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Balfour Declaration ‘a humanitarian act’, says current Lord Balfour

February 7, 2017 at 11:30 am

Palestinians protest to mark the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration on 1 November 2016 [Mohammed Asad /Wikipedia]

In the year marking a century on the passing of the Balfour declaration, a descendant of signatory of Balfour Declaration exalted his family’s role in founding a national homeland for Jews in Palestine.

Roderick Balfour, the great-grandson of the then UK Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour’s brother Gerald William Balfour, sent a letter to a conference on Jewish life labelling the declaration as “first and foremost a humanitarian act trying to repatriate a talented but much-persecuted people to the land of the original Judaic roots.”

The letter was sent to the Limmud FSU conference in Britain, which promotes itself as being “an educational conference for people of all ages and interests that is dedicated to Jewish life”.

Watch: Explained: The Balfour Declaration

On 2 November 1917, Balfour wrote a letter to Lord Walter Rothschild, the leader of the British Jewish community, stating his government’s support for the Zionist movement’s objective of creating a Jewish state in British Mandate Palestine.

Balfour declaration has been the main instigator for intensified Jewish immigration to and settlement in Palestine, and gradually the massacres and displacement of the Palestinian people in 1948, when Israel declared its independence.