Several months after first announcing their plan to sue Britain over the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the Palestinian Authority’s leaders, far from changing their minds, have continued to attack Israel’s legitimacy. In other words, writes David Horovitz, they’re still fighting not to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza but to destroy the Jewish state:
Polished Palestinian Authority politicians and spokespeople would have the world believe that their objections to Israel are centered on the occupation of the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem, and on the settlement enterprise—and that what they seek is an independent Palestine alongside Israel, not in place of it.
The Palestinians’ new campaign to highlight the ostensible illegalities and iniquities of the Balfour Declaration tells a different story. It shows an undimmed hostility to the very notion of Jewish sovereignty anywhere in the Holy Land, and an abiding refusal to accept Jewish legitimacy here.
The 1917 declaration pledged to safeguard the rights of others even as it sought to realize the rights of the Jews. So, too, the UN vote on partition in 1947. And yet here we still are, a century later, with the Palestinian leadership branding as a “crime” the start of a process that, had they accepted it, would long since have given them statehood. For the Palestinian leadership, in 2016, we Jews remain people who don’t belong here, who got something that wasn’t theirs. . . .
In declaring diplomatic and legal war on the Balfour Declaration, Palestinian leaders are telling the world—to their and our enduring misfortune—that nothing has changed in 100 years, that their opposition to our state in any borders remains greater than their desire for their own independent entity. A century later, they are affirming that their refusal to share any part of this land with the Jewish people remains absolute.
Read more on Times of Israel: http://www.timesofisrael.com/palestinian-campaign-vs-balfour-shows-hostility-to-jewish-state-undimmed-after-100-years/