"The greatest crime"
"A sin"
"The cursed promise"
"A mark of shame upon humanity"
"An ominous sign, [bringing] disasters upon the Palestinians, the Arabs, and the nations of the region and the world."
"Historical injustice"
"Balfour will continue to turn in his grave"
http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=5881
by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik
The Balfour Declaration of Nov. 2, 1917 was a letter from the British Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild of the Zionist movement, which expressed Britain's support for "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." A few years later, on July 24, 1922, the League of Nations confirmed the letter and selected Britain as "the Mandatory for Palestine." Every year on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, Palestinian Authority leaders and official media issue harsh statements attacking it. According to the Palestinian narrative, Jews have no history in the land and therefore have no right to exist as a state. Consequently, Israel exists only because of the Balfour Declaration.
This year, the PA Ministry of Information and the Ministry of Culture organized a workshop for high school girls in Tulkarem in cooperation with the city's Education Administration. The girls wrote "letters of sorrow and pain to the Queen of the United Kingdom, Elizabeth II, and to the British Foreign Minister, William Hague, since it was the letter by that country's Foreign Minister Arthur James Balfour, which has caused the Palestinian people ongoing suffering," reported the official PA daily.
One girl wrote to Queen Elizabeth:
"The real reasons that caused Balfour to give his dark promise, first and foremost [the desire] to be rid of the Jews in Europe and to award them a prize for the genocidal weapons which they had invented, which helped Britain to annihilate more people."
PA leaders and official media have published claims on many occasions that the establishment of Israel was a European plot to get rid of the Jews in Europe because the Jews were a burden on European society. The Balfour Declaration is cited by many Palestinians as proof that Zionism was not a Jewish idea but a colonialist idea, and it was this idea that the Palestinian girl was expressing in her letter.
Another girl wrote to the Queen:
"that she and her contemporaries are still paying the price of the Balfour promise in blood and tears, because he [Balfour] 'decided to donate a country which was not his to a nation [the Jews] which was not entitled to it, with no justification, since the Palestinian people had not attacked Britain or dreamed of invading London.'"
The official PA daily also reported that PLO Executive Committee member Zakaria Al-Agha demanded that:
"Britain assume its responsibility towards the Palestinian people and make amends for its mistakes, since it is the main culprit for its suffering, and to admit its grave mistake against it in allowing the Jews, by means of the cursed promise, to seize control of the Palestinian land and to establish their state on the Arab ruins and the Palestinian villages which were destroyed in 1948."
http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=488&fld_id=493&doc_id=5886 Fatah member Faiz Abu Aitah called the Balfour Declaration "the greatest crime that the international community is responsible for."
Click to view
Official PA TV News referred to "the cursed Balfour promise" as "a promise that brings a mark of shame upon humanity."
Click to view
http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=488&fld_id=493&doc_id=5888
The following are some of the many PA attacks on the Balfour Declaration that appeared in the PA press this year. Despite the PA's claims in English to the international community that it recognizes Israel, the PA openly continues to indoctrinate its people with significant historical revision, to reject and deny Israel's right to exist.
PA TV News broadcast
Interview with Fatah member Faiz Abu Aitah, speaking about the vote on accepting Palestine into UNESCO:
"Yesterday we had the [anniversary of the] Balfour promise - the greatest crime that the international community is responsible for, and specifically the British government. The time has come for the international community to repair the sin against the Palestinian people and to give the Palestinian people today its right to live like the nations of the world, on its land, within its independent Palestinian state."
[PA TV (Fatah), Nov. 3, 2011]
Click to view
Headline: "Tubas girls 'judge' Balfour promise [Balfour Declaration, 1917] in their letters"
"Girls from Tubas [in the West Bank] chose to mark the 94th anniversary of the cursed Balfour promise [Balfour Declaration, 1917] by writing letters of sorrow and pain to the Queen of the United Kingdom, Elizabeth II, and to the British Foreign Minister, William Hague, since it was the letter by that country's Foreign Minister Arthur James Balfour, which has caused the Palestinian people ongoing suffering. During a workshop held yesterday by the PA Ministry of Information and the Ministry of Culture, in cooperation with the city's Education Administration, girls from the Tubas [West Bank] high school wrote dozens of open letters to politicians and girls in Britain. Wafa Daraghmeh wrote to Queen Elizabeth, saying that she and her contemporaries are still paying the price of the Balfour promise in blood and tears, because he [Balfour] 'decided to donate a country which was not his to a nation [the Jews] which was not entitled to it, with no justification, since the Palestinian people had not attacked Britain or dreamed of invading London.' She ended the letter with thanks to the United Kingdom for having 'shattered the hopes of the Palestinian people'. Saja Daraghmeh addressed her words to a girl her age in London, whom she does not know, but who, she believes, enjoys freedom and has never tasted occupation. She addressed an open question to the girls of London: Would they agree for France to grant the Africans a national home in Wales? ... Amina Muhammad wrote in her letter the real reasons that caused Balfour to give his dark promise, first and foremost [the desire] to be rid of the Jews in Europe and to award them a prize for the genocidal weapons which they had invented, which helped Britain to annihilate more people."
