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Palestinians and the Balfour Declaration: Resisting the Past

(Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies-Bar-Ilan University) Dr. Alex Joffe - A striking aspect of Palestinian culture is its resistance to the realities of the past. On Sep. 22, 2016, PA President Mahmoud Abbas addressed the UN and demanded an apology from Britain for the Balfour Declaration. Abbas had previously threatened to sue London for damages resulting from the declaration and the creation of Israel. The irony, however, is that Balfour's wholly legal commitment, ratified by the League of Nations in 1920, is assailed much the same way the 1947 UN Palestine partition recommendation was condemned by the Arabs. Moreover, it is difficult to see what direct value an apology would have in helping to establish a Palestinian state. The Balfour apology campaign is thus another element in the Palestinian wars against inconvenient historical facts that must be denied, attacked, rewritten, or otherwise assailed, rather than debated, conceded, or shared. This approach accounts for such extraordinary Palestinian claims as Arafat's denial that there was ever a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem; Saeb Erekat's statement that the Palestinians are descendants of Epipaleolithic inhabitants, and thus the "real" indigenous population of the land; and the more consequential insistence that Jews are only adherents to a religion and not members of a nation. The concepts of redeeming fallen honor, perpetual victimhood, international responsibility, and achieving through guilt what politics and force of arms cannot are cultural ideas, transmitted endlessly by Palestinian leaders and through their educational system and media. But they are also reflected in Palestinian politics. At every turn, negotiations get to a stage and then stop because compromise would preclude full "restoration" of what never was. Fighting century-old events is unlikely to build either a stable Palestinian society or peace with Israel. The writer is a fellow at the Middle East Forum.
2017-03-29 00:00:00
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