Massacres in Palestine have continued since 1921, thanks to A.J. Balfour

The Jews lost 6,373 people, about 1% of the Jewish population of Palestine, in the 1948 war. 

I read that 4,000 were soldiers and the rest were civilians but elsewhere that Arabs killed 346 Jewish civilians and POWs.

According to leading Israeli historian Benny Morris the Yishuv (which became the Israeli army) committed twenty-four massacres in which they killed roughly 800 Arab civilians and prisoners of war. 

I read that 1,732 Arabs civilians were killed by Jews but I have no idea if this is true. The total number of Arab soldiers and civilians who died is said to be somewhere between 4,000 and 15,000. 

More than 500,000 Palestinian Arabs were ethnically cleansed.

There were between ten and eighty massacres committed in total by both sides, according to Wikipedia, which is not very precise.

Dreadful war crimes were committed by Jews in the 1948 war, including murdering babies, to which people who sympathise with the Arabs rightly draw attention, comparing them with the false stories of babies beheaded or burnt alive spread recently by Israelis. 

Such people are disingenuous if they do not add that Arabs also did plenty of dreadful things. 

The massacre by Hamas of up to 600 or more civilians in October last year and the slaughter of at least 2,000 Arab civilians in Gaza since are part of a story that goes back to 1921. 

This is what the media do not mention and which the public does not understand, unless they have looked into and studied the tedious issue.

One country is completely to blame - mine, England, and the all too languid, over-intelligent Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour. 

He persuaded the British cabinet, for no reason that is clear, to promise a Jewish homeland in what was until 1917 a pretty peaceful backwater of the Ottoman Empire.

Where your books are is where you live. I recently got possession of most of my books, that had been in storage for two decades and I am rereading. When I read Piers Brendon's Eminent Edwardians just after going down I thought it slight and journalistic but now, decades after reading history at university, the chapter on Balfour seemed good. 

So far have my standards slipped and probably my intelligence diminished. 

Like Sir Max Beerbohm who was always drawing him, I often thought about Balfour, that glamorous figure, but did not remember the Balfour Declaration or quite how utterly useless he was. 

Though I knew that he and Gordon Brown were the two cleverest and worst Prime Ministers of England in the 120 years between Lord Salisbury and Theresa May.

'The scent on my pocket handkerchief' is how Lloyd George described his role at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. 

In 1914 he was plotting treason against the King's government by involving himself in an Irish Unionist rebellion which the outbreak of war with Germany in 1914 forestalled.

His successor as Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon, for all his legendary pomposity and pride a much more substantial man, said Balfour's laziness was extraordinary.

He considered him `the worst and most dangerous` individual to have held the office, writing of his "lamentable ignorance, indifference, and levity….He never studied his papers; he never knew the facts; at the Cabinet he had seldom read the morning`s FO telegrams; he never got up a case; he never looked ahead` – trusting instead to his unequalled power of improvisation".

He was very beautiful. He was sub-Wildean. He offered Wilde the chance to escape to Paris and avoid prosecution for sodomy.

As a lifelong celibate he was extraordinary empty, though much esteemed at country house Friday to Mondays. 

Brendon said that that playing tennis he obtained 'pale gleams of happiness'.This phrase has always stuck in my mind. 

He famously said 'Nothing matters very much and most things don't matter at all' - that seemed in the 1980s a rather welcome contrast to Margaret Thatcher but it was not.

I quote from an article I recommend about the Balfour Declaration by William M Mathew

"As for serious political commitment, in any cause, he was, as he casually observed of himself, `a thick and thin supporter of nothing, not even of myself'.

"A.J. P Taylor refers to him as `cynical, unprincipled, and frivolous`- the latter characteristic notably exemplified in his exchanges with the French ambassador in London during the war, Paul Cambon. When Balfour declared `that it would be an interesting experiment to reconstruct a Jewish kingdom` in Palestine and Cambon warned that, according to scripture, a Jewish king would signify the end of the world, Balfour`s arcane-facetious response was `that such a denouement would be even more interesting'."

"Cynical, unprincipled, and frivolous", like many of Taylor's judgements, is right.

 This is the man who created the Arab-Israeli dispute.