Still functioning despite Israel’s ban, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency chief, Philippe Lazzarini, explains how the agency is laying the groundwork for future Palestinian institutions. By Ghousoon Bisharat and Meron Rapoport From +972 and Local Call 27 Feb, 2025 At the end of January, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) — the main humanitarian…
In just a few weeks, under cover of the war on Gaza and the tenuous ceasefire there, Israel has displaced more than 40,000 Palestinian refugees and destroyed four camps in the north of the Occupied Territories, stoking fears it seeks to erase the refugee question altogether. By Naela Khalil The New Arab, Ramallah, 18 Feb,…
Unable to pinpoint Hamas commanders in Gaza’s tunnels, the Israeli army decimated entire residential blocks with bunker-buster bombs to crush the passages below and flood them with lethal fumes, according to an investigation by Yuval Abraham 6 Feb, 2025 From the Israeli investigative journal +972 and Local Call The Israeli army intensively bombarded residential areas…
The report British Military Collaboration with Israel (January 2025), published by the British Palestinian Committee, examines the extent of the United Kingdom’s military ties with Israel and their implications under international law. It argues that the UK’s support – through arms exports, military logistics, and intelligence cooperation – contributes to Israel’s military operations in Gaza…
Below we reproduce an interview with former Israeli Diplomat Alon Liel in which he stresses the influence the UK still has in Israel and the powerful message UK recognition of Palestine would send to the Israeli government. In 2020, Alon Liel gave a talk to the Balfour Project in which he called for an end…
Cynical, unwilling, fearful: Benjamin Netanyahu, who rejected this same hostage deal when the Biden administration proposed it months ago, has now been bulldozed into wide-ranging concessions. For the hostages, and for Israel, this is the only morally correct end to an unbearable saga Excerpts from an article by Amos Harel, military and defence correspondent of…
UNRWA must continue its vital work, says UK parliamentary report on occupied Palestinian territory, citing humanitarian catastrophe 20 January 2025 Summary of the report and recommendations The report by the UK parliamentary International Development Committee* provides a critical examination of the humanitarian and legal dimensions of the ongoing situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT).…
Sami abu Salem is a Gaza journalist who, like most Gazan Palestinians, has been pursued with his extended family up and down the Strip by Israel’s war machine since October, 2023. Sami has reported regularly to broadcaster and film-maker Mike Joseph, and so to the Balfour Project. Earlier this week he sent this voice commentary…
15 January 2025 The Balfour Project is delighted to announce the appointment of Brian Brivati as its first Executive Director as of today, 15 January 2025. This appointment marks an important step forward in the growth of the charity as an effective British advocate for peace with justice and equality for Palestinians and Israelis alike.…
Imran Mulla, of Middle East Eye, tries and fails to find any consistency in the Government’s approach to the war on Gaza and any real pressure on Israel 3 Jan 2025 Six months after Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won the general election in the United Kingdom, his Government’s approach to the war has alienated UK…
By Richard Burden 3 Jan 2025: The picture on our Home Page is a photo that will come to symbolise the sheer enormity of Israel’s assault on healthcare in Gaza and its attempt to empty the north of Gaza of Palestinians altogether. It is ethnic cleansing and it is deliberate policy. It is not even…
Introduction by Timothy Mattar, Trustee 27 November 2024 The Balfour Project is proud to share the findings of a recent survey entitled ‘Palestine, Israel and the British’, examining the views of the British public on the war in Gaza and solutions to the wider conflict. This timely research, organised by UKPAN and supported by the…
The story isn’t Hamas, religion or terrorism. Rashid Khalidi, eminent historian and a pre-eminent Palestinian intellectual of our time, is convinced that the Israelis simply do not understand the conflict – living in a ‘bubble of false consciousness’. Here he talks to Haaretz reporter Itay Mashiach 30 Nov 2024 On May 1 this year, the day…
By Menachem Klein In the past year, I have been trying to decipher what happened to most Israeli Jews. What clouded their minds and hardened their hearts to what Israel’s armed forces are doing in their name to Palestinians and Lebanese? Answering these questions, I do not intend to justify Israel’s alleged war crimes, but…
By Mike Joseph ‘No bombs, no bodies’, wrote a viewer about my film, GAZA A Story of Love and War, ‘and yet so powerful and moving’. Lacking the expected screenplay of horror that fills television and online news daily since October 2023, this film may at first seem little more than two journalists talking about…
Under the leadership of Josh Paul and Tariq Habash, a coalition of Americans is ushering in a new chapter for US politics and policy on Israel/Palestine.. A New Policy will work to align our foreign policy with American values of equality, justice, human rights and freedom for all Washington, DC , 16 Oct— Former U.S.…
Sun 27 Oct 2024 Jewish Voice for Labour introduction The UK may have left the European Union, but it remains an important international organisation with influence on the world stage. It seems, however, to be tying itself in knots over Israel and Palestine. In doing so it is failing to fulfil its legal duties –…
In 25 minutes, this short sequel to GAZA A Story of Love and War, delivers three dramatic moments: The film is based on audience discussions following Ceredigion screenings of GAZA A Story of Love and War. Constituency MP Ben Lake reveals that no subject concerns his constituents more urgently than Gaza. He shares with the audience and…
