A source on politics, war, the Middle East, Arabic poetry, and art.
Saturday, November 03, 2007
Balfour Declaration. A lot of references to the 90th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration in the Arabic press. None mention what we now know: that Lord Balfour is an anti-Semite, and as is typical in such cases, his anti-Semitism is forgiven by Zionist groups because of his support for Zionism. See the reference to his speech in 1905 at the House of Commons (mentioned in the massive work, The Balfour Declaration by Leonard Stein). You need to read the transcript of the meeting between Balfour and Judge Brandeis (it is printed in that important book, Walid Khalidi, ed., From Haven to Conquest, DC: Institute of Palestine Studies--this book is one of the 5 top books one needs to read on the Palestine question--it had a great influence on me early in life). In it, Balfour (explaining how he offered Palestine as a "national home for the Jewish people", and explaining how he referred to the 91% of the population of Palestine (Palestinian Muslims and Christians) as "non-Jewish communities in Palestine") stated that "numerical self-determination" was excluded. Indeed it was. (Years later, the US House of Representative adopted the Balfour Declaration but they changed the reference to the natives from "the non-Jewish communities in Palestine" to "Christian and other communities in Palestine.")