’s, Germany turned increasingly to a form of national economic strategy, and away from British “free trade” adherence, in building a national industry and agriculture production rapidly.
From 1850 to 1913, German total domestic output increased five-fold. Per capita output increased in the same period by 250%. The population began to experience a steady increase in its living standard, as real industrial wages doubled between 1871 and 1913.
In the decades before 1914, in terms of fuelling world industry and transportation, coal was king. In 1890, Germany produced 88 million tons of coal while Britain, produced more than double as much at 182 million tons. By 1910, the German output of coal had climbed to 219 million tons, while Britain had only a slight lead at 264 million tons. Steel was at the center of Germany’s growth, with the rapidly-merging electrical power and chemicals industries close behind. Using the innovation of the Gilchrist Thomas steel-making process, which capitalized on the high-phosphorus ores of Lorraine, German steel output increased 1,000% in the twenty years from 1880 to 1900, leaving British steel output far behind. At the same time the cost of making Germany’s steel dropped to one -tenth the cost of the 1860’s. By 1913 Germany was smelting almost two times the amount of pig iron as British foundries. [16]
The German rail revolution
The rail infrastructure to transport this rapidly expanding flow of industrial goods, was the initial locomotive for Germany’s first Wirtschaftswunder. State rail infrastructure spending doubled the kilometers of track from 1870 to 1913. The German electrical industry grew to dominate half of all international trade in electrical goods by 1913. German chemical industry became the world’s leader in analine dye production, pharmaceuticals and chemical fertilizers.
Paralleling the expansion of its industry and agriculture, between 1870 and 1914 Germany’s population increased almost 75% from 40,000,000 to more than 67,000,000 people. Large industry grew in a symbiosis together with large banks such as Deutsche Bank, under what became known as the Grossbanken model of interlocking ownership between major banks and key industrial companies. [17]
One aspect of that economic expansion after 1870, more than any other, aside from the program of Admiral von Tirpitz to build a German Dreadnaught-class blue water navy to challenge British sea supremacy, that brought Germany into the geopolitical clash which later became World War I, was the decision of German banking and political circles to build a rail link that would connect Berlin to the Ottoman Empire as far as Baghdad in then-Mesopotamia. [18]
A Railway changes the geopolitical map of Europe
“When the history of the latter part of the nineteenth Century will come to be written, one event will be singled out above all others for its intrinsic importance and for its far-reaching results; namely, the conventions of 1899 and of 1902 between His Imperial Majesty the Sultan of Turkey and the German Company of the Anatolian Railways.”–[19]–
Towards the end of the 19th Century, German industry and the German government began to look in earnest for overseas sources of raw materials as well as potential markets for German goods. The problem was that the choice pieces of underdeveloped real estate had been previously carved up between rival imperial powers, especially France and Britain. In 1894 German Chancellor, Count Leo von Caprivi, told the Reichstag, “Asia Minor is important to us as a market for German industry, a place for the investment of German capital and a source of supply, capable of considerable expansion, of such essential goods (as grains and cotton) as we now buy from countries of which it may well sooner or later be in our interests to make ourselves independent.”[20] Caprivi was supported in turning to Asia Minor by large sections of the German industry, especially the steel barons, and by the great banks such as Deutsche Bank, as well as the foreign policy establishment and the military under General Helmuth von Moltke, Chief of the General Staff.
Berlin’s Drang nach Osten
The answer for Berlin’s need to secure new markets and raw material to feed its booming industries clearly lay in the east—specifically in the debt-ridden, ailing Ottoman Empire of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. The situation in Ottoman Turkey had become so extreme that the Sultan had been forced by his French and British creditors to put the finances of the realm under the control of a banker-run agency in 1881. By the Decree of Muharrem (December 1881) the Ottoman public debt was reduced from £191,000,000 to £106,000,000, certain revenues were assigned to debt service, and a European-controlled organization, the Ottoman Public Debt Administration (OPDA), was set up to collect the payments. The OPDA subsequently acted as agent for the collection of other revenues and as an intermediary with European companies seeking investment opportunities. Its affairs were controlled by the two largest creditors—France and Britain, the French being the larger.
