Newsletter Numéro 55                                                                                              14 July 2014

 

The Bannerman Report

This was written in 1907 by the Prime Minister of Great Britain, The Honorable Campbell-Bannerman, and, as it was strategically important it was suppressed and was never released to the public until many years later. (You find it by searching Google.)  I learned about it at the Alternate Information Center in Beit Sahour,  a joint Palestinian-Israeli organization promoting justice, equality and peace  for Palestinians and Israelis..

 “There are people (the Arabs, Editor’s Note) who control spacious territories teeming with manifest and hidden resources. They dominate the intersections of  world routes. Their lands were the cradles of human civilizations and religions.  These people have one faith, one language, one history and the same aspirations.  No natural barriers can isolate these people from one another … if, per chance,  this nation were to be unified into one state, it would then take the fate of  the world into its hands and would separate Europe from the rest of the world.  Taking these considerations seriously, a foreign body should be planted in the
heart of this nation to prevent the convergence of its wings in such a way that it could exhaust its powers in never-ending wars. It could also serve as a springboard for the West to gain its coveted objects.”


From the Campbell-Bannerman Report, 1907
—
“Imperialist Britain called for forming a higher committee of seven European countries. The report submitted in 1907 to British Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman emphasized that the Arab countries and the Muslim-Arab people living in the Ottoman Empire presented  a very real threat to European countries, and it recommended the following  actions:

1. To promote disintegration, division, and separation in the  region.
2. To establish artificial political entities that would be under the authority of the imperialist countries.
3. To fight any kind of unity—whether intellectual, religious or historical —and taking practical measures to divide the region’s inhabitants.
4. To achieve this, it was proposed that a “buffer state” be established in Palestine, populated by a strong, foreign presence that would be hostile to its neighbours and friendly to European countries and their interests.”

_____________
Dan Bar-On & Sami Adwan, THE  PRIME SHARED HISTORY PROJECT, in Educating Toward a Culture of Peace, pages  309–323, Information Age Publishing, 2006.

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