The Balfour declaration isn’t history, it’s an everyday reality for Palestinians

By Yasmeen el Khoudary

The British role I was referring to is the 1917 Balfour declaration, a letter from the then foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, which endorsed the “… establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. Britain, in effect, promised the Jewish population, who made up less than 10% of the total population of Palestine at the time, a land that Britain was fighting to capture from the Ottomans

In Palestine, Arabs are still silenced and sidelined by a declaration that is being commemorated as if it were a relic of empire Wednesday 1 November 2017

A few weeks ago, I was returning to London from a trip abroad. Exhausted, hungry, and annoyed by the long queue ahead at border control, it took me a bit of time to absorb my surroundings, and to realise that the only language I could hear was Hebrew. I happened to be standing in the middle of a group of Israelis whose flight from Tel Aviv had just landed in London.

I stood in the queue, not knowing how or what to feel. Because, as a Palestinian, I haven’t been able to go back to my country since I left it a few years ago, not even for a visit, owing to the continuing Israeli siege on Gaza. Yet all the Israelis who were around me enjoy the kind of travel freedoms and rights that Palestinians are denied by Israel.

After what felt like a lifetime, my turn finally came. I walked towards the desk and gave the border agency official my Palestinian passport. Flabbergasted, he told me that he had never before encountered a Palestinian passportholder on the Tel Aviv flight. When I asked him why he thought that might have been the case, he shrugged and said he thought “they probably travel on different flights”.

I explained to him that as a Palestinian passport holder, I am in fact automatically barred from boarding any flight from Tel Aviv, even though Ben Gurion airport is a one-hour drive from Gaza City, my home town. My husband is also barred even though he carries a British passport, since he was born in Palestine and holds a Gaza ID.

Palestinians in Gaza have absolutely no means of travel: the only airport was destroyed during an Israeli raid in 2001, land borders have been shut for eleven years, and Israel restricts access to the sea for fishing, let alone travelling. “Britain had a major role to play in creating this injustice, and the government is planning to celebrate it this year,” I told the immigration officer. He apologised, but I implored him instead to remember the reality each time he vets the passports of passengers from the Tel Aviv flight.

The British role I was referring to is the 1917 Balfour declaration, a letter from the then foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, which endorsed the “… establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. Britain, in effect, promised the Jewish population, who made up less than 10% of the total population of Palestine at the time, a land that Britain was fighting to capture from the Ottomans.

The declaration - which was later endorsed by the British government barely addressed the 730,000 indigenous Palestinian Arabs who made up the Palestine population, merely stating that “Nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.” Not only did the declaration reduce the original inhabitants of the land into a single “non-Jewish” category, but it also demoted national rights to civil and religious, thereby denying the vast majority of Palestine’s population any national or political rights.

This week, a hundred years on, the British government is officially celebrating the centenary of Balfour with what Prime Minister Theresa May described as “pride”. But being in Britain for me at this time feels like being deafened by white noise around marking a historic event, as if Balfour was just another relic from the British empire.

The reality, however, is that it is alive and well, and it continues to have a detrimental effect on the lives of millions of Palestinians every day. Yet the continuing discussion in Britain is shallow and superficial, and is in many ways an insulting re-enactment of the atmosphere that prevailed in 1917. We in the “existing non-Jewish communities”, whose immediate lives are still affected by the declaration, just as they were in 1917, are silenced and sidelined.

The British government has refused all Palestinian national demands, including recognising Palestine or even apologising for Balfour. And although I believe that this historical injustice and its ramifications, which led to the ongoing occupation of Palestine, will not simply be resolved by reinstating basic human rights for Palestinians, I would nonetheless ask the following: as a member of the “non-Jewish communities in Palestine”, who do I apply to in Britain now to claim my “civil and religious rights”?

Yasmeen is an independent Londonbased researcher and writer specialised in Palestinian history and cultural heritage.