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Balfour Declaration

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Summary

The British declaration in favour of a Jewish national home in Palestine, which in this booklet is never reproduced or dated directly; it enters Kanafani’s account through the Palestinian poets who answered it from the month it was issued onward, as the founding promise behind the Mandate order the revolt rose against.

Details

  • Wadi al-Bustani was the first to warn against the Balfour Declaration and its challenges, the very month it was issued (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.15 / printed p.28-29).

  • Al-Bustani’s long January 1920 reply poem in Haifa’s Karmel, answering Ma’ruf Al-Risafi’s poem for the High Commissioner, asserted even at that early date the danger of Jewish immigration, the role played by Britain in fragmenting the Palestinian Arabs, and the Balfour Declaration and its implications (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.15 / printed p.28-29).

  • When Balfour came from London to attend the opening ceremony of the Hebrew University, dated 1927 in the text, the poet Iskandar al-Khuri wrote lines addressed to Balfour (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.15 / printed p.28-29).

  • Sayegh dates and centres the Declaration as Kanafani’s booklet does not: the alliance of British Imperialism and Zionist Colonialism was concretely expressed in the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917, with the British capture of Jerusalem on 9 December 1917, and those two events opened Arab eyes to the true significance of what was happening (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.17 / printed p.222).

  • In Said’s analysis the declaration, made in November 1917 in the form of a letter to Lord Rothschild, undertook to view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and matters as a statement made by a European power about a non-European territory in flat disregard of both the presence and the wishes of the native majority resident there, as a promise of that territory to another foreign group (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.36-37 / printed p.15-16).

  • Balfour’s own Cabinet memorandum of August 1919, quoted by Said, states that in Palestine Britain does not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants, and that Zionism is of far profounder import than the desire and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.37-38 / printed p.16-17).

  • No publicity was undertaken for the declaration in Palestine, in the Jewish community there, in keeping with Balfour’s view that the present inhabitants need not be consulted (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.40 / printed p.19).

  • In Pappe, the moment Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour gave the Zionist movement his promise in 1917 to establish a national home for the Jews in Palestine, “he opened the door to the endless conflict that would soon engulf the country and its people”; Balfour promised to protect the aspirations of the non-Jewish population — “a strange reference to the vast native majority” — but the declaration clashed precipitately with both the aspirations and natural rights of the Palestinians for nationhood and independence (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.37).

  • Britain’s Mandate charter for Palestine incorporated the 1917 Balfour Declaration wholesale, with its promise to the Zionist movement to secure a ‘homeland’ for the Jews in Palestine (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.55-56).

The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, Wadi al-Bustani, Resistance Poetry, Zionism, Imperialism

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