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Britain Can Be Proud of the Balfour Declaration

(Gatestone Institute) Col. Richard Kemp - This week we enter the centenary year of the Balfour Declaration, signed on November 2, 1917 - the first recognition by the greatest power in the world at the time of the right of the Jewish people to their national homeland in Palestine. Under the San Remo Resolution three years later, the Balfour Declaration was enshrined in international law, leading ultimately to the proclamation of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948. In demanding that Britain apologize for a 99-year-old statement supporting a national home for the Jewish people, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas exposes his true position, and the true position of all factions of the Palestinian leadership: that the Jewish people have no right to a national home; the Jewish state has no right to exist. Despite Britain sometimes sinking into moral weakness over its subsequent failure to support the state that it incubated, the country can be intensely proud that Britain alone embraced Zionism in 1917. And it was the blood of many thousands of British, Australian and New Zealand soldiers that created the conditions that made the modern-day State of Israel a possibility. These men fought and died in the Palestine campaign to defeat the Ottoman Empire that had occupied the territory for centuries. Former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, the true motivating force behind the Balfour Declaration, said in 1931: "The Jews surely have a special claim on [Palestine]. They are the only people who have made a success of it during the past 3,000 years. They are the only people who have made its name immortal, and as a race, they have no other home. This was their first; this has been their only home." Nothing has changed in the Arabs' attitudes and actions from Balfour's day to our own. Yet we have seen a miraculous and untold transformation over those 99 years within the State of Israel. Col. Richard Kemp was Commander of British Forces in Afghanistan.
2016-11-09 00:00:00
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