Recent articles in the press.

Israeli Ex-Ambassador to South Africa raises the Apartheid question

Britain’s Broken Promise

Joint Public Issues Nov 2nd.

Britain’s Broken Promise: Time for a new approach” was a remarkable event organised by the Balfour Project at Central Hall Westminster.  It was remarkable not only in terms of the list of prominent speakers but, even more, for the sober way in which it meticulously exposed British history in Palestine.

Balfour Declaration Centennial Wasn’t About Israel or Palestine. It Was About U.K.’s Delusions of Grandeur

Haaretz Nov 2nd

With the Israeli-Palestinian conflict far from resolution, perhaps the Brits need to cling to the idea that Balfour really did matter….. at an event organized by .. “The Balfour Project” at the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster…. the majority seemed like regular concerned citizens, interested in reflection and action as speaker after speaker quoted the terms of the British Mandate in Palestine, Britain’s “sacred trust” – a trust they obviously felt still obligates Britain nearly 70 years after the Mandate ended…

It wasn’t about Israel. Not even about the Palestinians. It was about Britain and its unique combination of tortured conscience for the sins of the empire and its delusions of grandeur and of still being a world power capable of influencing events around the world. Read more: Haaretz

Balfour 100: Senior Church figures lament Britain’s ‘broken promise’ to the Palestinians.

Christian Today Nov 1st

A collection of senior Church figures has lamented Britain’s ‘broken promise’ to the Palestinians exactly 100 years after the Balfour Declaration that promised both a national home for the Jews but also the protection of ‘existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’.

Balfour’s Original Sin

Gideon Levy, Haaretz

British colonialism prepared the way for Israeli colonialism, even if it didn’t intend for it to continue for a 100 years and more

There was never anything like it: an empire promising a land that it had not yet conquered to a people not living there, without asking the inhabitants. There’s no other way to describe the unbelievable colonialist temerity that cries out from every letter in the Balfour Declaration, now marking its centenary.

The Jews in Pre-state Israel Who Called for a Binational State

Ofer Aderet, Haaretz

In 1921, four years after the Balfour Declaration promised to establish a “national home for the Jewish people” in the Holy Land, Yosef Castel, a well-known public figure in Jerusalem, prepared an alternative version of the declaration. It also centered on establishing a national home, but for two peoples, Jewish and Arab, rather than one.

“Both sides are fighting each other over a single land, and they must, as a matter of historical necessity, live in it together and peacefully develop their national homes in the same land, which is destined to be one state,” he wrote. Or in today’s terminology, one state for two peoples.