The 107th anniversary of infamous Balfour Declaration falls this year while Gaza continues being destroyed: residential buildings, government facilities, schools, hospitals and places of worship, Muslim and Christian, are all being targeted by the Israeli occupation state. The civilian infrastructure in the Gaza Strip has been decimated. The destruction is evident everywhere; nowhere is safe; it is uninhabitable. Sadly, this is happening with the open complicity of Western governments and the collusion of Zionist Arab regimes.
How many in the Muslim world remembered that 2 November was the day on which the slaughter of the Ummah commenced in 1917? How many remembered that UK Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour sent a letter to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, one of the leaders of the global Zionist movement, indicating that the British government viewed “with favour the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine? It was a promise from those who did not own the land to give it anyway to those who did and do not deserve it.
The number of Jews in Palestine at that time was no more than 50,000 out of the total Jewish population around the world estimated at 12 million at that time. In Palestine, Jews were around five per cent of the population, alongside 650,000 of the indigenous Palestinians. Nevertheless, and in a sign of things to come in terms of dehumanising the Palestinians, they weren’t even mentioned as such. For Balfour and Rothschild, they were only the “non-Jewish communities in Palestine” whose “civil and religious rights” were not to be prejudiced. The Palestinians’ political, economic and administrative rights were ignored.
Balfour kickstarted the Zionist takeover of Palestine.
What was more important, though, was the Paris Peace Conference and the Versailles Treaty two years later, in 1919, which resulted in an agreement between Prince Faisal, the representative of the Kingdom of Hejaz, and Dr Chaim Weizmann, the representative of the World Zionist Organisation. This deal included clauses that deprived the Palestinians of their rights and strengthened the Jewish presence in Palestine. One clause stipulated that measures must be taken to encourage and urge Jewish immigration to Palestine on a large scale and to do so with the utmost speed possible, so that the immigrants may settle in the land through housing and intensive agriculture.
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With the Versailles Treaty, the call was launched for Jews around the world to move from the diaspora with Palestine’s door wide open. They responded to the call, and Jewish migration to Palestine increased with more than seventy nationalities represented among the immigrants. The “national home” for the Jews was on the way to becoming a reality.
It is to Balfour that the global Zionist movement points in order to claim some sort of legitimacy for its usurper state in Palestine. The state arising out of the Nakba (Catastrophe) came into being on 15 May, 1948 on the back of the terrorism of the Irgun, Stern Gang and Haganah Zionist militias. The Zionist entity became a member of the United Nations under pressure from the major countries, which passed Resolution 181 partitioning Palestine, supposedly into a Jewish and Arab state. The former came into being; the latter still hasn’t been established. Moreover, its membership was conditional upon it accepting UN Resolution 194, guaranteeing the right of return of Palestinian refugees. That has never happened.
The Zionist state of Israel became the first country in history to be established by the international community on usurped land after its indigenous people were displaced from their homeland; and the first to receive international backing and unprecedented support from the most powerful country in the world, the United States of America. This support has made Israel arrogant and allowed it to act with total impunity, taking ever more Palestinian and other Arab land.
The genocide of the Palestinians today is the predictable result of the Nakba.
What prompted the UK to back Zionism with the Balfour Declaration and apparently unquestioned support in the UN for the past 76 years? It couldn’t have been the Holocaust, because Balfour was issued decades before that started. Was it Britain’s innate anti-Semitism, making it act to rid Europe of the “Jewish problem”? Quite likely, given that Balfour himself is said to have been a “White supremacist” and an “anti-Semite”. Or was it to do with Britain’s need for scientist Weizmann’s professional help during World War One?
Whatever humanitarian or religious justifications are promoted are generally deceitful and are used to whitewash the Western imperialist project called Israel. It is on record that Theodor Herzl’s intention was always to create a “sector of the wall of Europe against Asia… the outpost of civilisation against barbarism.” This state was planted like a cancer in the heart of the Arab region to watch over Western colonial interests.
One hundred years after Balfour, and US President Donald Trump recognised a united Jerusalem as the eternal capital of Israel in December 2017, and moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem six months later. He opened the way for the Zionist entity to approach the Arab regimes with a view to fulfilling the dream of “Greater Israel” from the Nile to the Euphrates through the so-called Deal of the Century. This is why the Zionist Arab regimes are waiting for their friend Trump to win this week’s US presidential election and return to the White House in January to see this through to its conclusion.
All of this is happening due to the fact that the Arab people are not represented by their “leaders”, who are in place to suppress and oppress them, rather than rule them with fairness and justice. They are the biggest threat to the people, especially the Palestinians, not the usurpers and invaders and their supporters in the West. Our problem in seeing the terms of the Balfour Declaration come to fruition is not only the conspiracy of Western rulers, but also the treacherous Zionist Arab regimes who have colluded with the enemies of the Arab and Muslim world for over a century.
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