The Germans set about to change that dependency of Ottoman Turkey on the British and French. For his part, Sultan Abdul Hamid II was all too pleased to open his door to growing German influence as a welcome counterweight and a source of new capital to solve the economic problems of the empire.
In 1888, the Oriental Railway from Austria, across the Balkans via Belgrade, Sofia, to Constantinople, was opened. This linked with the railways of Austria-Hungary and other European countries and put the Ottoman capital in direct communication with Vienna, Paris, and Berlin. It was to be significant for later events.
By 1898, the Ottoman Ministry of Public Works had applications from several European groups to build railways in the Anatolian part of the empire. These included an Austro-Russian syndicate, a French proposal, a proposal from a group of British bankers, and the proposal of the German Deutsche Bank. The Sublime Porte had no desire to have significant Russian presence on its territory, because of Russian desires for access for its navy through the Dardanelles. The British government backing for its bankers faded away with outbreak of the Boer War in 1899. The French proposal was considered significant enough that Deutsche Bank entered into negotiations with the French Banks about a joint venture. [21]
The Sultan, Abdul Hamid II, on November 27, 1899, awarded Deutsche Bank, headed by Georg von Siemens, a concession for a railway from Konia to Baghdad and to the Persian Gulf. In 1888 and again in 1893, the Sultan had assured the Anatolian Railway Company that it should have priority in the construction of any railway to Baghdad. On the strength of that assurance, the Anatolian Company had conducted expensive surveys of the proposed line. As part of the railway concession, the shrewd negotiators of the Deutsche Bank, led by Karl Helfferich, negotiated subsurface mineral rights twenty kilometers to either side of the proposed Baghdad Railway line.[22] Deutsche Bank and the German government backing them made certain that included the sole rights to any petroleum which might be found. The Germans had scored a strategic coup over the British, or so it seemed. Mesopotamian oil secured through completion of the Berlin-Baghdad Railway was to be Germany’s secure source to enter the emerging era of oil-driven transport.
The German success was no minor event. The geographical position of the Ottoman Empire, dominating the Balkans, the Dardanelles straits, and territory to Shatt-al-Arab at the Persian Gulf, from Aleppo to Sinai bordering the strategic Suez Canal link to the British Empire India trade, down to Aden at the Strait of Bab el Mandeb. The German-Ottoman agreement assuring construction of the final section of the Berlin-Baghdad Railway meant the shattering of England’s hope of bringing Mesopotamia, with its strategic location and its oil, under her exclusive influence and it meant as well a major defeat for France.
Britain reacts
Systematically, Britain took measures to secure her exposed flank in Mesopotamia. By 1899, Britain had secured a 99-year exclusive agreement between Britain and Kuwait, nominally part of the debt-ridden and militarily weak Ottoman Empire from the unscrupulous Shaikh Mubarak-al-Sabah. By 1907 they had converted it to a ‘lease in perpetuity.’
In 1905, through the machinations of British spy, Sidney Reilly, Lord Strathcona, secured exclusive rights to Persian oil resources and what in 1909 became the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, after discovery of oil there in 1908. The company negotiated an agreement with Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, shortly before World War I, for major financial backing by the British Government in return for secure oil for the Royal Navy. In 1912 the government, at Churchill’s urging, bought controlling interest secretly in Anglo-Persian Oil Company. She had negotiated with the Sheikh of Muhammerah to also build an oil refinery, depot and port on Abadan Island adjacent to the Shaat-al-Arab as part of the emerging British policy to keep the Germany out of the strategic Mesopotamian oil-rich region. [23]
A German-built rail link to Baghdad and on to the Persian Gulf, capable of carrying military troops and munitions, was a strategic threat to the British oil resources of Persia. Persian oil was the first crucial source of secure British petroleum for the Navy. Already, the decision by the German Reichstag to approve the massive naval construction program of Admiral von Tirpitz in the German Naval Law of 1900, to build 19 new battleships and 23 battle cruisers over the coming 20 years, presented the first challenge to Britain’s rule of the seas. At the Hague Convention of 1907 Germany refused to continue an earlier ban on “aerial warfare.” Under Count Zepplin, the Germans had been the first to develop huge airships. [24]
Turkey, backed and trained by Germany, had the potential, should it get the financial and military means, to launch a military attack on what had become vital British interests in Suez, the Persian route to India, the Dardanelles. By 1903 the German Reich was prepared to give the Sultan that means in the form of the Baghdad Railway and German investment in Ottoman Anatolia.