By Joseph Willits 16 Oct 2024 Joseph Willits is Head of Parliamentary Affairs at the Council for Arab British Understanding, and this article first appeared in Middle East Eye. Some hoped the new Government would chart a fresh course: but after 100 days in office, Keir Starmer continues to fail Palestinians One hundred days ago,…
By Jonathan Kuttab This question is important because of the prevailing political and media narratives. These narratives claim that what Hamas did on that day, apart from being unprovoked, was so heinous and evil that it excused everything that happened next. This is allowing politicians to claim that the evil of Israel’s genocidal attacks were…
On 18 September the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) voted to adopt a resolution which reaffirms the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) of 19 July 2024. The vote followed a debate concerning Israeli actions in occupied East Jerusalem and the rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territory. There were 124 votes in favour,…
On 6 April this year (2024), amid steadily increasing Israeli aggression and oppression in the occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank, Israeli security agents seized at gunpoint a 23-year-old Palestinian woman, Layan Nasir, taking her from her home in the town of Bir Zeit, near Ramallah There was no charge, no indication of trial,…
By Daniel Levy US policies strengthen Benjamin Netanyahu – whose political preference in the short term is an open-ended war, not a deal. Kamala Harris should not continue this (This article appeared in The Guardian on 27 Aug 2024) The Biden administration remains in an intense phase of Middle East diplomatic activity working to avoid a regional…
By Diana Safieh This article first appeared in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs of August/September 2024, pp. 20-2 ON 6 JUNE this year, at a Balfour Project conference in London, Palestinian political analyst Nour Odeh discussed the unique survivor’s guilt felt by Palestinians in the West Bank during Israel’s current war in Gaza.…
By Richard Sewell 2 August 2024 People must not avert their eyes from the conflict in the Holy Land, writes Richard Sewell in a personal reflection from Jerusalem In 1955, the Anglican priest and monk (and later bishop) Trevor Huddleston was recalled to England by his Order, having served for 15 years as a priest in apartheid-era…
A historian of the Middle East recalls the passionate Zionists who opposed such an entity as a distraction from the goal of ‘true Zionism’, which was to create a land where Arabs and Jews would flourish together. By JOHN MCHUGO From the 27 July 2024 edition of THE TABLET “A STATE at any cost” is…
By Oren Ziv, July 8, 2024 Israeli soldiers describe the near-total absence of firing regulations in the Gaza war, with troops shooting as they please, setting homes ablaze and leaving corpses on the streets — all with their commanders’ permission In early June, al Jazeera aired a series of disturbing videos revealing what it described as…
Today, the ICJ has delivered its Opinion: the 1967 Israeli occupation is unlawful. The Balfour Project supports this Opinion and calls on the British Government to do so. In 2022 the UN General Assembly asked the ICJ two questions: The Court dismissed the Conservative Government’s contention that it should decline to deliver an opinion. The…
Menachem Klein explores how Israel’s rule over the Palestinians has created a new form of the religion Originally published in Logos. A fundamental question: “Are we, Israelis, still Jews?”, asked the philosopher Ernest Simon in 1953.[1] What looks like a provocative question, was indeed a descriptive statement. He concluded that the establishment of the Jewish…
The June-July 2024 report of the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, primarily on Gaza and Southern Israel but also including the West Bank and East Jerusalem, finds that on 7 Oct last year, Palestinian armed groups, including Hamas, committed war crimes, including abuses of International Human Rights Law…
Top Israeli Government and security officials have overseen a nine-year surveillance operation targeting the International Criminal Court and Palestinian rights groups to try to thwart a war crimes probe, reveals a joint investigation by +972, Local Call and The Guardian By Yuval Abraham and Meron Rapoport 28 May, 2024 For nearly a decade, Israel has…
Article in The Independent, 27 May 2024 For more than a century, Britain has shown scant respect for Palestinian rights, says our former envoy in Jerusalem, Sir Vincent Fean – we must now play our part in creating a framework for peace. Palestinian self-determination is the key to a just peace in the Middle East.…
Peace with Justice – how to get there Email your MP on Recognition of Palestine 6 June Conference Tickets & Info Balfour Project Action Points for UK Government The Hamas attack of 7th October 2023 and the on-going Israeli destruction of Gaza which followed are but the latest, and most devastating, episode of cycles of…
Special guest Queen Rania of Jordan discusses the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the Israel-Hamas war in this exclusive one-on-one with The ReidOut on MSNBC. “What’s happening in Gaza today… is a war crime,” Queen Rania tells Joy Reid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDxe9JFsfzc&ab_channel=MSNBC
War was the Zionists’ choice in 1948, writes Balfour Project Trustee and historian John McHugo. And Israel must acknowledge its responsibility towards the Palestinians who were turned into refugees…more than 70 per cent of Palestine’s population at the time. Click here to read article in The National
‘It is hard to describe it as anything but ethnic cleansing’ By Donald Macintyre If you wanted someone to illustrate the Palestinian concept of sumud you could have done a lot worse than Halima Jaber Nawaja sitting in front of her house three weeks after Israeli settlers came and told her family to leave it or be…