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Nov. 3, 2011]
Headline: "On the 94th anniversary of the cursed promise [Balfour Declaration, 1917] - personalities and bodies called upon the world to correct part of Balfour's sin by supporting the Palestinian demand at the UN"
"The world must correct part of its sin - thus concurred national figures and bodies which published announcements yesterday on the occasion of the 94th anniversary of the Balfour promise [Balfour Declaration, 1917] ... Member of the PLO Executive Committee Zakaria Al-Agha demanded that the United Kingdom vote at the Security Council in favor of recognizing a Palestinian state on the June 4, 1967 borders, with Jerusalem as its capital... In a press release yesterday, Al-Agha demanded that Britain assume its responsibility towards the Palestinian people and make amends for its mistakes, since it is the main culprit for its suffering, and to admit its grave mistake against it in allowing the Jews, by means of the cursed promise, to seize control of the Palestinian land and to estab`lish their state on the Arab ruins and the Palestinian villages which were destroyed in 1948. ... The PLO Department of International Relations demanded that the international community assume its historical, moral and human responsibility towards the Palestinian people... This was said in a press release by the department yesterday, on the 94th anniversary of the promise which Britain gave to the Jews, to give them a national home in Palestine, which has caused our people suffering, oppression and injustice continuing to our own times... The PA Ministry of Information said that the usual condemnations are not an effective prescription for [addressing] this great sin, in which [Britain] gave a land which was not its own to a nation which had begun to claim it [the land] was part of itself [the nation]. [Britain] must apologize and make amends for this sin, and acknowledge to the world that the result of the words of its Foreign Minister - no more than sixty words - are still having their effect."
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Nov. 3, 2011]
PA TV News broadcast
PA TV News reader: "Today is the 94th anniversary of the cursed Balfour promise [Balfour Declaration, 1917], in which which those who had no ownership (Britain) permitted those who had no right (the Jews) to establish a national homeland for the Jews in Palestine."
Reporter: "This is the Balfour promise, in which the British Foreign Minister, Arthur Balfour, gave the Jews a national home in Palestine, in 1917. This was the promise which approved of Jewish immigration to Palestine. They [the Jews] took the place of the original inhabitants, conquered their land, and turned them into refugees throughout the world. A promise that brings a mark of shame upon humanity because it [humanity] ignored the colonialist frenzy - not only in Palestine but in the Arab homeland, from east to west...
The promise is not necessarily the right of humans, in contrast to Allah [who has the right] to promise this land, which did and still does belong in its entirety to its Palestinian owners. Balfour will continue to turn in his grave because of the historical injustice which Britain committed against the Palestinian people."
[PA TV (Fatah), Nov. 2, 2011]
Click to view
Headline: "Today is the 94th anniversary of the Balfour promise" [Balfour Declaration, 1917]
"Today is the 94th anniversary of the cursed Balfour promise [The Balfour Declaration of 1917], by which Britain awarded the Jews the right to establish a national home in Palestine, based on the false slogan, 'A land without a people for a people without a land'. ... This promise represented the first step taken by the West on the road to establishing an entity for the Jews on the land of Palestine, in accordance with the wishes of World Zionism, at the expense of a people which had been rooted in this land for thousands of years. This promise was given as a declaration on the part of the British Foreign Minister at the time, Arthur James Balfour... to Lord Rothschild, one of the leaders of the World Zionist movement, following three years of negotiations between the British government and the Jews of Britain and the World Zionist Organization, in which the Zionists managed to persuade Britain concerning their ability to realize its [Britain's] aims and to protect its interests in the region... The Jews made successful use of the piece of paper published by Arthur Balfour, known for his friendship with the Zionist Movement, and later the [British] Mandate and the 1947 resolution by the [UN] General Assembly concerning the Partition of Palestine: They realized their dream of establishing [the State of] Israel on May 15th, 1948, and this entity earned membership in the UN thanks to pressure by the super powers. Israel became the first country in the history of the global political system which was established on land belonging to others, and which receives international aid which has caused it to behave arrogantly in the region - expanding, swallowing more Palestinian and Arab territory, and behaving violently and mercilessly towards those among the Palestinian people who remain upon their land."
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Nov. 2, 2011]
"The President of the United States of America, Barack Obama, expressed the hope of seeing Palestine as a state in the UN, on Sept. 21, 2011, and we believed him... It has been said of the Balfour promise [Balfour Declaration, 1917] that it was a promise by someone who had no ownership [of the land] to those who had no right [to it]. We said of Obama's promise that it was a promise by someone who is unable, to those whose right [to the land] it is already. Balfour's promise to the Jews of Europe - a homeland in Palestine - was a preventive step, because in his letter he sketched a road map for freeing his country and Europe of the burden of the Jewish problem, and of the bases for the spread of Communism in western Europe, which was led by the poor, the European workers, and the Jews... The Jews of the Zionist enterprise sought a promise from Balfour, who had the ability, because they knew that only the strongest power in the world at the time [Britain] could impose the conditions for the establishment of a state for the Jews. His promise was an ominous sign, [bringing] disasters upon the Palestinians, the Arabs, and the nations of the region and the world."
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Nov. 2, 2011]
"The Arab League emphasized yesterday that now, more than ever, there is a need for a serious international position supporting the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and putting an end to the historical injustice done to it in the wake of the Balfour promise [Balfour Declaration, 1917] and the continued Israeli occupation. A press release by the [Arab League] Department for Palestine and the Occupied Arab Lands on the occasion of the anniversary of the Balfour promise, said: 'This cursed promise was the main reason for the catastrophe which befell Palestine in 1948, and it represented the beginning of the tragedy of the Palestinian people, which has continued for many decades...
The promise declared by British Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour, on Nov. 2, 1917, constitutes a great political crime and sin, leading to the uprooting of the Palestinian people and the theft of its land, and causing wars and great conflicts which still continue in the region.'"
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Nov. 2, 2011]
Guest Comment: Every year on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, Palestinian Authority leaders and official media issue harsh statements attacking it. According to the Palestinian narrative, Jews have no history in the land and therefore have no right to exist as a state. Consequently, Israel exists only because of the Balfour Declaration.
This year, the PA Ministry of Information and the Ministry of Culture organized a workshop for high school girls in Tulkarem in cooperation with the city's Education Administration. The girls wrote "letters of sorrow and pain to the Queen of the United Kingdom, Elizabeth II, and to the British Foreign Minister, William Hague, since it was the letter by that country's Foreign Minister Arthur James Balfour, which has caused the Palestinian people ongoing suffering," reported the official PA daily.
One girl wrote to Queen Elizabeth:
"The real reasons that caused Balfour to give his dark promise, first and foremost [the desire] to be rid of the Jews in Europe and to award them a prize for the genocidal weapons which they had invented, which helped Britain to annihilate more people."
PA leaders and official media have published claims on many occasions that the establishment of Israel was a European plot to get rid of the Jews in Europe because the Jews were a burden on European society. The Balfour Declaration is cited by many Palestinians as proof that Zionism was not a Jewish idea but a colonialist idea, and it was this idea that the Palestinian girl was expressing in her letter.
Another girl wrote to the Queen:
"that she and her contemporaries are still paying the price of the Balfour promise in blood and tears, because he [Balfour] 'decided to donate a country which was not his to a nation [the Jews] which was not entitled to it, with no justification, since the Palestinian people had not attacked Britain or dreamed of invading London.'"
The official PA daily also reported that PLO Executive Committee member Zakaria Al-Agha demanded that:
"Britain assume its responsibility towards the Palestinian people and make amends for its mistakes, since it is the main culprit for its suffering, and to admit its grave mistake against it in allowing the Jews, by means of the cursed promise, to seize control of the Palestinian land and to establish their state on the Arab ruins and the Palestinian villages which were destroyed in 1948."
http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=488&fld_id=493&doc_id=5886 Fatah member Faiz Abu Aitah called the Balfour Declaration "the greatest crime that the international community is responsible for."