By 1913 that German engagement had taken on an added dimension with a German-Turkish Military Agreement under which German General Liman von Sanders, member of the German Supreme War Council, with personal approval of the Kaiser, was sent to Constantinople to reorganize the Turkish army on the lines of the legendary German General Staff. In a letter to Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg, dated April 26, 1913, Freiherr von Wangenheim, the German Ambassador to Constantinople declared, “The Power which controls the Army will always be the strongest one in Turkey. No Government hostile to Germany will be able to hold on to power if the Army is controlled by us…” [25].
German intelligence operatives, led by Baron Max von Oppenheim, a German Foreign Ministry diplomat and an archaeologist, had made extensive surveys of Mesopotamia already beginning 1899 to explore the proposed route of the Baghdad Railway, confirming the estimated of Ottoman officials that the region held oil. The British referred to Oppenheim as “The Spy.” He was also an ardent German imperialist. In 1914 shortly before outbreak of war, Oppenheim reportedly told Kaiser Wilhelm, “When the Turks invade Egypt, and India is set ablaze with the flames of revolt, only then will England crumble. For England is at her most vulnerable in her colonies.” He was author of a German strategy of encouraging a Turkey-led Jihad or Holy War and against the colonial powers of Britain, France and Russia as a strategy of war. [26]
Isolating the German Reich
By the end of the 1880’s fundamental shifts in security and trade alliances had begun. Britain, France and Russia were all growing alarmed at the emerging power and potential threat of the German Reich. In October 1903 Britain and France came together to agree spheres of influence which resulted in signing of an Entente Cordiale in April 1904, ending their imperial rivalries over Egypt, Morocco, Sudan and allowing both to concentrate on the threat posed by Germany in alliance with Austro-Hungary. [27]
By 1907, following its defeat in the Russo-Japan War of 1905 in a conflict that Britain overtly helped along by providing battleships to the Japanese to destroy the Russian Pacific Fleet, Russia settled its disputes with Britain over Afghanistan, The Great Game as Kipling termed the fight between Britain and Russia for control of the Afghan passage to India. Russia also settled their dispute with Britain over Persia and in June 1908 at the Baltic port of Reval, King Edward VII met his cousin Czar Nicholas II to agree on an Anglo-Russian alliance. The system of carefully built diplomatic alliances laid by Bismark which saw France in 1887 as the only country hostile to Germany, had, by 1908 turned to one in which by then the only friendly ally of Germany was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a remarkable reversal of alliances and the prelude to the Great War.
ON JULY THE 8TH 1908 6 YEARS BEFORE THE OUTBREAK OF “THE GREAT WAR / JIHAD AKBAR. AS PROPHESEID, 70,000 MASONIC JEWS FROM SALONIKA TOOK CONTROL OF CONSTANTINOPLE IN A SCRETIVE COUP D’ETAT – FOR DETAILS SEE CARVED TURKEY PAGE
In the months up to outbreak of war in 1914, there were efforts at cooling down a mounting confrontation between the two great power blocks—the Triple Entente of England, France, Russia and the alliance of Germany with Austro-Hungary. In 1911 Germany and Russia signed the Potsdam Agreement over rights to northern Persia in return for Russian agreement not to block the Baghdad Railway progress. Clear, however, was that Germany was fully committed to completing the Baghdad project.
Following the Balkan wars from 1910-1912, it was obvious to all that the next part of the Ottoman Empire to be carved up was Anatolian Turkey itself. The balance between the Great Powers was endangered with the result of the Balkan Wars, and the stunning defeat of the Ottoman army by small opponents. In a very short period, Turkey lost most of her territory in Europe except for İstanbul and a small hinterland, and retreated back to defence line in Çatalca.
