Mahmoud al-Bahtiti, who has been fixing car and truck engines in Gaza City for the past 50 years didn’t vote in the 2006 Palestinian elections because he trusted neither Fatah nor Hamas.
But on Britain, he has definite opinions – or at least, about Britain circa 1917. He doesn't need a centenary commemoration to bring up the Balfour Declaration with a British visitor.
Last year, his business struggling for lack of customers, he asked me a question. Given that "We [Palestinians] are still suffering as a result" of the Declaration, wouldn’t an apology from the British government be in order?Obviously, Macintyre thinks that Mahmoud is speaking some deep truth here.
Mahmoud wasn’t trying to get back what is now Israel. In his words: “The Jewish people took their rights after Hitler committed massacres against them. But who will give us our rights? Britain gave our lands to the Israelis and they never cared to give us our rights."
But guess what? The Palestinians could have had a state in 1937. And 1947. And 2000. And 2001. And 2008. And even under the Netanyahu government in 2014!
They have rejected every single peace plan. But hateful pseudo-experts like Macintyre know that the Palestinians are without any blame. Let's blame Great Britain for their plight. (News flash, Donald: If there was no Balfour Declaration and the Zionists weren't successful, there would still not be a "Palestinian state." It would have been gobbled up by Jordan, Egypt and Syria. You know this is true because in 1917 there were essentially no such thing as Palestinian nationalism.)
Macintyre isn't done with his idiocy and hate, though:
He writes this a day after Hamas was discovered to be building a tunnel into Israel to perform war crimes. War crimes which Fatah condoned. So, Macintyre is saying the best chance for peace is to allow two terrorist groups to unite - and for Britain to encourage it.
If the British government wanted, 100 years after Balfour, to rethink its historic role in the conflict, it could begin by persuading its EU partners (while, pre-Brexit, it still has any) to reinforce the one initiative currently in play: The attempt at Hamas-Fatah reconciliation. To commemorate a point in history when the conflict deepened with support for a process of unification, at least on the one, weaker side.