How Britain entrenched Zionist impunity in Palestine
Male and female Arab fighters during the revolt, 1936
Ghada Karmi writes in The New Arab on 2 December 2025:
Are we seeing the final dismemberment of Palestine and the end of the Palestinian struggle for freedom? It is a distinct possibility, and if it happens it will be the culmination of a long and cruel colonial journey that was imposed on the Palestinians from the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 until today.
That pernicious and ill-advised decision to create a ‘national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine led inexorably to the current genocidal war on Gaza and Israel’s multiple human rights abuses against the Palestinians, ongoing since Israel’s establishment.
Balfour’s great crime in 1917 was not just to cede control of Palestine (which Britain did not own) to foreign colonists, but to do so specifically and, of all people, to a group of tormented, complex Jewish European Zionists with an acute sense of grievance about their historic persecution. The deep animus they held against a world, which had allowed it to happen, fed their belief that the world owed them recompense for their sufferings, and Britain’s offer of a ‘national home’ in Palestine was only their due.
It gave them a sense of entitlement to the country which bred an arrogant conviction that it belonged exclusively to them.
Such ideas, never questioned or rejected by Israel’s western supporters, but on the contrary indulged and accepted as valid, have led to the systematic depredations of Palestine and its people.