Dozens of Palestinian citizens on Wednesday participated in a protest sit-in outside the UN headquarters in Gaza to condemn the ill-famed Balfour declaration which is marked on November 2 every year on its 99th anniversary.
A speaker at the sit-in held Britain responsible for the suffering that has befallen the Palestinian people at home and abroad for tens of years and demanded it to apologize for its crime through recognizing the Palestinians’ right to their entire land.
“The Balfour declaration has led to the displacement of the Palestinian people and dispersed them throughout the world while it brought thousands of Jews from several countries to replace the indigenous people” the speaker underlined.
He also stressed that there would never be stability and peace in the region unless the Palestinian people were given back their usurped rights.
He urged the UN to act in harmony with its resolutions and stop its bias in favor of the Israeli occupation state.
The Balfour Declaration was sent in a letter on 2nd November 1917 by British foreign minister Arthur James Balfour to Zionist leader Walter Rothschild.
His letter stressed the British government’s support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”.
The declaration came after three years of talks between the British government the British Jewish community and the international Zionist movement during which the latter convinced British officials that a Jewish “national home” in Palestine would not conflict with British interests in the region.
Palestine was occupied by British forces in 1917 during the First World War. Five years later the League of Nations a forerunner of the UN granted Britain a temporary mandate over Palestine.
When the mandate expired in 1948 Britain withdrew from Palestine allowing armed Zionist gangs to commit massacres and ethnic cleansing crimes against the Palestinian people and capture vast swathes of their land before unilaterally declaring the new state of Israel an event known today among Palestinians as the Nakba (catastrophe).
