13 ms·

Another fun bit of biochemical history: Chaim Weizmann (1) was a biochemist and staunch Zionist who gained the attention of First Lord of the British Admiralty,

Another fun bit of biochemical history: Chaim Weizmann (1) was a biochemist and staunch Zionist who gained the attention of First Lord of the British Admiralty, Winston Churchill, for cultivating a bacterium, Clostridium acetobutylicum, that could produce acetone, which was in short supply and required for the production of cordite, the key propellent in naval artillery during World War I. In gratitude for Weizmann's contribution to the war effort, George Lloyd asked him what Britain could do for him, to which he replied "not for me, but for my people", which begat the Balfour Declaration (2) establishing Britain's commitment to provide a Home for the Jewish People (3). (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaim_Weizmann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaim_Weizmann (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration (3) It is essentially lost to history that the Balfour Declaration also provided that the Palestinian people should not be displaced. It is also mostly lost to history that there was a great deal of politicking between Weizmann arriving in England and his audience with George Lloyd, including a world tour Weizmann orchestrated to promote one Albert Einstein.

zabzonk 2y ago
[flagged]
- colechristensen 2y ago
  Really the ultimate cause for all of that pain and suffering is the failure of the Ottoman Empire which was quite cosmopolitan while it lasted. There is plenty to criticize about the actions taken by many parties post-collapse, but I strongly doubt it's at all possible for external powers to take a failed empire and keep all the pieces happy in the aftermath. Those people have to do most of that themselves, and in this case they didn't for many reasons. Europe was ready for the transition away from monarchy and empire, the middle east wasn't. Russia/USSR tried a path that worked but not particularly well. Luck and circumstance also played a part. A century of war and strife post empire collapse isn't exactly unusual.
  - ithkuil 2y ago
    Well it was cosmopolitan because it conquered many people in an area that was cosmopolitan from the start (in particular Constantinople) and as long as they didn't fight back for their independence they were tolerated. That's not much different from the current state of Israel which allows Arabs to live in it (and even have political representation!). I don't know how to square the elevation of the tolerance in the ottoman empire while at the same time decrying the apartheid within Israel's borders. The situation is fucked up. It's hard to have justice and peace.
    - colechristensen 2y ago
      > I don't know how to square the elevation of the tolerance in the ottoman empire while at the same time decrying the apartheid within Israel's borders. Well for starters I don’t test the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century and Israel in the 21st against the same standard. We’re not saying the Ottomans were great by a modern western standard, but compared to most of the west in their day they were quite good.
      - ithkuil 2y ago
        yeah, fair enough. I don't think there one "right way" of looking at all this. I think it's important to keep all those things in mind at the same time, including what you're saying about standards and how they change over time. My point was that when we look back at times of peaceful coexistence within empires, it was often the results of suppression of dissent. Empires are fundamentally at odds with national self determination. Empires are by definition violent subjugation of people and self-determination movements often require violence to counteract that. It's easy to take past empires for granted and assume they are "how things are"; but when they fail and crumble they do so for a reason, they contain the seed of their own destruction, because they impose stability and order over internal and extern forces that push against them.
- jolj 2y ago
  depends on who you ask, for german jews under the nazis before world war 2, it was almost the only place to go to, and definitely saved them from certain death in places like the netherlands. not to mention after world war 2 for those who came back from the camps and found their homes taken. moreover zionism did not start with the balfour declaration, but decades before with mass killings of jews in eastern europe
  - zabzonk 2y ago
    the western allies certainly could and should have done much pre-war, and arguably in the war (mosquito strikes on the camps, for example). my point was that few can dispute that, as we see today, the whole imposition of israel on its neighbours has been a disaster.
    - jolj 2y ago
      that's only when taking only palestinians into account. When the balfour declaration was signed already 10% of then population was jewish. Mass killings of jews had already started in eastern europe decades before the holocaust. which was what prompted zionism. This is not a singular event, but a movement that would happen with the british or without them. And any result of the conflict would cause serious "disaster" for one people or another
rmason 2y ago
I continue to be amazed the things you learn on HN. When I was in Poland last summer I learned that a number of Jewish leaders there between the two world wars advocated for a Jewish homeland. But they were never able to convince the government to publicly declare that support. Despite the fact at the time Jews made up to 25% of Poland's population.
- acidioxide 2y ago
  That's wrong. Polish state from 1926 onwards supported Zionists (in the years 1926-1939, Poland was ruled by the authoritarian Sanation movement).
  - rmason 2y ago
    Verified you are correct. Yet the museums I toured in both Warsaw and Gdansk gave me the exact opposite impression.
riffraff 2y ago
I've heard that tour was also accidentally the reason Einstein became such a household name and face, tho I'm not so convinced this is true.
jojobas 2y ago
> Palestinian people should not be displaced This was always wishful thinking at best, and more realistically a lie.
- cnlevy 2y ago
  Hmmm, those palestinian Arabs that made peace with the Jews in the 1948 civil war are still there; see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghosh https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghosh https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umm_al-Fahm https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umm_al-Fahm
  - jojobas 2y ago
    Doesn't prove much. The Jews needed the fertile lands that were very much settled, there were not all flocking there for some desert. Quoting Ben-Gurion: A people which fights against the usurpation of its land will not tire so easily. ... When we say that the Arabs are the aggressors and we defend ourselves — this is only half the truth. ... [P]olitically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves. The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country.
0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
[flagged]
- ein0p 2y ago