Britain and British intelligence was active in the Balkans stirring revolt and opposition to Constantinople’s rule. The Entente Powers—France, England and Russia– knew that despite all her efforts, Germany did not have strong cards in the Balkans. And the Balkans constituted a strategic link between Berlin and Baghdad as a glance at a good typographical map reveals.
The success of the so-called Young Turk revolution of 1908-9 in forcing the Sultan to reinstate a constitutional monarchy with a parliament unleashed a series of destabilizing revolts in the Balkan provinces of the empire. British intelligence was actively engaged in pushing events along. The Young Turk revolutions of 1908 and 1909, which ended the reign of Abdul Hamid in the Ottoman Empire, offered France and Great Britain an unprecedented opportunity to assume moral and political leadership in the Near East. Many members of the Committee of Union and Progress, the revolutionary party, had been educated in western European universities–chiefly in Paris–and had come to be staunch admirers of French and English institutions.[28] In 1908, as Constantinople was under the chaotic rule of the secular Young Turk Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), Anglo-Turkish relations were quite warm. The British Ambassador, Sir Gerald Lowther, at least in the initial days after the takeover in 1908, extended unlimited British support for the revolution. He told the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, “Things have gone as well as they could.” [29] The role of the Yung Turks, most of whom were members of various European freemason lodges, is a rich and important story beyond the scope of this brief essay. Initially at least the Young Turk regime viewed the agreements between the Sultan and the Germans on the Baghdad Railway and oil rights to be a symbol of the corruption and destruction of Turkish national resources.
British diplomatic and intelligence operatives also played a role in Albanian independence in the Balkans. A key if little-known figure of British machinations at the time was Aubrey Herbert, Member of Parliament and British intelligence officer who was close to Gertrude Bell and T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”). Herbert had been active since 1907 in fomenting Albanian independence from Constantinople, and was offered the Crown of Albania for his efforts, an offer which his friend, Asquith, dissuaded him from taking.
British active measures
As well in Serbia British military and intelligence networks were most active prior to outbreak of war. Major R.G.D. Laffan was in charge of a British military training mission in Serbia just before the war. Following the war, Laffan wrote of the British role in throwing a huge block on the route of the German-Baghdad project:
“If ‘Berlin-Baghdad’ were achieved, a huge block of territory producing every kind of economic wealth, and unassailable by sea-power would be united under German authority,” warned R.G.D. Laffan. Laffan was at that time a senior British military adviser attached to the Serbian Army.
“Russia would be cut off by this barrier from her western friends, Great Britain and France,” Laffan added. “German and Turkish armies would be within easy striking distance of our Egyptian interests, and from the Persian Gulf, our Indian Empire would be threatened. The port of Alexandretta and the control of the Dardanelles would soon give Germany enormous naval power in the Mediterranean.”
Laffan suggested a British strategy to sabotage the Berlin-Baghdad link. “A glance at the map of the world will show how the chain of States stretched from Berlin to Baghdad. The German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bulgaria, Turkey. One little strip of territory alone blocked the way and prevented the two ends of the chain from being linked together. That little strip was Serbia. Serbia stood small but defiant between Germany and the great ports of Constantinople and Salonika, holding the Gate of the East…Serbia was really the first line of defense of our eastern possessions. If she were crushed or enticed into the ‘Berlin-Baghdad’ system, then our vast but slightly defended empire would soon have felt the shock of Germany’s eastward thrust.” (emphasis added – w.e.) [30]
In 1915, after returning from a mission to Bulgaria, British MP, Noel Buxton wrote in the introduction to his book similar views of the strategic role of the Balkans for British strategy of blocking Germany and Austro-Hungary:
“No one now denies the supreme importance of the Balkans as a factor in the European War. It may be that there were deep-seated hostilities between the Great Powers which would have, in any case, produced a European War, and that if the Balkans had not offered the occasion, the occasion would have been found elsewhere. The fact remains that the Balkans did provide the occasion…” [31]
Buxton added, “The Serbian army would be set free to take the offensive, and possibly provoke an uprising of the Serbian, Croat, and Slovene populations of the Austrian Empire. Any diminution of the Austrian force would compel the Germans to withdraw a larger number of troops from the other theatres of war.” [32]
The only Great Power whose interest lay in preventing the further deterioration of Ottoman control of its territories on the eve of war was Germany. The success of its grand economic and political project to win Ottoman Turkey as an informal sphere of influence, as well as securing the rights of the Baghdad Rail link to Mesopotamia and eventually to the Persian Gulf depended on preserving a stable political regime in Constantinople as partner.[33]
In April 1913, His British Majesty’s Foreign Office handed the Turkish Ambassador to London an official British statement of intent regarding Mesopotamian oil: “His Majesty’s Government…rely on the Ottoman Government to make without delay arrangements in regard to the oil wells of Mesopotamia which will ensure British control and meet with their approval in matters of detail.” [34]
Ironically, just on the eve of the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Archduke and heir to the Habsburg throne in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, a member of a Serbian Black Hand secret society with reported French Masonic ties, agreements were finally reached between the Germans, the British and the Turkish parties over oil rights in Mesopotamia.