Click to view
Official PA TV News referred to "the cursed Balfour promise" as "a promise that brings a mark of shame upon humanity."
Click to view
http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=488&fld_id=493&doc_id=5888
The following are some of the many PA attacks on the Balfour Declaration that appeared in the PA press this year. Despite the PA's claims in English to the international community that it recognizes Israel, the PA openly continues to indoctrinate its people with significant historical revision, to reject and deny Israel's right to exist.
PA TV News broadcast
Interview with Fatah member Faiz Abu Aitah, speaking about the vote on accepting Palestine into UNESCO:
"Yesterday we had the [anniversary of the] Balfour promise - the greatest crime that the international community is responsible for, and specifically the British government. The time has come for the international community to repair the sin against the Palestinian people and to give the Palestinian people today its right to live like the nations of the world, on its land, within its independent Palestinian state."
[PA TV (Fatah), Nov. 3, 2011]
Click to view
Headline: "Tubas girls 'judge' Balfour promise [Balfour Declaration, 1917] in their letters"
"Girls from Tubas [in the West Bank] chose to mark the 94th anniversary of the cursed Balfour promise [Balfour Declaration, 1917] by writing letters of sorrow and pain to the Queen of the United Kingdom, Elizabeth II, and to the British Foreign Minister, William Hague, since it was the letter by that country's Foreign Minister Arthur James Balfour, which has caused the Palestinian people ongoing suffering. During a workshop held yesterday by the PA Ministry of Information and the Ministry of Culture, in cooperation with the city's Education Administration, girls from the Tubas [West Bank] high school wrote dozens of open letters to politicians and girls in Britain. Wafa Daraghmeh wrote to Queen Elizabeth, saying that she and her contemporaries are still paying the price of the Balfour promise in blood and tears, because he [Balfour] 'decided to donate a country which was not his to a nation [the Jews] which was not entitled to it, with no justification, since the Palestinian people had not attacked Britain or dreamed of invading London.' She ended the letter with thanks to the United Kingdom for having 'shattered the hopes of the Palestinian people'. Saja Daraghmeh addressed her words to a girl her age in London, whom she does not know, but who, she believes, enjoys freedom and has never tasted occupation. She addressed an open question to the girls of London: Would they agree for France to grant the Africans a national home in Wales? ... Amina Muhammad wrote in her letter the real reasons that caused Balfour to give his dark promise, first and foremost [the desire] to be rid of the Jews in Europe and to award them a prize for the genocidal weapons which they had invented, which helped Britain to annihilate more people."
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Nov. 3, 2011]
Headline: "On the 94th anniversary of the cursed promise [Balfour Declaration, 1917] - personalities and bodies called upon the world to correct part of Balfour's sin by supporting the Palestinian demand at the UN"
"The world must correct part of its sin - thus concurred national figures and bodies which published announcements yesterday on the occasion of the 94th anniversary of the Balfour promise [Balfour Declaration, 1917] ... Member of the PLO Executive Committee Zakaria Al-Agha demanded that the United Kingdom vote at the Security Council in favor of recognizing a Palestinian state on the June 4, 1967 borders, with Jerusalem as its capital... In a press release yesterday, Al-Agha demanded that Britain assume its responsibility towards the Palestinian people and make amends for its mistakes, since it is the main culprit for its suffering, and to admit its grave mistake against it in allowing the Jews, by means of the cursed promise, to seize control of the Palestinian land and to estab`lish their state on the Arab ruins and the Palestinian villages which were destroyed in 1948. ... The PLO Department of International Relations demanded that the international community assume its historical, moral and human responsibility towards the Palestinian people... This was said in a press release by the department yesterday, on the 94th anniversary of the promise which Britain gave to the Jews, to give them a national home in Palestine, which has caused our people suffering, oppression and injustice continuing to our own times... The PA Ministry of Information said that the usual condemnations are not an effective prescription for [addressing] this great sin, in which [Britain] gave a land which was not its own to a nation which had begun to claim it [the land] was part of itself [the nation]. [Britain] must apologize and make amends for this sin, and acknowledge to the world that the result of the words of its Foreign Minister - no more than sixty words - are still having their effect."
