It's been 107 years since the Balfour Declaration and Britain has not yet atoned for its grave historic mistake. It is time to make amends with the Palestinian people.

It's been 107 years since the #BalfourDeclaration and Britain has not yet atoned for its grave historic mistake. It is time to make amends with the Palestinian people.

 

Husam Zomlot

@hzomlot

Ambassador of the State of Palestine to the UK. Former Ambassdor to the United States.

 

Today, 2 November 2024, marks 107 years since the Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917. 

 

It has never been more urgent that the injustice of that declaration be addressed and accounted for.

By ignoring the rights of the Palestinian people to their own land, the Balfour Declaration effectively cancelled the Palestinian people.

 

This set in motion a series of events culminating in the ethnic cleansing of two-thirds of the Palestinian people in the 1947-49 Nakba. 

 

By then allowing Israel to ignore, without consequence, the right of return of Palestinian refugees, a long record of Israeli impunity began. 

 

This record of impunity has emboldened Israel not only to seek to take more territory by force over the following decades, but to engage in an ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza and across occupied territory.

 

It is time Israeli impunity ends. 

 

It is time the cancellation of the Palestinian people embodied in the Balfour Declaration is addressed.

And it is time the British government accepts its historic responsibility for this state of affairs, and took action to redress the injustice at the heart of the Balfour Declaration. 

 

How can the UK begin to make amends and work toward ending Israeli impunity? 

 

The UK must take steps to end the ongoing genocide. 

 

It can do this by imposing a full arms embargo, instituting sanctions against Israel for its illegal occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank including occupied East Jerusalem, and demand accountability for Israeli leaders accused of war crimes. 

 

The UK must immediately recognise the State of Palestine as a long overdue inalienable right of the Palestinian people and in compliance with international law and international resolutions.

 

This should come along with an official apology from the British government for the cancellation of the Palestinian people and their legitimate rights.

 

 Simultaneously, the UK must also, in compliance with the International Court of Justice and international law and in accordance with the UK’s explanation for its the vote in the UN’s General Assembly on 18 September, ban all trade in goods and services with Israel’s illegal settlements in occupied territory, penalise British companies that operate illegally there, and affirm the UK’s support for the right of return of Palestinian refugees.

 

International law as expressed by the International Court of Justice is clear: third parties must end any support for Israel’s illegal occupation and recognise the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination. 

 

Those steps are well understood. It is time to take them.

Palestine in the UK

@PalMissionUK

 

 

1917 Balfour Declaration

Anti-Defamation League ramps up lobbying to promote controversial definition of antisemitism : Federal records show a dramatic spending increase that critics say is primarily intended to punish criticism of Israel and target pro-Palestinian groups

 The Anti-Defamation League has spent record amounts on lobbying in recent years, including on bills opponents say are meant to punish criticism of Israel and target Jewish peace and Palestinian rights groups.

The Jewish civil rights organization, founded in 1913, is the self-described “leading anti-hate organization in the world”, and has historically focused on combating antisemitism by shaping public opinion. Its lobbying spike marks a dramatic shift – it spent about $100,000 on lobbying in 2020 and is on pace to spend nearly $1.6m this year based on its first quarter expenditures, a Guardian analysis of federal records finds.

The spending positions the ADL as the largest pro-Israel lobbying force on domestic issues. Records show the surge’s broader aim is to promoting a controversial definition of antisemitism across a range of federal agencies and mobilizing the government to enforce it....

 READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/15/adl-lobby-antisemitism-definition

Stephen Kapos is a regular figure on the pro-Palestine marches, often as part of the ever-growing Jewish bloc: “My message to the brave student protesters in America is just keep doing it. Don’t give up.”

Holocaust survivor Stephen Kapos  STOP THE WAR

 

“My message to the brave student protesters in America is just keep doing it. Don’t give up.” – Stephen Kapos

A Holocaust survivor opposed to Israel’s war on Gaza on Wednesday told U.S. student protesters they’re on the right side of history, and that the global wave of demonstrations against the slaughter and starvation of Palestinians will soon force Western leaders to face up to their complicity in genocide.

