Balfour Portrait and Declaration, via Wikipedia
Against the backdrop of the First World War, Britain’s then-foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, declared support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. For Palestinians themselves, history took a turn towards turmoil.
The Balfour Declaration set the groundwork for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. Today this state is called Israel. A state which advocates of the Palestinian cause; like Mabrur Ahmed, founder and director of Restless Beings; accuse of acting with impunity.
“It acts as if there are no rules which it must adhere to,” he told Salaamedia in an interview on Tuesday, just days after the historic document turned 107 years old. Ahmed echoed growing concern that the apartheid state was getting away with genocide and war crimes.
“That only comes about from the fact that this state was created without accountability, without consultation, without any sort of international diplomacy whatsoever. That’s what you see today,” he said.
The letter, dated 2 November 1917, insisted that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. But history has subsequently shown how dispensable Palestinian rights were.
A common refrain among Zionists is that Israel was created on “a land without people for people without a land”. This justification of the decades-long occupation does not withstand closer scrutiny.
“The Balfour Declaration of 1917 essentially gave a people without land access as if it was a land without people. That land is and wasn’t without people. That was the home of the Palestinians,” Ahmed asserted.
Ironically, he continued, the very document that led to widespread displacement, dispossession and subjugation of Palestinians itself proved that Palestine did indeed exist before Israel’s creation.
“Many pro-Zionists argued that the idea of Palestine isn’t even a real thing. This document kind of proves that it absolutely was, because it regards that territory as Palestine and that’s where the land for the Jewish peoples’ home was to be created. That almost falls on deaf ears.”
It was another three decades before, in an epoch of violence, a Jewish homeland would be created. Ever since, Israel has exercised exceptional levels of brutality in a bid to secure its existence on Palestinian land.
