The Palestinian Authority has been involved since last year in a campaign to delegitimize the 1917 Balfour Declaration, demanding that Britain apologize for its decision to create “a Jewish national home in Palestine.” According to the current Palestinian narrative, the declaration and its subsequent ratification by the League of Nations betrayed the principle of self-determination it was meant to uphold (by ignoring Palestinian Arabs’ right to a state of their own), unjustly gave Arab land to Jews, and thus led to the Arab-Israeli conflict and a century of Palestinian suffering. Gershon Hacohen seeks to put this narrative, and the Balfour declaration itself, in context:

[After 1917], the Arabs claimed the Balfour Declaration contradicted the principle of self-determination—but even as that claim was made, the leaders of the Arab struggle did not demand Palestinian self-determination. What they demanded instead was the joining of the mandatory land of Israel to the short-lived Kingdom of Syria, which was established by the self-proclaimed King Faisal [and lasted from March to July of 1920]. Their recognition of Palestine as part of a “Greater Syria” remained [in place] long after Faisal was expelled from Damascus by the French. . . .

In view of the League of Nations’ design to end imperial colonialism, the recognition by the world powers—followed by the international community as a whole—of the right of the Jews to a national home in the land of Israel stands prominent. The [official acknowledgment] of the exceptional situation of the Jews, most of whom did not reside at that time within the expanse of Mandate rule, . . . emphasized the significance of the special right of the Jewish people in the land of Israel. It recognized their historical and cultural affinity to the land and affirmed the political significance of this affinity.

The importance of the declaration lies also in its timing—decades before the Holocaust. It recognized the right of the people of Israel to establish a national entity in the land of Israel due to their historical ties to the land rather than due to a disaster that befell them. Israeli Jews, [especially], should seek to return to that understanding of the grounds for Israel’s establishment, which was taken for granted at the time by the international community.

In a recent article, the New York Times Magazine asserts that Benjamin Netanyahu “prolonged the war in Gaza to stay in power.” Niranjan Shankar takes the argument apart piece by piece, showing that for all its careful research, it fails to back up its basic claims. For instance: the article implies that Netanyahu torpedoed a three-point cease-fire proposal supported by the Biden administration in the spring of last year:

First of all, it’s crucial to note that Biden’s supposed “three-point plan” announced in May 2024 was originally an Israeli proposal. Of course, there was some back-and-forth and disagreement over how the Biden administration presented this initially, as Biden failed to emphasize that according to the three-point framework, a permanent cease-fire was conditional on Hamas releasing all of the hostages and stepping down. Regardless, the piece fails to mention that it was Hamas in June 2024 that rejected this framework!

It wasn’t until July 2024 that Hamas made its major concession—dropping its demand that Israel commit up front to a full end to the war, as opposed to doing so at a later stage of cease-fire/negotiations. Even then, U.S. negotiators admitted that both sides were still far from agreeing on a deal.

Even when the Times raises more credible criticisms of Israel—like when it brings up the IDF’s strategy of conducting raids rather than holding territory in the first stage of the war—it offers them in what seems like bad faith:

[W]ould the New York Times prefer that Israel instead started with a massive ground campaign with a “clear-hold-build” strategy from the get-go? Of course, if Israel had done this, there would have been endless criticism, especially under the Biden administration. But when Israel instead tried the “raid-and-clear” strategy, it gets blamed for deliberately dragging the war on.