Marking 102 years of the Balfour Declaration, Saeb Erekat, secretary general of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), said today that Britain should remedy this ill by recognizing the state of Palestine, among other things.
He said in a statement marking this occasion in which then British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour promised in 1917 a homeland for Europe’s Jews in Palestine in total disregard for the opinion or existence of its Palestinian Arab population, that the anniversary “should serve as a reminder for the United Kingdom of its historical, political, moral, and legal responsibility to take substantive action and play a proactive role in the fulfillment of the national rights of the people of Palestine.”
Erekat said Britain needs to “apologize for the resulting injustice of a colonialist statement that denied the Palestinian people their political rights, to recognize the State of Palestine, and to take proactive measures against Israel’s colonial-settlement enterprise, including its products, companies, and funding sources.”
He said that “such actions are not going to remediate all the consequences of the Balfour Declaration. Yet they will serve as a model for the rest of the international community to work for a just and lasting peace in Palestine, the Middle East, and the world.”
The PLO official added, “What is happening on the ground today in occupied Palestine cannot be disconnected from the Balfour Declaration. Israel’s colonial agenda, supported by the Trump Administration, is precisely what Balfour envisioned 102 years ago: an overall Israeli control over the land of historic Palestine that can systematically deny the political rights of the Palestinian people and their right to self-determination.”
He saluted the international solidarity movement, civil society organizations, and popular initiatives working towards “the achievement of our rights, defending the principles and core values of the global system and law, in the face of the reactionary wave of populism.”
Erekat concluded by saying, “Only by implementing international law and UN resolutions, we will be able to face those forces that aim at imposing the law of the jungle, threatening the basic principles of peace, security and stability.”