  What’s missing in your world view is that “high functioning” countries largely ride on the backs of lower functioning ones and depend on low cost labor to sustain their quality of living. Eg the US is just coming off of 20+ years of riding on China’s back.
  - JackFr 2y ago
    > Eg the US is just coming off of 20+ years of riding on China’s back. That China’s per capita GDP increased 4x over that period — was that because of, or in spite of the US ‘riding on their back’?
    - RomanAlexander 2y ago
      most people can only see "winners" and "losers" in economic transactions.
    - immibis 2y ago
      We gave them lots of money. When there's more money, prices go up. When prices go up, GDP goes up.
    - ein0p 2y ago
      Yes. Same as you can be exploited and grow your earnings over time as you move up the value chain. Note however how unbelievably strenuously the US is trying to keep them from progressing technologically. It’s to the point of imposing its will on _other_ countries by now. That is not accidental, and it has nothing to do with “national security” or whatever. It’s just to be able to milk that teat for a little longer. Military gear by design uses older chips that are easy to produce should a war break out.
  - 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
    America's biggest sources of imports are Mexico, Canada, China, Germany, and Japan. I'm wishing we could do more to improve the lives of people living in countries like Sudan, Venezuela, Burundi, Haiti, DR Congo, etc. They're humans too even if they don't make the news. Right now those countries are too dysfunctional to be competitive for most exports. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.EXP.GNFS.ZS?most_recent_value_desc=false https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.EXP.GNFS.ZS?most_rec...
cafard 2y ago
Pedantry: David Lloyd George, Prime Minister during the later part of WW I and for a time after.
hnbad 2y ago
It also can't be overstated that Balfour himself was a staunch racist and antisemite. His motivation for passing the Declaration was at least in part the idea that if the UK gives the Jews their own country, the UK will have a powerful ally in the global Jewish conspiracy - and also encourage Jews to leave the UK and not manipulate in its politics, culture and economy. From Balfour's own writing in 1919 cited in his Wikipedia article: > [Zionism would] mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a Body [the Jews] which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb. He's the best example how support of Zionism and antisemitism aren't mutually contradictory and can actually go hand in hand. It's likewise often lost on people that there was a Zionist project helping German Jews emigrate to Palestine with support of the German government even after Hitler came to power, although of course (like all migration) it ended with the beginning of World War 2. This isn't to say the Nazis were fond of this project but they didn't actively oppose it. They did however pass laws requiring emigrating Jews to liquidate their assets (i.e. sell off any businesses or property) and significantly limiting the amount of wealth they could transfer out of the country just like they later dispossessed (and subsequently re-privatized) Jewish business owners and confiscated their property during the Holocaust.
pjmorris 2y ago
> "It is essentially lost to history" In practice, this is clearly true. But it is not for lack of trying, at least on some people's parts. I recently read 'A Peace to End All Peace', David Fromkin, which goes in depth into the background here, including Weizmann's role and the making of the Balfour declaration. A passage from the book's conclusion has stuck with me: "It took Europe a millennium and a half to resolve its post-Roman crisis of social and political identity: nearly a thousand years to settle on the nation-state form of political organization, and nearly five hundred years more to determine which nations were entitled to be states. Whether civilization would survive the raids and conflicts of rival warrior bands; whether church or state, pope or emperor, would rule; whether Catholic or Protestant would prevail in Christendom; whether dynastic empire, national state, or city-state would command fealty; and whether, for example, a townsman of Dijon belonged to the Burgundian or to the French nation, were issues painfully worked out through ages of searching and strife, during which the losers—the Albigensians of southern France, for example—were often annihilated. It was only at the end of the nineteenth century, with the creation of Germany and Italy, that an accepted map of western Europe finally emerged, some 1,500 years after the old Roman map started to become obsolete. The continuing crisis in the Middle East in our time may prove to be nowhere near so profound or so long-lasting. But its issue is the same: how diverse peoples are to regroup to create new political identities for themselves after the collapse of an ages-old imperial order to which they had grown accustomed."
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  One big difference with the Middle East is that the present day borders were largely drawn up by foreign powers (England, France) rather than evolving organically as they did in post-Roman Europe. This is also a source of much of the ongoing conflicts in the region including Israel/Palestine.
  - readthenotes1 2y ago
    TBF, England and France took hundreds of years drawing up their own borders between each other
leoc 2y ago
I'm not saying that this is a bad comment, or that it should not have been made; but at the same time, I am also a bit wearied to see that the HN comment section has achieved a Time To Palestine of 1 on this post.
- jhardy54 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - DiggyJohnson 2y ago
    These low effort posts are against the HN guidelines and also not terribly clever.
racional 2y ago
"Britain's commitment to provide a Home for the Jewish People ... in a place other than Europe" is the key detail that's missing here. It wasn't like they all got together and said, you know, it's time we did the Jewish People a solid for once.
adhamsalama 2y ago
Well, now I hate him. Thanks.
fsckboy 2y ago
> It is essentially lost to history that the Balfour Declaration also provided that the Palestinian people should not be displaced. It is equally essentially lost on most people today, that the Balfour Declaration did not create the state of Israel, nor did the United Nations create it, nor the UK, nor the US, nor was it post-war "resettlement plan" for displaced Jews by the Allies. To the contrary, Jews at that time were barred from entering the British Mandate. Israelis declared themselves a state, similar to Americans declaring themselves independent of Britain, against the wishes of the UK. So it should also be noted that no "plan" for that region called for a civil war: but a civil war broke out. So it's revisionist shoehorning of the events that played out to say that they didn't match such and such of various plans that may have previously been made but never came to fruition. The cis-Jordan Arabs were not treated worse by the Israelis than they themselves were attempting to treat the Israelis; the Arabs did lose the military conflict, however, after which they displaced their own longstanding Jewish populations.

