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Israel's Founding Certainly Wasn't Imperialist
(Telegraph-UK) Nigel Biggar - In December on Al Jazeera, University of Kent lecturer Dr. Shahd Hammouri said: "Israel is a colonizing power and the Palestinians the colonized indigenous population." That's the simplistic melodrama. Here's the complicated truth. Before 1914, Jewish corporations bought Palestinian land from Arab landlords to settle thousands of Zionist immigrants fleeing Russian pogroms. Whatever our evaluation, this was no "invasion." In 1917 the British government made the Balfour Declaration, pledging to establish "a national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, without prejudice to "the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities." A major motive was sympathy for the Zionist story of an exiled people yearning to return home. At the same time, the British established two Arab states, Jordan and Iraq. The cartoonish "decolonization" narrative doesn't begin to do justice to the past. The writer is Emeritus Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford.