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.