Learning how Israel was created

Rambam Mesivta High School students were ready for New York Times best-selling author Edwin Black as the throughout the writer’s nearly 90-minute presentation, Black asked questions and the students had the answers.

Black kicked off a three-week, 12-city cross-country trek commemorating the 100th anniversary of what is known as the Balfour Declaration. Issued on Nov. 2, 1917, the brief non-binding letter written by British Foreign Minister James Balfour to Lord Walter Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, was also sent to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland.

The 67-word correspondence included these powerful words. “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object.”

Words that were repeated in the San Remo Agreement — a post World War I meeting of international leaders — the Mandate for Palestine, which came out of the League of Nations and in the United Nations’ charter.

Yet, Black pointed that the Balfour Declaration “has been mis-portrayed, maligned and misquoted so massively that is calls out for an honest, independent look,” he said before speaking to the students. “Jews were the indigenous people of Israel,” Black said. “There is only one way to usurp the future of the Jewish people. That is to abduct their history and refract it into something it is not.”

Black said that he uncovers facts in context. “How the United States teaches history is deliberate sabotage,” said Eve Jones, Black’s chief researcher.
After meeting with students from the school’s Book Club, where he told them that “writing is rewriting,” Black launched into his presentation in Rambam’s prayer room.

His talk took his audience on a historical journey from ancient times to the contemporary era. He pointed to 1964 as a turning after the state of Israel had been inexistence for barely 16 years. The Arabs, who had been nomads for all their Arabs became Palestinians, usurping the original Palestinians— the Jews.

Rabbi Zev Meir Friedman, Rambam’s dean, called having Black speak at the Lawrence school an “amazing opportunity.” “The better information you get the more informed you are,” Friedman told his students. “You need to be armed with the facts to what the Balfour Declaration is and the ongoing effects.”

Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, sent a message about Black’s appearance, not his first at Rambam, which was read by Assistant Principal Hillel Goldman.

Black’s tour took him to the House of Representatives on Oct. 23 and goes to Florida, California and ends at the Potomac Congregation B’Nai Tzedek in Maryland on Nov. 9.