PA calls on UK to apologise for Balfour Declaration

The Palestinian Authority yesterday called on the United Kingdom to apologise as a “first step to uplift the historical oppression laid on the Palestinians due to the 1917 Balfour Declaration,” Arabs48.com reported.

In a statement, the PA foreign ministry said: “If Britain wanted to unload the burden of the historical responsibility laid on its shoulders regarding the Balfour Declaration, there are certain measures it must carry out.”

One of these measures, the statement said, is for the “highest bodies” to apologise to the Palestinian people due to “what happened to them because of the Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate.”

Another measure is for the UK to recognise the Palestinian state within the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital.

The PA’s Foreign Minister Riyad Al-Malki told Arab League leaders, who gathered in Mauritania on Monday, that the UK is responsible for all “Israeli crimes” committed against the Palestinians since the end of the British Mandate in 1948.

Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “After 4,000 years of Jewish history on this land, around 100 years on Balfour Declaration and 68 years since the creation of the Israeli state, there are some people who deny our connection with our land.”

“I heard the PA is preparing to prosecute the UK over the Balfour Declaration. This means that it does not only reject the Jewish state, but also rejects the national Jewish home which preceded the Jewish state.”

“The PA will fail, but this sheds the light on the roots of the conflict which is the Palestinian rejection to recognise the Jewish state whatever its borders were,” he said.