“The Erasure of Palestine”

I explore the historical record from WWI on for CounterPunch

Happy Halloween, everyone. I hope your day is going great so far. I have a Halloween special published today at CounterPunch; I was led to write this piece by the apparently fathomless ignorance of recent history we find virtually everywhere in the U.S. legacy media system (echoed by Bill Clinton is his unbelievably warped statements in Michigan). Here’s an excerpt, but I hope you’ll read the whole article and share with family and friends who may need a fuller understanding of how we got here:

There is clear and direct continuity between the colonial ambitions of Britain and France during this period and the founding of Israel as a European colonial outpost on the Arab Mediterranean. While the Sykes-Picot Agreement made Palestine an area of international administration due to its cultural and religious importance, Britain had always taken a special interest in Palestine as a key strategic location, and the Agreement made special exceptions for British control of the ports at Haifa and Acre. Again emerges British duplicity: the following year, in 1917, Britain’s Foreign Secretary famously issued the Balfour Declaration, a statement of the British government’s official support of “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” The French perceived this promise of Palestine, which was supposed to be treated as a neutral international zone, to the Zionist cause as a breach of the Sykes-Picot terms and a brazen attempt to consolidate more permanent control of Palestine. The French were of course correct about British designs for the region, and the Balfour Declaration had laid the foundation for the Mandate for Palestine.

Let me know what you think. Always appreciated.

Dave