zabzonk 2y ago

[flagged]

colechristensen 2y ago
Really the ultimate cause for all of that pain and suffering is the failure of the Ottoman Empire which was quite cosmopolitan while it lasted. There is plenty to criticize about the actions taken by many parties post-collapse, but I strongly doubt it's at all possible for external powers to take a failed empire and keep all the pieces happy in the aftermath. Those people have to do most of that themselves, and in this case they didn't for many reasons. Europe was ready for the transition away from monarchy and empire, the middle east wasn't. Russia/USSR tried a path that worked but not particularly well. Luck and circumstance also played a part. A century of war and strife post empire collapse isn't exactly unusual.
- ithkuil 2y ago
  Well it was cosmopolitan because it conquered many people in an area that was cosmopolitan from the start (in particular Constantinople) and as long as they didn't fight back for their independence they were tolerated. That's not much different from the current state of Israel which allows Arabs to live in it (and even have political representation!). I don't know how to square the elevation of the tolerance in the ottoman empire while at the same time decrying the apartheid within Israel's borders. The situation is fucked up. It's hard to have justice and peace.
  - colechristensen 2y ago
    > I don't know how to square the elevation of the tolerance in the ottoman empire while at the same time decrying the apartheid within Israel's borders. Well for starters I don’t test the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century and Israel in the 21st against the same standard. We’re not saying the Ottomans were great by a modern western standard, but compared to most of the west in their day they were quite good.
    - ithkuil 2y ago
      yeah, fair enough. I don't think there one "right way" of looking at all this. I think it's important to keep all those things in mind at the same time, including what you're saying about standards and how they change over time. My point was that when we look back at times of peaceful coexistence within empires, it was often the results of suppression of dissent. Empires are fundamentally at odds with national self determination. Empires are by definition violent subjugation of people and self-determination movements often require violence to counteract that. It's easy to take past empires for granted and assume they are "how things are"; but when they fail and crumble they do so for a reason, they contain the seed of their own destruction, because they impose stability and order over internal and extern forces that push against them.
jolj 2y ago
depends on who you ask, for german jews under the nazis before world war 2, it was almost the only place to go to, and definitely saved them from certain death in places like the netherlands. not to mention after world war 2 for those who came back from the camps and found their homes taken. moreover zionism did not start with the balfour declaration, but decades before with mass killings of jews in eastern europe
- zabzonk 2y ago
  the western allies certainly could and should have done much pre-war, and arguably in the war (mosquito strikes on the camps, for example). my point was that few can dispute that, as we see today, the whole imposition of israel on its neighbours has been a disaster.
  - jolj 2y ago
    that's only when taking only palestinians into account. When the balfour declaration was signed already 10% of then population was jewish. Mass killings of jews had already started in eastern europe decades before the holocaust. which was what prompted zionism. This is not a singular event, but a movement that would happen with the british or without them. And any result of the conflict would cause serious "disaster" for one people or another

