With the approach of the 100th anniversary of Britain’s declaration that it favored “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” a Palestinian campaign is underway to obtain an apology from the United Kingdom for this supposed injustice. Alex Joffe explains what the campaign reveals about Palestinian leaders’ aspirations and tactics:

[T]he campaign against the Balfour Declaration [characteristically involves] mistaking symbolism for practical action. Presumably an apology would achieve a partial restoration of Palestinian national honor and constitute another step toward the complete eradication of Israel. However, . . . it is difficult to see what direct value an apology would have in helping to establish a Palestinian state. . . .

The Balfour apology campaign is thus another element in the Palestinian wars against inconvenient historical facts that must be denied, attacked, rewritten, or otherwise assailed, rather than debated, conceded, or shared. This approach accounts for such extraordinary Palestinian claims as [Yasir] Arafat’s denial that there was ever a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem [and] Saeb Erekat’s statement that the Palestinians are descendants of Epipaleolithic inhabitants and thus the “real” indigenous population of the land. . . .

These [preoccupations]—redeeming lost honor, perpetual victimhood, international responsibility, and achieving through guilt what politics and force of arms cannot—are cultural ideas, transmitted endlessly by Palestinian leaders and through their educational system and media. But they are also reflected in Palestinian politics. At every turn, negotiations get to a stage and then stop because compromise would preclude full “restoration” of what never was. Fighting century-old events and hoping to produce another outcome is consistent with this pattern. It is unlikely to build either a stable Palestinian society or peace with Israel.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”