The Balfour Declaration, British historic responsibility for the Palestinian tragedy

The British conspiratorial role against the Palestinian people started with the Sykes Picot Accord which was signed in 1916 between France and Britain distributing the Arab Homeland  to be occupied later by the two states as if it was their inheritance. Palestine was the share of Britain which offered Balfour Declaration to the Jews of the world.

On November 2, 1917, Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour wrote a letter to Britain’s most illustrious Jewish citizen, Baron Lionel Walter Rothschild, expressing the British government’s support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The government of Prime Minister David Lloyd George—elected in December 1916—made the decision to publicly support Zionism, a movement led in Britain by Chaim Weizmann, a Jewish chemist who had settled in Manchester. Despite Britain’s earlier agreement with France dividing influence in the region after the presumed defeat of the Ottoman Empire, Lloyd George had come to see British dominance in Palestine—a land bridge between the crucial territories of India and Egypt—as an essential post-war goal. The establishment of a Zionist state there—under British protection—would accomplish this, while seemingly following the stated Allied aim of self-determination for smaller nations.

Many Arabs, in Palestine and elsewhere, were angered by their failure to receive the nationhood and self-government they had been led to expect in return for their participation in the war against Turkey. In the years after the war, the Jewish population in Palestine increased dramatically, along with the instances of Jewish-Arab violence. This was a prime example of colonial arrogance by which Britain, which was not then in occupation of Palestine, promised the Zionist Federation, which did not represent all Jews, without the consent of the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine, the Palestinians, to facilitate the creation of a homeland for Jews in Palestine.

The British occupation forces facilitated the work of the so-called The Jewish Agency which worked as a government within a government confiscating vast areas of the Palestinian lands and building settlement units to absorb the influx of thousands of Jewish settlers who were encouraged to leave Europe and other world states and come to Palestine.

Balfour Declaration is a demonstration of Britain’s double standards. Israel was not established on empty land; it has been built on the homeland of the Palestinian people. Balfour gave the green light to the Zionist movement, which perpetuated the lie that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land”. The truth is that Jews, like Muslims and Christians, were citizens of many countries, including Syria and Iraq, and Palestine was inhabited by a people, the mainly Muslim but also Christian and Jewish, Palestinians. The Balfour Declaration and Britain’s League of Nations Mandate rule in Palestine were key reasons for the growth of Jewish migration to Palestine, which accelerated following the Second World War. The creation of Israel as Britain rushed to abandon Palestine left the Palestinians at the mercy of murderous Zionist terror groups  which committed atrocious crimes and heinous massacres forcing the indigenous population of Palestine to leave their homeland. DeirYassin and Kafr Qassem were only two examples of the Zionist savage massacres perpetrated against the defenceless Palestinians.

The injustice of the lack of a viable Palestinian state and the continuing refugee catastrophe continues to this day. Israel brazenly flouts the “civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” on a daily basis, and has done since its creation in 1948. Its illegal occupation continues to oppress, humiliate and generate hatred. Israel’s siege on the Gaza Strip — described by David Cameron as “a prison” — continues unabated. House demolitions  continues unabated in various Palestinian cities. Settler violence has escalated and Jewish terror has taken the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem.

Britain has not done anything substantially to repair the suffering it has caused to the Palestinians. Britain has not met its historic responsibility. Successive British administrations have avoided repairing this injustice by making statements of goodwill instead of taking actions to end the Israeli occupation and support the Palestinian right to self-determination.

The UK has not taken the necessary political and diplomatic steps to realize the establishment of a free and independent state of Palestine. Rather than continuing down this path, the UK, more than any other state, should stand behind the Palestinian endeavor towards the fulfillment of their national rights and aspirations because its pledge of the Balfour Declaration was a grave mistake that caused the expelling of the Palestinians from their indigenous homeland.

K.Q.