Balfour at 109: Britain must answer for the abuses in Palestine it now condemns
Victor Kattan writes in Middle East Eye on 5 November 2026:
On 8 October, workers in East Jerusalem took down the sign reading “British Consulate General”. Britain has had a diplomatic presence in the city since the 1830s: under the Ottomans, under its own rule from 1917 to 1948, and through nearly 60 years of Israeli occupation.
Israel ordered the consulate closed in retaliation for the British government’s sanctions on West Bank settlements, leaving only a reduced mission in its place.
In announcing those sanctions, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband told the Commons in plain terms that settlers are carrying out the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. For the first time in a generation, a British government is calling dispossession in Palestine exactly what it is.
Yet while Britain now condemns what is being done to Palestinians, it has not sufficiently acknowledged its own part in how it began.
The Balfour Declaration turned 109 on 2 November. In a letter to Lord Rothschild, a leading figure in Britain’s Jewish community, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour pledged British support for “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.
Less often quoted is the rest of that sentence: “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. These “non-Jewish communities”, comprising Muslim and Christian Arabs, made up around 90 percent of the population at the time. Nonetheless, Britain quickly abandoned its commitment to safeguarding those rights.
A promise abandoned
In a private memorandum of 1919, Balfour, a Conservative statesman and peer, admitted that “in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country”. Zionism, he added, was “of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land”.
British policy followed suit. The League of Nations Covenant had provisionally recognised the Ottoman Arab community of Palestine as an “independent nation” to be assisted until it was “able to stand alone”. Despite this, the Arab majority spent nearly 30 years without an elected or representative governing body. When a compromise in the form of a modest legislative council was finally put forward in the mid-1930s, Westminster struck it down.
When Palestinians rose in revolt in 1936, Britain answered with emergency law. A district commissioner could imprison a man without trial for a year, then renew the order indefinitely. Whole villages were fined in cash, livestock and crops for offences no one had been shown to commit. The army blew up a large part of Jaffa’s old city. Firing a weapon became a capital offence, and military courts sent rebels to the gallows.
By the end of the revolt, around 5,000 Palestinians had been killed. By the late Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi’s estimate, one in ten adult Arab men was killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled.
When the Nakba came in 1948, Palestinian society had already been stripped of its leadership, many of whom had been held in detention facilities overseas. British troops stood by amid the ethnic cleansing, and some even joined in the plundering of Palestinian property.
Many of the methods Britain now condemns in the West Bank, including collective punishment and house demolitions, began under British emergency law. Some of those regulations are still in use today.
A precedent for accountability
In September 2025, the Britain Owes Palestine campaign submitted a 400-page legal petition to UK ministers setting out this record, based primarily on Britain’s own archival records evidencing multiple acts of misconduct. We are still awaiting a response.