Wednesday, November 02, 2016

For Everything You Wanted to Know About the Balfour Declaration


I'd like to call your attention to the Balfour 100 website.

In addition to the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, 2017 is the 120th anniversary of the First Zionist Congress, the 70th anniversary of the UN General Assembly Partition Resolution, the 50th anniversary of the Six-Day War, the 40th anniversary of Anwar Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem, and the 30th anniversary of the first intifada.

Perhaps you have heard that the moderate Palestinian Arab camp wants to sue the British government for issuing the Declaration. 

That suggests that the Arab-Israel conflict is not about boundaries, settlements, or about this or that Israeli policy, but reflects unrelenting Arab refusal to accept the right of the Jewish people to a national homeland in any part of Palestine.

This is what the extremist Hamas Charter says about the Balfour Declaration:

You may speak as much as you want about regional and world wars. They [the Jews] were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state. It was they who instigated the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security Council to enable them to rule the world through them. There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it.

Whereas this is what the Palestine Liberation Organization still says in the Palestinian National Charter:

Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the Arab homeland and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation. The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine, and everything that has been based upon them, are deemed null and void. Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong.

This Balfour 100 site http://www.balfour100.com/ simply puts the Balfour Declaration in factual context.