rmason 2y ago

I continue to be amazed the things you learn on HN. When I was in Poland last summer I learned that a number of Jewish leaders there between the two world wars advocated for a Jewish homeland. But they were never able to convince the government to publicly declare that support. Despite the fact at the time Jews made up to 25% of Poland's population.

acidioxide 2y ago
That's wrong. Polish state from 1926 onwards supported Zionists (in the years 1926-1939, Poland was ruled by the authoritarian Sanation movement).
- rmason 2y ago
  Verified you are correct. Yet the museums I toured in both Warsaw and Gdansk gave me the exact opposite impression.

riffraff 2y ago

I've heard that tour was also accidentally the reason Einstein became such a household name and face, tho I'm not so convinced this is true.

jojobas 2y ago

> Palestinian people should not be displaced This was always wishful thinking at best, and more realistically a lie.

cnlevy 2y ago
Hmmm, those palestinian Arabs that made peace with the Jews in the 1948 civil war are still there; see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghosh https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghosh https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umm_al-Fahm https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umm_al-Fahm
- jojobas 2y ago
  Doesn't prove much. The Jews needed the fertile lands that were very much settled, there were not all flocking there for some desert. Quoting Ben-Gurion: A people which fights against the usurpation of its land will not tire so easily. ... When we say that the Arabs are the aggressors and we defend ourselves — this is only half the truth. ... [P]olitically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves. The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country.

0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago

[flagged]

ein0p 2y ago
What’s missing in your world view is that “high functioning” countries largely ride on the backs of lower functioning ones and depend on low cost labor to sustain their quality of living. Eg the US is just coming off of 20+ years of riding on China’s back.
- JackFr 2y ago
  > Eg the US is just coming off of 20+ years of riding on China’s back. That China’s per capita GDP increased 4x over that period — was that because of, or in spite of the US ‘riding on their back’?
  - RomanAlexander 2y ago
    most people can only see "winners" and "losers" in economic transactions.
  - immibis 2y ago
    We gave them lots of money. When there's more money, prices go up. When prices go up, GDP goes up.
  - ein0p 2y ago
    Yes. Same as you can be exploited and grow your earnings over time as you move up the value chain. Note however how unbelievably strenuously the US is trying to keep them from progressing technologically. It’s to the point of imposing its will on _other_ countries by now. That is not accidental, and it has nothing to do with “national security” or whatever. It’s just to be able to milk that teat for a little longer. Military gear by design uses older chips that are easy to produce should a war break out.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
  America's biggest sources of imports are Mexico, Canada, China, Germany, and Japan. I'm wishing we could do more to improve the lives of people living in countries like Sudan, Venezuela, Burundi, Haiti, DR Congo, etc. They're humans too even if they don't make the news. Right now those countries are too dysfunctional to be competitive for most exports. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.EXP.GNFS.ZS?most_recent_value_desc=false https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.EXP.GNFS.ZS?most_rec...

cafard 2y ago

Pedantry: David Lloyd George, Prime Minister during the later part of WW I and for a time after.

