- Palestinians will never forget
No surprises that London chose to mark one hundred years of the Balfour Declaration with “pride”, as Prime Minister May so deliberately put it. The crown then, at least, is not one of those parties that understood and learnt from the mammoth tragedy whose foundations were laid when Lord Balfour, British foreign secretary a hundred years ago, wrote to Lord Rothschild about “His Majesty’s government” viewing with favour the called for Jewish homeland in Palestine. In one of modern history’s greatest, and cruelest, ironies, a British official signed off Palestinian land to far away Jews on the recommendation of Austrian journalist Theodore Heartzel’s famous line “a land without a people for a people without a land” – even though both points were false.
The Palestinians, needless to say, do not share London’s “pride”. Because of political, as well as financial, deals made far, far away, a generation of Palestinians were plucked from their lands and prized olive gardens and flung forever to the mercy of the outside world. Worse, still, they have since been dubbed the aggressor, the militant, as well as the terrorist. History has few examples of a people so mercilessly, and so unnecessarily, uprooted from their own homes and the supposed defenders of freedom, democracy, etc, cheering and arming the occupier decade after decade.
Sadly neither the proud and rich Arab neighbours, nor equally proud Muslim nations near and far, have been able to help the Palestinians in any substantial way except accept them as refugees and keep them in camps year after year. Even worse, the Palestinians – sick and exhausted from continuous war and survival – insulted their own years of sacrifice when Hamas and Fatah broke off into a bloody civil war ten years ago. Heartzel’s wish, Balfour’s clout and Rothschild’s money perpetrated a crime so deep and so convincing that even now the world’s biggest powers hold Israel as their dearest friend. Still, the Palestinians shall never forget the unfair hand dealt to them by fate and “His Majesty’s government”.