The imperialist exploitation of West Asia that accelerated after the First World War has never ceased. The effects on the region have been disastrous—wars, conflicts, ecocide and ultimately genocide.  They have left deep scars on the people and the land.

Palestinians are among those most deeply affected.  And despite the onslaught of British, Israeli and American militaries, they have endured.  Their struggle has been exemplary; their courage steadfast; and their quest to reclaim their stolen land legendary.  

Palestine must remain in the forefront of global concern, as Israel seeks to deflect the world’s attention from its heinous atrocities in occupied Gaza and the West Bank, as well as expansionist ambitions in Lebanon and Syria.  

History not only provides context for the present, it can act as a disinfectant, an antidote to the evil it explores and poison left behind.  

In this crucial time in history, as Palestinians fight for survival, it is important to look back on the cynical document that set in motion the racist colonial adventure and legacy of violence so brazenly displayed by Israel today. 

The ordeal of the Palestinian nation—the Nakba (catastrophe)—did not begin on 7 October 2023.  Their 108-year anguish began on 2 November 1917 with a carefully worded guileful policy statement of the British government—the Balfour Declaration. 

Although it had no sovereign rights over the land, then Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Arthur James Balfour, conveyed in a letter to British Zionist, Lord Walter Rothschild, that the British government would sponsor and facilitate the establishment of a “Jewish national homeland” in Palestine.

Conspicuous in the declaration is the arrogant presumption that the British government had the right to give away one people’s land to another. The infamous short letter that has caused so much misery for Palestinians, reads as follows:

The phrasing of the Balfour agreement, a classic colonial document, implied that the majority Palestinian population had no name, nor rights, and no voice. They were referred to as the existing “non-Jewish communities,” while the minority Jews were identified as a “people.” 

The letter was imbedded with ambiguities. Its British authors, for example, eschewed the word “state,” using the more obscure phrase “establishment of a  national home.” In the initial draft, Zionist leaders pushed for the phrase “the national home of the Jewish people,” to imply prior residence and to ensure that the whole of Palestine would be exclusively Jewish.  

The phrase establishment of a home “in Palestine” could be understood to mean a community, settlement or something else; not the entire area.  The extent of the proposed Jewish homeland was never made clear.  

While Balfour’s public pledge was written on behalf of his government, it was approved in advance by Britain’s wartime allies—France, Italy, the Vatican and the United States—whose consensus gave it international legitimacy. 

It is important to note that America shares responsibility for the Balfour letter. President Woodrow Wilson’s advanced approval of the document had a decisive effect on the judgment of the British cabinet.  

The 69th U.S. Congress, in June 1922, passed the Lodge-Fish joint resolution, favoring a home for Jews in Palestine. The joint resolution, which employed language nearly identical to the Balfour letter, was introduced by Rep. Hamilton Fish III (R-NY) and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA), and signed on 21 September 1922 by President Warren G. Harding.  

The United States, in 1924, bound itself further to the principles of the Balfour Declaration by signing the Anglo-American Convention.  The U.S. endorsed the treaty in order to protect American interests and rights under the British mandate of Palestine, that had been approved by the newly created League of Nations in 1920.  

The Balfour Declaration became a formidable instrument in the hands of European Zionists in their effort to transform a religion into a nation.  They were acutely aware that appropriating and colonizing an already populated land could only be achieved through force.  Inevitably, their idealized vision of a Jewish state has emerged as a racist outlaw entity.

Israeli barbarity was certain. It was evinced early on in the ideology of Russian-born Zionist leader and founder of Revisionist Zionism, Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940). Jabotinsky—foundational ideologue for Israel’s right-wing political bloc, particularly the Likud—argued that morality and conscience could not dictate Zionist policy and that Zionists had to accept the fact that extremism and force were integral to accomplishing Jewish statehood. Hence, the genocidal strategies Israel has practiced for 78 years—the mass displacement and ethnic cleansing of millions of Palestinians that the Israeli Occupation Forces have described as “mopping up” and “mowing the lawn”.   

Zionism’s founders also understood that they needed the patronage of an imperial power to fulfill their objectives. With the decline of the “perfidious Albion” after the Second World War, the United States assumed Britain’s imperial role and patronage of the Zionist colony.  Since that time, London’s Ten Downing Street has essentially subcontracted its foreign policy to Washington, while Israel has become inseparable from the White House and the U.S. Congress.  

Undoubtedly, the 67-word declaration served as a tool for the British empire’s interests, as has every U.S.-Israeli agreement and accord, masquerading as peace.

The Trump administration’s corporate-inspired blueprint for Gaza is simply Balfour repackaged; the latest phase in the 100-year old imperial investment in the Zionist settler-colonial project.  

Gazans have shown the world what courage looks like under brutal occupation. It has also revealed how Israel has grown accustomed to and embraced violence and the sense of superiority it gives.

Tel Aviv has used the siege, starvation and bombardment of Gaza to erode the individual and collective dignity and strength of the Palestinian people, forcing Gazans to negotiate their dignity to stay alive.  

The Israeli occupiers have stolen the land, lives and freedom of generations of Palestinians.  It has not, however, been able to steal their dignity, strength, pride and resistance.  Kafa Abu Harb, a 49-year-old widow and mother of three, living under military occupation in the West Bank, affirmed that, saying: “Our strength is all we have left.” 

It is the strength and morality of the Palestinian cause that Israel, the U.S. and its minions deem a threat to their structured system of regional and global domination.  Since the 7 October uprising, the world has been witness to the ferocity of the response, the extreme violence they have employed to maintain control.  The endless piles of concrete that once were homes are a testament to that dread.  

No matter how hard they try, however, Washington and Tel Aviv cannot put the genie of truth back in the bottle. Only if it is willing to destroy the entire population, Palestinian nationalism cannot be destroyed through military force. 

After a century of indifference, the Palestinian liberation struggle has been globalized.  Their pursuit of justice and example of dignity have become humanity’s cause.  

Israel was born in imperial hubris, aggression and arrogance. Its birth certificate was signed in London and Washington; and with every king’s ransom and lethal arms shipment, they validate their illegitimate offspring.  Today we are led to ask: Will we continue to tolerate an ethnocidal/genocidal state and the global power that sustains it.   

The answer, perhaps, can be found in the historic Nuremberg trials (1945-46) of Nazi war criminals. The International Military Tribunal, created in the aftermath of World War II by the Allied Powers, met to prosecute the perpetrators of the Holocaust and crimes against humanity and peace. Subsequently, the principles of the tribunal established the foundation of present-day international criminal law. 

The opening statement of the tribunal’s chief prosecutor, then-U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson, holds particular relevance today. He presciently stated:

“The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so

calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot 

tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”

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