IN the wake of Arab-Israeli conflict of 1948-49 about 700,000 Palestinians fled their homes or were encouraged by Israel to leave. Some were forcibly ejected from their villages which were then demolished. James McDonald, the first Ambassador of the United States to Israel, described the plight of the refugees thus: they are ‘a huge and pitiful multitude, uprooted, exploited and helpless’. This was just the beginning.

Now that the Palestinian problem is fast moving towards final solution the world helplessly watches the endgame as it did 60 years ago when an attempt at another final solution was under way in the Nazi-dominated Europe. There is, however, some difference. On the previous occasion the world did, temporarily and for good reason, feel helpless but was not in a state of morbid paralysis. The authors of the previous attempt at final solution had to pay a very heavy price as the collective wrath of almost the whole world descended upon them, and continued unabated till they were destroyed.

The present scenario is totally different. This time round those who can intervene are in no way helpless, but are in every way unhelpful. In fact there are many among them who, under the influence of a potent brew of racial and religious antipathy, have chosen to take a passionately dispassionate view of the fate of the Palestinians.

This antipathic indifference to the fate of the Palestinians has a long tradition, but let us go no further than the Balfour Declaration (1917) that officially and formally committed the British government to the ‘establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. Its author, Arthur Balfour, justified the new covenant with the Jews, and resiling from the old with the Arabs, with this magisterial pronouncement: ‘The four great powers are committed to Zionism, and Zionism, be it right or be it wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land’. (Emphasis added)

Arthur James Balfour, whose mind worked in rather devious ways, had just the right credentials to make that kind of pronouncement. While he supported the creation of Israel for a people who lived elsewhere, he was an implacable opponent of home rule for the Irish whose rights there had an ‘age-long tradition’. In fact as chief secretary for Ireland he suppressed the insurrection in Ireland with such ruthlessness that he came to be known as ‘Bloody Balfour’. One would like to add that he was kept aloft in politics by an indulgent electorate for an interminably long period of