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Nov. 3, 2011]
PA TV News broadcast
PA TV News reader: "Today is the 94th anniversary of the cursed Balfour promise [Balfour Declaration, 1917], in which which those who had no ownership (Britain) permitted those who had no right (the Jews) to establish a national homeland for the Jews in Palestine."
Reporter: "This is the Balfour promise, in which the British Foreign Minister, Arthur Balfour, gave the Jews a national home in Palestine, in 1917. This was the promise which approved of Jewish immigration to Palestine. They [the Jews] took the place of the original inhabitants, conquered their land, and turned them into refugees throughout the world. A promise that brings a mark of shame upon humanity because it [humanity] ignored the colonialist frenzy - not only in Palestine but in the Arab homeland, from east to west...
The promise is not necessarily the right of humans, in contrast to Allah [who has the right] to promise this land, which did and still does belong in its entirety to its Palestinian owners. Balfour will continue to turn in his grave because of the historical injustice which Britain committed against the Palestinian people."
[PA TV (Fatah), Nov. 2, 2011]
Click to view
Headline: "Today is the 94th anniversary of the Balfour promise" [Balfour Declaration, 1917]
"Today is the 94th anniversary of the cursed Balfour promise [The Balfour Declaration of 1917], by which Britain awarded the Jews the right to establish a national home in Palestine, based on the false slogan, 'A land without a people for a people without a land'. ... This promise represented the first step taken by the West on the road to establishing an entity for the Jews on the land of Palestine, in accordance with the wishes of World Zionism, at the expense of a people which had been rooted in this land for thousands of years. This promise was given as a declaration on the part of the British Foreign Minister at the time, Arthur James Balfour... to Lord Rothschild, one of the leaders of the World Zionist movement, following three years of negotiations between the British government and the Jews of Britain and the World Zionist Organization, in which the Zionists managed to persuade Britain concerning their ability to realize its [Britain's] aims and to protect its interests in the region... The Jews made successful use of the piece of paper published by Arthur Balfour, known for his friendship with the Zionist Movement, and later the [British] Mandate and the 1947 resolution by the [UN] General Assembly concerning the Partition of Palestine: They realized their dream of establishing [the State of] Israel on May 15th, 1948, and this entity earned membership in the UN thanks to pressure by the super powers. Israel became the first country in the history of the global political system which was established on land belonging to others, and which receives international aid which has caused it to behave arrogantly in the region - expanding, swallowing more Palestinian and Arab territory, and behaving violently and mercilessly towards those among the Palestinian people who remain upon their land."
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Nov. 2, 2011]
"The President of the United States of America, Barack Obama, expressed the hope of seeing Palestine as a state in the UN, on Sept. 21, 2011, and we believed him... It has been said of the Balfour promise [Balfour Declaration, 1917] that it was a promise by someone who had no ownership [of the land] to those who had no right [to it]. We said of Obama's promise that it was a promise by someone who is unable, to those whose right [to the land] it is already. Balfour's promise to the Jews of Europe - a homeland in Palestine - was a preventive step, because in his letter he sketched a road map for freeing his country and Europe of the burden of the Jewish problem, and of the bases for the spread of Communism in western Europe, which was led by the poor, the European workers, and the Jews... The Jews of the Zionist enterprise sought a promise from Balfour, who had the ability, because they knew that only the strongest power in the world at the time [Britain] could impose the conditions for the establishment of a state for the Jews. His promise was an ominous sign, [bringing] disasters upon the Palestinians, the Arabs, and the nations of the region and the world."
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Nov. 2, 2011]
"The Arab League emphasized yesterday that now, more than ever, there is a need for a serious international position supporting the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and putting an end to the historical injustice done to it in the wake of the Balfour promise [Balfour Declaration, 1917] and the continued Israeli occupation. A press release by the [Arab League] Department for Palestine and the Occupied Arab Lands on the occasion of the anniversary of the Balfour promise, said: 'This cursed promise was the main reason for the catastrophe which befell Palestine in 1948, and it represented the beginning of the tragedy of the Palestinian people, which has continued for many decades...
The promise declared by British Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour, on Nov. 2, 1917, constitutes a great political crime and sin, leading to the uprooting of the Palestinian people and the theft of its land, and causing wars and great conflicts which still continue in the region.'"
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Nov. 2, 2011]
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