Balfour centennial
With regard to “PA prime minister to UK: Apologize for Balfour” (October 30), if the Arabs want an apology, let them first apologize for the expulsion of Jews from Arab lands and the confiscation of their abandoned property. Apologize? My foot! ALIZA WEINBERG
Rehovot
As Barry Shaw (“The Balfour Declaration – some stories and anecdotes,” Original Thinking, October 29) points out, little words can have tremendous influence.
A Shaw writes, the original draft of the Balfour Declaration mentioned “‘the reconstitution of Palestine as a Jewish state.’ But by the time it had reached its final draft... this had been watered down to read ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.’”
So the little word “as” haunts us until the present. IDA SELAVAN SCHWARCZ
Omer
In light of everything that is being written about the centennial of the Balfour Declaration, it would appear that the importance of the declaration is overstressed.
The November 2, 1917, declaration was merely a suggestion made in time of war by an international statesman that if the western nations would defeat the Central Powers, which included Ottoman Turkey, the Ottoman Empire would be dismembered and a number of Arab states and mandates, including Palestine for the Jewish people, would be proposed.
While it might be considered the motivation, the significant dates, however, are April 25, 1920, when the leading victors agreed to the establishment of a Jewish Palestine, which was subsequently confirmed by the 52 members of the League of Nations in Geneva in 1922, with the important statement that “recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.”
It would appear quite clear that what we should be celebrating are the recognition by the nations of the world of Herzl’s vision of turning the messianic dream into a political reality, subsequently endorsed by Balfour and agreed to by the nations of the world in the 1920s, challenged only in our own day by a resurgent Islam that goes unchallenged by a politically correct and enfeebled western society. BERNHARD LAZARUS
Tel Aviv