“When Arthur Balfour launched his scheme for peopling Palestine with Jewish immigrants, I am credibly informed that he did not know there were Arabs in the country.”
W. R. Inge (!860-1954), from the London Evening Standard, quoted in This England, by M. Bateman, selections fro the New Statesman
But Balfour was a Conservative. Enough said.
There was no such place as “Palestine”. Palestine was an invention of the British. It was all desert and the Israelis made that desert bloom by hard work. The only Arabs there were nomads on camels, coming and going. The idea that there were 600,000 Arabs in the area is just Arab propaganda.
(Center for Christian Zionism )
Balfour made one of the greatest understatements of history when signing the Declaration: “I have no idea what the result will be, but I am certain that it will lead to a very interesting situation.”
The classic quotation is Herzl: “A land without a people for a people without a land.”
Charlie, people have lived in Palestine, including cities such as Jerusalem and Hebron and Jaffa, for thousands of years. It doesn’t take kibbutzim with Western irrigated agriculture to live there, though it may take that to support millions of people. And you have heard of the Crusades, yes? The campaign to take the Holy Land back from the Arabs?
Crusades? Yes. There’s a lot of misinformation about the Crusades. Our pastor told us that Jerusalem had a mixed population of Christians and Jews when the Arabs turned up, led by a guy call Saladin, who came from someplace else, Syria I think. Anyway, he certainly wasn’t tending goats in the Garden of Gethsemane. The Crusaders were just taking back what was mainly Christian. Have you heard of Jesus?