PLO Secretary-General Saeb Erekat on Monday released a statement marking the 98th anniversary of the Balfour declaration, calling on the international community to "remediate" decades of occupation and exile. "Ninety-eight years ago, the destiny of our nation changed due to the action of a foreign colonial power. The Balfour Declaration should serve as a reminder that what is happening in Palestine is a result of colonial decisions made in faraway capitals," he said. "Mr. Balfour, on behalf of Great Britain, promised Palestine, a country over which Britain had no legal right, to another people. From 85,000 Jews in Palestine (around 12 percent of Palestine's population), few of them were Zionists, and the declaration was even rejected by the only Jewish member of the British Cabinet at that time, Lord Montagu." Erekat added that Palestinians had also rejected the Balfour Declaration and made it clear that the problem was not with a Jewish community in Palestine, but the dramatic transformation of a Muslim and Christian Arab state into an exclusively Jewish one. "The United Kingdom in particular should close the darkness of its colonialist past in the region by taking concrete steps in order to protect and promote Palestinian rights, including the recognition of the State of Palestine on the 1967 border with East Jerusalem as its capital," Erekat said. The Balfour Declaration of Nov. 2, 1917 was a letter sent from British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Baron Rothschild, a British Jewish leader, declaring British support for the "establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." Palestinians have since viewed the declaration as paving the way for the creation of the State of Israel at the expense of the land's original inhabitants. The declaration was made before the British had wrested control of Palestine from the Ottoman Empire, and was not made public until several years after the First World War, in 1920. By that time, Britain had been formally granted a mandate over Palestine by the League of Nations, and was struggling with its contradictory obligations of "rewarding" Arabs for their support during the war, while also fulfilling their pledge to create a Jewish state. As Jewish immigration to Palestine gathered pace through the 1920s and 1930s, the situation grew increasingly fraught, resulting in two large outbreaks of violence between Palestinians and Jewish immigrants in 1929 and 1936. The British increasingly sought to distance themselves from the Balfour Declaration, with a government White Paper in 1939 explicitly rejecting the creation of a Jewish state. However, with the onset of the Second World War, Palestine became a distant priority for Britain. After the war, British forces withdrew from Palestine, leaving it in the hands of the newly created United Nations, which favored partition, particularly as evidence slowly emerged of the vast scale of the Holocaust in Europe. The decision led to the 1948 war between Arab nations, including Palestinians, and Jewish immigrants, ultimately resulting in the creation of the state of Israel and the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes inside its borders, an event known as the Nakba among Palestinians.