Stephen Kapos, 86, was 7 years old in 1944 when he was separated from his family during the Nazi extermination of Jews in his native Hungary. Most of his family was murdered in the Holocaust but Kapos survived and moved to the United Kingdom after the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary.

Kapos is part of a small group of Shoah survivors and their descendants who “demonstrate disagreement with the use of the Holocaust experience as a cover by the Zionists and the state of Israel.” They attend protests wearing signs around their necks reading, “This Holocaust Survivor Says Stop the Genocide in Gaza!”

“As a Holocaust survivor, my message to the brave student protesters in America is just keep doing it. Don’t give up,” Kapos said in video published by Double Down News. “We are doing exactly the same, and in the long term we are going to prevail.”

Kapos’ comments came amid a growing wave of pro-Palestine student protests—many of them Jewish-led—on dozens of U.S. university and college campuses in response to Israel’s U.S.-backed war on Gaza, which the International Court of Justice in January found “plausibly” genocidal and which many Israeli and international experts say is undoubtedly a genocide.

According to Gazan and international officials, more than 122,000 Palestinians have been killed or maimed during 202 days of near-relentless Israeli attacks. This figure includes around 11,000 people who are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of bombed-out buildings. Around 90% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been forcibly displaced. Starvation and dehydration caused by Israel’s bombardment and blockade of Gaza are killing children and other vulnerable people.

Instead of condemning Israeli leaders, the Biden administration has lavished them with billions of dollars in U.S. military aid while providing diplomatic cover for Israeli crimes and blocking recognition of Palestinian statehood at the United Nations.

As the suffering in Gaza continues, U.S. students have set up encampments or staged other forms of protest, some of which have been brutally repressed by police—who have also attacked and arrested journalists and bystanders.

On Wednesday, far-right Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu implored U.S. authorities to crack down even harder on the students, whom he called an “antisemitic mob.”

Highlighting video footage of Netanyahu comparing the student protests to what happened at German universities during the rise of Nazism, Kapos said that “the way that the Israeli government is using the memory of the Holocaust in order to justify what they’re doing to the Gazans is a complete insult to the memory of the Holocaust.”

He said he is also protesting “the conflating of Jewishness with Zionism, which is what the Israeli state is trying to do, which does nothing but increase antisemitism.”

Kapos predicted that “today’s marches are having a very hopeful aspect that is so large, so persistent, so global that eventually the Western leadership—which are trying to deny what is actually going on—will be forced to face up to it, and I think we are not far from that.”

“There is a question of historical responsibility towards injustice, genocide, and fascism,” Kapos asserted. “If you are indifferent, if you do not take a stand, you acquire a degree of guilt without any doubt and I think it is imperative to assert opposition and even some degree of disadvantage and risk if you want to be guilt-free when history judges what’s happening.”

Kapos and his comrades are part of a long history of Holocaust survivors speaking out against Israeli crimes against Palestinians.

Long before today’s growing acknowledgment that Israel is an apartheid state, the late Suzanne Weiss—whose parents were murdered in Nazi-occupied France—said in 2010 that “the Palestinians are victims of ethnic cleansing and apartheid” and that “the Israeli government’s actions toward the Palestinians awaken horrific memories of my family’s experiences under Hitlerism.”

Hajo Meyer, who survived 10 months in the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, argued during his lifetime that “what is happening to the Palestinians every day under the occupation” was “almost identical” to “what was done to the German Jews before the ‘Final Solution,’” and that instead of making Jews safer, Israeli policies and practices were stoking the flames of antisemitism.

Holocaust survivors who stand up for Palestinian rights have been condemned by critics as “antisemites” and “self-hating Jews” who, in Meyer’s case, allegedly abused his status as a Holocaust survivor.

Kapos, who has experienced such slurs, is undaunted and says he has no plans to stop protesting. During a recent rally in London he vowed, “I’ll keep doing it as long as the bombing and apartheid and the injustice is going on.”

Source: Common Dreams

26 Apr 2024 • by Brett Wilkins

 Stop the War

Free Gaza: Stop the Massacre - End the Siege! 

🇵🇸 #MayDay4Palestine 🇵🇸