2nd Nov 2022 ~
The Balfour Declaration was issued by Britain laying the foundations for settler-colonialism in Palestine.
The Balfour Declaration was named after British politician Arthur James Balfour a white supremacist who is today revered by Britain.
As prime minister, Balfour passed the Aliens Act in 1905, an explicitly anti-immigration legislation which was designed to block entry to Britain for Jewish refugees fleeing from pogroms. Zionism, according to Balfour, was a “serious effort to mitigate the age-old miseries created for western civilization by the presence in its midst of a body which is too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or absorb.”
Known as "Bloody Balfour" for his brutal rule in Ireland until 1891, which he once said: "All the civilization in Ireland is the work of England”. There's a drawing called “Ireland wrestles with famine while Balfour plays golf”, which encapsulates his reputation there.
In 1906, Balfour argued against giving Black people in South Africa the vote: “Men are not born equal, the white and black races are not born with equal capacities: they are born with different capacities which education cannot and will not change.”
Balfour's 1917 declaration set the stage for full-blown land theft and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the decades that followed, which is ongoing today. 105 years after the declaration was issued people across Palestine are continuing to resist against settler-colonialism.
For more information with regard to the Balfour Declaration I recommend reading the book “The Balfour Declaration Empire, the Mandate and Resistance in Palestine”, by Bernard Regan"
