Melanie Phillips: Our crazy world this week
Please join me here as I discuss with Avi Abelow of Israel Video Network the Democrats’ Russian boomerang (which of course has been generally ignored or scorned), VP Mike Pence’s initiative to support the persecuted Christians of the Middle East, and the Catalan crisis that has erupted in Spain.
Year Zero: The Palestinians and the Balfour Declaration
For the Palestinians, the year zero is not 1948, when the State of Israel came into being, but 1917, when Great Britain issued, in the November of that year, the Balfour Declaration — expressing support for the establishment of a “Jewish national home” in Palestine.'The criminal Balfour Declaration'
So central is the Balfour Declaration to Palestinian political identity that the “Zionist invasion” is officially deemed to have begun in 1917 — not in 1882, when the first trickle of Jewish pioneers from Russia began arriving, nor in 1897, when the Zionist movement held its first congress in Basel, nor in the late 1920s, when thousands of German Jews fleeing the rise of Nazism chose to go to Palestine.
The year 1917 is the critical date because that is when, as an anti-Zionist might say, the Zionist hand slipped effortlessly into the British imperial glove. It is a neat, simple historical proposition upon which the entire Palestinian version of events rests: an empire came to our land and gave it to foreigners, we were dispossessed, and for five generations now, we have continued to resist.
Moreover, it is given official sanction in the Palestine National Covenant of 1968, in which article 6 defines Jews who “were living permanently in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion” as “Palestinians” — an invasion that is dated as 1917 in the covenants’ notes.
As the Balfour Declaration’s centenary approaches on November 2, tes theme is much in evidence. There is now a dedicated Balfour Apology Campaign in the UK, seeking both British government contrition and British taxpayer-funded reparations for the supposed handing of Palestine, in the words of one British Mandate-era Arab organization, into “the claws of the Jews.”
The Palestinians - an invented people - have not only tried to deny the rights of Jews to the land they were promised, they have also tried to trace their roots to the Canaanites; they claim Jesus was Palestinian; the Jewish Temple was built in Sinai, not in Jerusalem; the ancient Israelite kings were actually Muslims, and the Jews are just a melee of people that will forever endure God's wrath; they are actually of Khazar origin, they are not entitled to a homeland, but perhaps they can live as second-class citizens under Islam.
British Prime Minister Theresa May has stood fast in the face of the annoying Palestinian efforts to extract an apology. Instead, she has voiced pride in the declaration and said there were no grounds to walk it back.
The Balfour Declaration is not the basis for Israel. The state was founded based on the historical and religious rights of the people of Israel on this holy soil.
Because the promise of a Jewish national home is anchored in the three monotheistic religions, the Palestinians who are fighting the facts must also sue the biblical prophets, Jesus, and especially Allah and the Prophet Muhammad, who promised this land to the people of Israel and never mentioned the Palestinians.