In 1909, the National Bank of Turkey was founded following a trip, on request of England’s King Edward, by the influential London banker, Sir Ernest Cassel. Cassel was joined by the mysterious and wealthy Ottoman subject, of Armenian origin, Calouste Gulbenkian. The bank had no representation of Ottoman origins. Its board included Hugo Baring of the London bank, Earl Cromer, Barons Ashburton, Northbrook and Revelstone. At the time Lord Cromer was Governor of the Bank of England. This elite British entity in Constantinople then created an entity called the Turkish Petroleum Company, in which Gulbenkian was given 40% share. The purpose was to win from the Sultan an oil concession in Mesopotamia. Simultaneously, a second British-controlled enterprise, Anglo-Persian Oil Company was actively trying to extend its Persian oil claims into the disputed borders with Mesopotamia. The third player, the only one with exploration rights from Sultan Abdul Hamid II was the Baghdad Railway Company of Deutsche Bank. The crafty British were about to change that.
The combined British efforts forced the German group into a compromise. In 1912 and again in early 1914 on the eve of the war, with the backing of British and German governments, the (British) Turkish Petroleum Company was reorganized. Share capital was doubled. Half went to Anglo-Persian Oil Company, now secretly owned by the British Government. Another 25% was held by the Anglo-Dutch Royal Dutch Shell group. A final 25% was held by the Deutsche Bank group, the only ones with rights to exploit the oil resources to either side of the Baghdad rail line. Finally, Shell and Anglo-Persian each agrees to give Gulbenkian 2.5% of their shares for a total of 5%. On June 28, 1914, in one of the great ironies of history, the Turkish Petroleum Company won the oil concession from the Sultan’s government. It did not matter. War had broken out and British forces would secure the entire oilfields of Mesopotamia after Versailles in a new League Protectorate called Iraq.[35]
In June 1914, just days before outbreak of war, the British Government, acting on First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill’s urging, bought the majority share of the stock of Anglo-Persian Oil Company and with it she took automatically APOC’s major share in Deutsche Bank’s Turkish Petroleum Company. [36] London left nothing to chance.
Why would England risk a world war in order to stop the development of Germany’s industrial economy in 1914?
The ultimate reason England declared war in August, 1914 lay fundamentally, “in the old tradition of British policy, through which England grew to great power status, and through which she sought to remain a great power,” stated Deutsche Bank’s Karl Helfferich, the man in the midst of negotiations on the Baghdad Railway, in 1918. “England’s policy was always constructed against the politically and economically strongest Continental power,” he stressed.
“Ever since Germany became the politically and economically strongest Continental power, did England feel threatened from Germany more than from any other land in its global economic position and its naval supremacy. Since that point, the English-German differences were unbridgeable, and susceptible to no agreement in any one single question.” Helfferich sadly noted the accuracy of the declaration of Bismarck from 1897, “The only condition which could lead to improvement of German-English relations would be if we bridled our economic development, and this is not possible.”[37]
Endnotes:
[1] Glyn Davies, A History of Money from Ancient Times to the Present Day, rev.ed., (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996), 348-352.