hnbad 2y ago

It also can't be overstated that Balfour himself was a staunch racist and antisemite. His motivation for passing the Declaration was at least in part the idea that if the UK gives the Jews their own country, the UK will have a powerful ally in the global Jewish conspiracy - and also encourage Jews to leave the UK and not manipulate in its politics, culture and economy. From Balfour's own writing in 1919 cited in his Wikipedia article: > [Zionism would] mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a Body [the Jews] which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb. He's the best example how support of Zionism and antisemitism aren't mutually contradictory and can actually go hand in hand. It's likewise often lost on people that there was a Zionist project helping German Jews emigrate to Palestine with support of the German government even after Hitler came to power, although of course (like all migration) it ended with the beginning of World War 2. This isn't to say the Nazis were fond of this project but they didn't actively oppose it. They did however pass laws requiring emigrating Jews to liquidate their assets (i.e. sell off any businesses or property) and significantly limiting the amount of wealth they could transfer out of the country just like they later dispossessed (and subsequently re-privatized) Jewish business owners and confiscated their property during the Holocaust.

pjmorris 2y ago

> "It is essentially lost to history" In practice, this is clearly true. But it is not for lack of trying, at least on some people's parts. I recently read 'A Peace to End All Peace', David Fromkin, which goes in depth into the background here, including Weizmann's role and the making of the Balfour declaration. A passage from the book's conclusion has stuck with me: "It took Europe a millennium and a half to resolve its post-Roman crisis of social and political identity: nearly a thousand years to settle on the nation-state form of political organization, and nearly five hundred years more to determine which nations were entitled to be states. Whether civilization would survive the raids and conflicts of rival warrior bands; whether church or state, pope or emperor, would rule; whether Catholic or Protestant would prevail in Christendom; whether dynastic empire, national state, or city-state would command fealty; and whether, for example, a townsman of Dijon belonged to the Burgundian or to the French nation, were issues painfully worked out through ages of searching and strife, during which the losers—the Albigensians of southern France, for example—were often annihilated. It was only at the end of the nineteenth century, with the creation of Germany and Italy, that an accepted map of western Europe finally emerged, some 1,500 years after the old Roman map started to become obsolete. The continuing crisis in the Middle East in our time may prove to be nowhere near so profound or so long-lasting. But its issue is the same: how diverse peoples are to regroup to create new political identities for themselves after the collapse of an ages-old imperial order to which they had grown accustomed."

insane_dreamer 2y ago
One big difference with the Middle East is that the present day borders were largely drawn up by foreign powers (England, France) rather than evolving organically as they did in post-Roman Europe. This is also a source of much of the ongoing conflicts in the region including Israel/Palestine.
- readthenotes1 2y ago
  TBF, England and France took hundreds of years drawing up their own borders between each other

leoc 2y ago

I'm not saying that this is a bad comment, or that it should not have been made; but at the same time, I am also a bit wearied to see that the HN comment section has achieved a Time To Palestine of 1 on this post.

jhardy54 2y ago
[flagged]
- DiggyJohnson 2y ago
  These low effort posts are against the HN guidelines and also not terribly clever.

racional 2y ago

"Britain's commitment to provide a Home for the Jewish People ... in a place other than Europe" is the key detail that's missing here. It wasn't like they all got together and said, you know, it's time we did the Jewish People a solid for once.

adhamsalama 2y ago

Well, now I hate him. Thanks.

fsckboy 2y ago

> It is essentially lost to history that the Balfour Declaration also provided that the Palestinian people should not be displaced. It is equally essentially lost on most people today, that the Balfour Declaration did not create the state of Israel, nor did the United Nations create it, nor the UK, nor the US, nor was it post-war "resettlement plan" for displaced Jews by the Allies. To the contrary, Jews at that time were barred from entering the British Mandate. Israelis declared themselves a state, similar to Americans declaring themselves independent of Britain, against the wishes of the UK. So it should also be noted that no "plan" for that region called for a civil war: but a civil war broke out. So it's revisionist shoehorning of the events that played out to say that they didn't match such and such of various plans that may have previously been made but never came to fruition. The cis-Jordan Arabs were not treated worse by the Israelis than they themselves were attempting to treat the Israelis; the Arabs did lose the military conflict, however, after which they displaced their own longstanding Jewish populations.