What a generous man !

The British had absolutely no right in promising a national homeland to the Jewish people, or any other people for that matter, anywhere in the world (except perhaps in Britain)... Just imagine Jack Straw (The British Foreign Secretary) promising today a national homeland for the Kurds in Cyprus.

    "How can he do that ? Cyprus does not belong to Britain" you may say.

     Of course not!... "Nor did Palestine ! ".

"The Balfour Declaration, made in November 1917 by the British Government, was made

• by a European power,

• about a non-European territory,

• in flat disregard of both the presence and wishes of the native majority resident in that territory...

...As Balfour himself wrote in 1919, `The contradiction between the letter of the Covenant (the Anglo French Declaration of 1918 promising the Arabs of the former Ottoman colonies that as a reward for supporting the Allies they could have their independence), is even more flagrant in the case of the independent nation of Palestine than in that of the independent nation of Syria. For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country... The four powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desire and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land'."  Edward Said  "The Question of Palestine"

"One can imagine an argument for the right of a persecuted minority to find refuge in another country able to accommodate it; one is hard-pressed, however, to imagine an argument for the right of a peaceful minority to politically and perhaps physically displace the indigenous population of another country. Yet...the latter was the actual intention of the Zionist movement."  Norman Finkelstein  "Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict"

Wasn't Palestine a wasteland before the Jews started immigrating there?

"Britain's high commissioner for Palestine, John Chancellor, recommended total suspension of Jewish immigration and land purchase to protect Arab agriculture. He said: `all cultivable land was occupied; that no cultivable land now in possession of the indigenous population could be sold to Jews without creating a class of landless Arab cultivators'... The Colonial Office rejected the recommendation."  John Quigley  "Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice"

"We came to this country which was already populated by Arabs, and we are establishing a Hebrew, that is a Jewish, state here. Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. There is not a single community in the country that did not have a former Arab population."  Moshe Dayan, quoted in Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi's "Original Sins"