The Balfour Declaration

Lloyd George and the Balfour Declaration

Lloyd George's War Memoirs, vol. i, p. 349. (Vol i published 1933/4; vol ii 1936.)

Note: Lloyd George became Prime Minister of a coalition in December 1916, replacing Asquith who had been Prime Minister since 1908

The Balfour Declaration plays an important part in 'alternative' First World War history; it is regarded as the event which caused Jews in the USA to secretly put pressure on US officials, and more overtly to circulate atrocity stories about Germany, to bring the US into the war on the side of Britain, despite Wilson's election on the basis of neutrality.
And this idea seems, in fact, to be true.

The British government was faced with a stalemate; trench warfare had proved a failure and armies were static. The Germans had proposed a return to the status quo ante. The whole of the British government's energies were devoted to defeating Germany. Keynes' Economic Consequences of the Peace (p 256, footnote): 'The financial history of the six months from the end of the summer of 1916 up to the entry of the United States into the war in April 1917 remains to be written. Very few persons, outside the half-dozen officials of the British Treasury who lived in daily contact with immense anxieties and impossible financial requirements of those days, can fully realise what steadfastness and courage were needed, and how entirely hopeless the task would soon have become without the assistance of the United States treasury. ...' What point could there be in the British making such an announcement, at that time, other than for military advantage?

There is widespread agreement that something of the sort was intended. Lloyd George's War Memoirs, published in six volumes, then in two, says as much—see the illustration. And see for example Belloc, Freedman and Wells for perspectives on this event.

The Declaration itself was drafted by a secret Jew.

The subsequent orgy of atrocity stories in the USA puzzled many onlookers. J M Keynes, in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, remarked on the fact that the French could be excused for doing more than shrugging their shoulders and saying "c'est la guerre"; but the real oddity was that the extremest emotions were generated in the USA. Keynes seemed to think that newspaper articles were written and published by the general public.

Quoting Keynes again, a 'Conservative friend' told him, of the new post-First-World-War House of Commons, that "They are a lot of hard-faced men, who look as if they had done very well out of the war." In fact Punch between the wars often had cartoons showing War Profiteers behaving in unattractive ways, usually in nouveau riche mode.
Alan Bullock in Hitler: a Study in Tyranny (1962 'completely revised edition' still reprinted unchanged by Penguin in 1990, and beyond) quotes Hitler: 50: ‘'The war of 1914', he wrote in Mein Kampf, 'was certainly not forced on the masses; it was even desired by the whole people'—a remark which illustrates at least this man's state of mind. 'For me these hours came as a deliverance from the distress that had weighed upon me during the days of my youth. I am not ashamed to acknowledge today that I was carried away by the enthusiasm of the moment and that I sank down upon my knees and thanked Heaven out of the fullness of my heart for the favour of having been permitted to live in such a time. Mein Kampf, pp 146-7.’
The accounts of Lloyd George, Wells, Freedman and others make it clear that the disaster of the First World War was also regarded as a splendid opportunity by some Jews. This is not to say all Jews. Nor is to say they had vast powers; it amounted to the casting vote in 1916 of a tiny minority.

'Timeline' of the First World War (western front only; published in 1920). By 1916, the situation was as follows (Basil Liddell Hart, History of the First World War): ‘With the First World War, the standard [length of time of battles, once hours,] became months. And of all the so-called 'battles' of the war Verdun holds the duration record, extending from February 21st to December 15th, 1916. ..’ The Somme followed. Tanks had not yet been tried (NB the name 'tank' is left over from wartime secrecy: the first efforts were made in Lincoln, and were described as tanks—water tanks or cisterns—I think (if I recall correctly) that the cover story was they were intended for the Near East. The name was retained).
The official reason for the US entering the war, as marked on the timeline, was unrestricted German submarine warfare, after the Lusitania was sunk off Ireland—or allegedly sunk — see https://big-lies.org/mileswmathis/lusi.pdf. I leave it for the reader to judge how likely this was to have been the genuine reason. Anyway, nearly two years later the Armistice was arrived at.

July 12th, 1920. Start of a speech by Balfour at the Albert Hall. What was called a 'Demonstration organised by the English Zionist Federation', to thank the British Government for a decision to incorporate the Balfour Declaration for a Jewish National Home in the Treaty of Peace with Turkey. Taken from Speeches and Addresses of the Earl of Balfour KG, OM, FRS 1910-1927.
Note that Balfour thinks the 'ancient home of the Jewish people' is more important than the devastation of Europe. Probably Balfour's outlook was formed by some half-educated nanny and by rich Jews whose sources of wealth he never investigated. He also pretends it was an 'unexpected' result; in fact, Jewish propaganda around 1916, Jewish blackmail of President Wilson, and Jewish credit combined to get the USA into the war in 1917.

[Balfour speaks:] For long I have been a convinced Zionist, and it is in that character that I come before you to-day, though in my most sanguine moments I never foresaw, never even conceived, the possibility that the great work of Palestinian reconstruction would happen so soon, or that indeed it was likely to happen in my own lifetime.

This is one of the great and unexpected results of the world struggle which has just come to an end—even if, indeed, we dare to say that it has yet completely come to an end.

Of infinite evils that struggle has been the parent, but if among its results we can count the re-establishment in their ancient home of the Jewish people, at all events we can put to its credit one great result which under other circumstances, so far as we can see, could never have occurred at so early a date.

Who would have thought five or six years ago that a speaker in the Albert Hall would be able to recount as an established fact that the Great Powers of the world had elected to accept the Declaration to which Lord Rothschild has referred, had consented to give a Mandate to the country which at all events is in the forefront among those who desire to see this policy brought to a successful issue, and that they would already have seen appointed as the High Commissioner of Palestine a man who so admirably joins the double qualifications which Lord Rothschild has so felicitously expressed? ...

Lloyd George and the Balfour Declaration

© Rae West 2000