We owe Palestinians for flawed carve-up

BRITAIN still owes Palestinians a country on the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, which controversially promised the “national home for Jewish people” that was to become Israel.

KEVINMAGUIRE

What for Israelis was a joyous moment, paving the way for the creation of their state after the horrors of the Holocaust, is for Palestinians the woeful decision of Empire Britain to give away their lands in 1917.

So, at just 67 words, the deceptively brief pledge by Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Walter Rothschild remains the most explosive short letter in the history of international politics.

Britain cannot simply look away and find excuses when, as the world’s most formidable colonial power, we picked a side in what for many decades has proved one of the globe’s most intractable conflicts.

Opinion’s deeply divided within, as well as between, political parties in what frequently descends into shouting matches, with charges of racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, levelled by bitter enemies.

Tory PM Theresa May will join, in London, her Israeli opposite number Benjamin Netanyahu to applaud the Balfour Declaration, while Labour