[2] Sir John Clapham, Bank of England, Vol.II, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944), p.217.
[3] Timothy Green, Central Bank Gold Reserves: An historical perspective since 1845, World Gold Council, Research Study no. 23, November 1999, London.
[4] T. Green, Central Bank Gold…, 3,6.
[5] Russell Ally, Gold & Empire: The Bank of England and South Africa’s Gold Producers, 1886-1926, (Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press, 1994), 31.
[6] T. Green, Central Bank Gold…, 6-9.
[7] As South African economic historian Russell Ally put the relationship between the Boer War and the Bank of England’s gold reserves, ‘To be sure, Britain did not take physical control of the Transvaal just because the Bank of England was concerned about the state of its gold reserves…However, this should not detract from the fact that there was a growing appreciation of the importance of the Witwatersrand’s gold for the Bank of England’s safeguarding its leadership of the international gold standard and that this coincided with the mining magnates’ (e.g. Rhodes and others—f.w.e.) hostility towards Kruger’s government.’ Cited in Russell Ally, Gold & Empire: The Bank of England and South Africa’s Gold Producers, 1886-1926, (Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press, 1994), 25. Ally also notes the crucial role of Lord Milner, then High Commissioner of the Cape Colony and later Governor of Transvaal. Milner and his circle, using the resources from the will of Cecil Rhodes, later founded The Round Table and a periodical of the same name, in order to advance an enormously influential agenda for the regeneration of the British Empire, a fascinating subject beyond the scope of this brief essay.
[8] P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion 1688-1914, (London, Longman, 1993), 373.
[9] Susan Fairlie, ‘The Corn Laws and British Wheat Production, 1829-76,’ Economic History Review, Second Series, Vol. 22, No. 1, April 1969, 88 -116.
[10] Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, 181ff.
[11] Cited in Sonderabdruck aus der Frankfurter Zeitung, Gegen die englische Finanzvormacht, (7 November, 1915), Frankfurt am Main, Druck & Verlag der Frankfurter Societsdruckerei GmbH.
[12] Hans Rosenberg, ‘Political and Social Consequences of the Great Depression of 1873-1896 in Central Europe,’ Economic History Review, Vol. 13, nos.1&2, 1943.
[13]Eric J. Dahl, ‘Naval innovation: from coal to oil,’ Joint Force Quarterly, Winter, 2000. The details on oil versus coal powered ships is found in Anton Mohr, The Oil War, (New York, Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1926), 113-115. Anton Zischka, Oelkrieg: Wandlung der Weltmacht Oel, Leipzig, Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, 1939) 293 for additional comparative data of oil over coal.
[14] Winston Churchill, quoted in Peter Slulgett, Britain in Iraq: 1914-1932, (London, Ithaca Press, 1976, 103-4.
[15] Anton Mohr, The Oil War, (New York, Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1926), 118-120.
[16] There are numerous sources which detail the rapid industrial transformation of the German Reich after 1870. Especially useful in this regard are Karl Erich Born, Wirtschafts-und Sozialgeschichte des Deutschen Kaiserreichs (1867 /71-1914), (Stuttgart, Steiner Verlag, 1985; and Knut Borchardt, The German Economy, 1870 to the present., (London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1967).
[17] Karl Helfferich, Deutschlands Volkswohlstand 1888-1913, (Berlin, Verlag von Georg Stilke, 1913).
[18] K.E. Born, Wirtschafts…
[19] Charles Sarolea, The Bagdad Railway and German Expansion as a Factor in European Politics ( Edinburgh, 1907), p. 3, quoted in Edward Mead Earle, Turkey, The Great Powers, and The Bagdad Railway
A Study in Imperialism, (New York The Macmillan Company, 1924), v.
[20] Count Leo von Caprivi, quoted in Franz Fischer, War of Illusions: German Policies from 1911 to 1914,( New York, W. W. Norton Company Inc., 1975), 49.
