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The Palestinians have announced they plan to sue Britain for helping, in 1917, to establish the modern State of Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed the Palestinians announcement that they intend to sue the United Kingdom for the Balfour Declaration, a document written almost 100 years ago by then UK Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur James Balfour which expressed support for the establishment of a Jewish national homeland in the land of Israel.
Speaking at the annual memorial ceremony for Benjamin Zeev Herzl on Tuesday, Netanyahu said the Palestinians’ step clarifies that the root of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the refusal by the Palestinians to recognize the Jewish state in any borders.
“Of course they will fail” Netanyahu said of the lawsuit.
“After nearly 4,000 years of Jewish history inextricably tied to this land, almost one hundred years after the Balfour Declaration, 68 years after the establishment of the State of Israel, there are people who still deny our strong connection to our land.This shines a light clarifying that the root of the conflict is the refusal to recognize a Jewish state in any borders, Netanyahu declared.
“It was and remains the heart of this conflict, and until we do not recognize this and tell the nations of the world, ‘Here, this is the root of the conflict, that and the incitement that accompanies it,’ only then – without diagnoses, without prognoses – there is no cure, there is no relief,” he explained.
The Israeli premier was responding to comments made by Palestinian Authority foreign minister Riyad al-Maliki to the recent Arab League summit in Mauritania in which he urged those in attendance to “bring a suit against the British government over the ominous Balfour Declaration which resulted in the Nakba (catastrophe) for the Palestinian people.”
The document, al-Malki said, “gave people who don’t belong there something that wasn’t theirs.”
The 1917 Balfour Declaration, written by Lord Balfour to Baron Walter Rothschild, stated that the British government would “view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” The document is considered by many to be a founding legal document for the State of Israel.
The 100th anniversary of the historic declaration will be celebrated next year, sure to prompt international anti-Israel activity.
By: United with Israel Staff
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