In this edition of The Debate, Press TV has conducted an interview with Tony Gosling, an investigative journalist from London, and Maxine Dovere, a reporter and political analyst from New York, to discuss UK Prime Minister Theresa Mays statement on the Balfour Declaration. Robert Fisk: #Balfour100 aim was to encourage Jews of Russia & America to support the Allies against Germany in #WW1 http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/b...
Theresa May wants British people to feel pride in the Balfour Declaration. What exactly is there to be proud of? http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/b...
Balfour initiated a policy of British support for Israel which continues to this very day, to the detriment of the occupied Palestinians of the West Bank and the five million Palestinian refugees living largely in warrens of poverty around the Middle East, including Israeli-besieged Gaza. Surely we should apologise
Robert Fisk @indyvoices Thursday 2 March 2017 12:45 GMT
Theresa May told us that Britain will celebrate the centenary of the Balfour Declaration this summer with âprideâ. This was predictable. A British prime minister who would fawn to the head-chopping Arab autocrats of the Gulf in the hope of selling them more missiles â and then hold the hand of the insane new anti-Muslim president of the United States â was bound, I suppose, to feel âprideâ in the most mendacious, deceitful and hypocritical document in modern British history.
As a woman who has set her heart against immigrants, it was also inevitable that May would display her most venal characteristics to foreigners â to wealthy Arab potentates, and to an American president whose momentary love of Britain might produce a life-saving post-Brexit trade agreement. It was to an audience of British lobbyists for Israel a couple of months ago that she expressed her âprideâ in a century-old declaration which created millions of refugees. But to burnish the 1917 document which promised Britainâs support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine but which would ultimately create that very refugee population â refugees being the target of her own anti-immigration policies â is little short of iniquitous.
The Balfour Declarationâs intrinsic lie â that while Britain supported a Jewish homeland, nothing would be done âwhich may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestineâ â is matched today by the equally dishonest response of Balfourâs lamentable successor at the Foreign Office. Boris Johnson wrote quite accurately two years ago that the Balfour Declaration was âbizarreâ, a âtragicomically incoherentâ document, âan exquisite piece of Foreign Office fudgeramaâ. But in a subsequent visit to Israel, the profit-hunting Mayor of London suddenly discovered that the Balfour Declaration was âa great thingâ that âreflected a great tide of historyâ. No doubt we shall hear more of this same nonsense from Boris Johnson later this year.
Although the Declaration itself has been parsed, de-semanticised, romanticised, decrypted, decried, cursed and adored for 100 years, its fraud is easy to detect: it made two promises which were fundamentally opposed to each other â and thus one of them, to the Arabs (aka âthe existing non-Jewish communitiesâ), would be broken. The descendants of these victims, the Palestinian Arabs, are now threatening to sue the British government over this pernicious piece of paper, a hopeless and childish response to history. The Czechs might equally sue the British for Chamberlainâs Munich agreement, which allowed Hitler to destroy their country. The Palestinians would also like an apology â since the British have always found apologies cheaper than law courts. The British have grown used to apologising â for the British empire, for the slave trade, for the Irish famine. So why not for Balfour? Yes, but.... Theresa May needs the Israelis far more than she needs the Palestinians.
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