• March 29, 2024
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Baroud in Washington Report on Middle East Affair: The Balfour Declaration Destroyed Palestine, Not the Palestinian People

SOME PROMISES ARE made and kept; others disavowed. But the “promise” made by Arthur James Balfour in what became known as the “Balfour Declaration” to the leaders of the Zionist Jewish community in Britain one hundred years ago was only honored in part: it established a state for the Jews and attempted to destroy the Palestinian nation.

In fact, Balfour, the foreign secretary of Britain at the time his declaration of 84 words was pronounced on Nov. 2, 1917, was, like many of his peers, anti-Semitic. He cared little about the fate of Jewish communities. His commitment to establishing a Jewish state in a land that was already populated by a thriving and historically rooted nation was only meant to enlist the support of wealthy Zionist leaders in Britain’s massive military buildup during World War I.

Whether Balfour knew it or not, the extent to which his short statement to the leader of the Jewish community in Britain, Walter Rothschild, would uproot a whole nation from their ancestral homes and continue to devastate several generations of Palestinians decades later, is moot. In fact, judging by the strong support his descendants continue to exhibit toward Israel, one would guess that he, too, would have been “proud” of Israel, oblivious to the tragic fate of the Palestinians.

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