[21] E.M. Earle, The Great Powers…, 58-60. Earle included a 1922 correspondence of his with the representative of the British rail group, Mr E. Rechnitzer, in which the latter stated, ‘My offer being much more favorable than that of the Germans, it seemed likely in August, 1899, that it would be accepted. Unfortunately the Transvaal War broke out in the autumn of that year, and the German Emperor, a few days after the declaration of war, specially came to London to ask our Government to give him a free hand in Turkey. It appears that there was an interview between the Emperor and Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, who was more interested in Cecil Rhodes’ scheme in Africa than in my scheme in Turkey.’
[22] Anton Mohr, The Oil War, 80-81.
[23] UK National Archive, BP Archive, Archon Code: 1566.
http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/news/0300bp.html,
accessed on 16 June, 2007. BBC, The Company File: From Anglo-Persian Oil to BP Amoco, August 11, 1998.,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/149259.stm.
Details available on the relation between the British government and Anglo-Persian are detailed in Anton Mohr, The Oil War, 124-129. For background on Churchill’s role in securing oil sources and converting the Navy see Sara Reguer, Persian Oil and the First Lord: A Chapter in the Career of Winston Churchill , Military Affairs, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Oct., 1982), 134-138.
[24] Sara Reguer, Persian Oil…, 134.
[25] Freiherr von Wangenheim, cited in Hans Herzfeld, Die Liman-Krise und die Politik der Großmächte in der Jahreswende 1913/14, Berliner Monatshefte 11, 1933., 841 ff.
[26]Baron Max von Oppenheim as cited in The First World War: Haji Wilhelm,
http://www.channel4.com/history/
microsites/F/firstworldwar/cont_jihad_1.html.,
accessed on 18 June, 2007.
[27]Martin Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, Volume One:1900-1933, (London, Harper Collins, 1997), 81-82. See also Peter Hopkirk, On Secret Service East of Constantinople, (London, Juhn Murray, 1994), 85-87, for more on Oppenheim’s role in supporting the Jihad.
[28] Edward Mead Earle, Turkey, the Great Powers…, 217-18.
[29] Gerald Lowther to Grey, 4 August 1908, Pte. Lowther Papers (FO800/193B), cited in Hasan Ünal, Britain and Ottoman Domestic Politics: From the Young Turk Revolution to the Counter-Revolution, 1908-9, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 37, No.2, April 2001, 1-2.
[30] R.G.D. Laffan, The Serbs: The Guardians of the Gate, (1917, reprinted by Dorset Press, New York, 1989), 163-4.
[31] Noel and Charles R.Buxton, The War and the Balkans (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1915), 1
[32] Ibid., 20-21.
[33] Nikolaus Brauns, Deutsch-türkische Beziehungen im Kaiserreich, 4 .5.4 Deutsche Kompromisse mit der Entente…, www.agahdari.com,
30 October 2006, 38
[34]Cited in Peter Sluglett, Britain in Iraq…, 104-5.
[35] Nubar Gulbenkian, Wir—die Gulbenkians: Porträt in Oel, (München, R. Piper & Co., 1966), 93-95.
[36] Peter Slugett, Britain in…,105.
[37] Karl Helfferich, Der Weltkrieg: Vorgeschichte des Weltkrieges, (1919, Ullstein & Co., Berlin), 165-6.
[ EDITORIAL NOTE: The thought of abandoning the security of domestic British coal fuel in favor of reliance on foreign oil was a strategy embedded in risk. The Fisher Committee had been dissolved in 1906 without resolution of the oil issue on the election of a Liberal government pledged to work for arms control. By 1912, as the Germans began a major Dreadnought-class naval construction program, Prime Minister Asquith convinced Admiral Fisher to come out of retirement to head a new Royal Commission on Oil and the Oil Engine in July 1912”.
“Two months later on Fisher’s recommendation, the first British battleship using only oil fuel, the Queen Elizabeth, was begun. Fisher pushed the risky oil program through with one argument: “In war speed is everything.”
“Winston Churchill, had by then replaced Fisher as First Lord of the Admiralty and was a strong advocate of Fisher’s oil conversion. Churchill stated in regard to the Commission finding: “We must become the owners or at any rate the controllers at the source of at least a proportion of the oil which we require.” [14] From that point, oil conversion of the British fleet dictated national security priority to secure large oil reserves outside Britain.]
END OF PART 1
Forward March 