By Erskine B Childers Published in The Spectator of 12 May 1961 The Palestine Arab refugees wait, and multiply, and are debated at the United Nations. In 13 years, their numbers have, increased from 650,000 to 1,145,000. Most of them survive only on rations from the UN agency, UNRWA. Their subsistence has already cost £110,000,000.…
Even before the British Mandate for Palestine and the Balfour Declaration, British intervention in the Holy Land was laying the foundations for Israel’s occupation, with consequences that reverberate today By Gabriel Polley 23 March 2023 Twenty twenty two marked the centenary of the British Mandate for Palestine, which formalised Britain’s presence in the Holy Land after the First World…
By Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Editor of Foreign Affairs Published on July 1, 1957 It would be wrong to call the United Nations experiment in administering the Gaza Strip a failure; the experiment was never made. Some preparations for it were made. Civilian experts were assembled and dispatched to Gaza on the heels of the United…
1901 Keren Kayemeth [Jewish National Fund] founded as land-acquisition organ of WZO; land acquired by JNF in Palestine to be inalienably Jewish, and exclusively Jewish labour to be employed on it. 1903 Lloyd George’s law firm acted for Herzl in negotiations on a Jewish community in Uganda. Lloyd George drafted a charter for the ‘Jewish…
This booklet has been published by the British Palestine Police Association (BPPA) for the centenary of the Palestine Police which carried the main burden of law and order during the British Mandate. The Force was at first mainly locally recruited with British senior officers, but the difficulty of policing by Arabs or Jews, given the political emotions involved, led…
Published in The Guardian, 30 Aug 2020 by Oliver Holmes, Jerusalem Correspondent Exclusive: architect leaked plans to Jewish militants leading to raid seen as signifying London’s declining control The family of a decorated British civil servant who built a notorious jail for the empire in Palestine has revealed he leaked the building plans to Jewish…
A talk given online in June 2020. Andrew Whitley: My thanks to so many of you for taking the trouble today to attend this online talk from the Balfour Project, I hope you will find it stimulating and thought-provoking. It may be a little confusing at times because we’re going to be jumping between Palestine…
By Avi Shlaim This is the full text of a truncated version of Avi Shlaim’s article in The Guardian. The Guardian had edited out the references to Winston Churchill and the Israeli Policy Working Group. The wave of anti-racist protest sweeping through the country has prompted a re-examination of colonial legacies and responsibilities. Britain’s theft…
One of the many merits of the book is the way Khalidi uses his family and his own life experience to tell this tragic, yet-to-be-righted, story of the Palestinians.
This article from Haaretz, which was published in July 2019, describes how Israel is suppressing information on what actually happened during the Nakba.
William M. Mathew See also Part I and Part II A. GEORGE MARSHALL: ‘A NEAR-RUN THING’. Truman’s fundamental position was straightforward – at least retrospectively. As President, he was in charge. In ‘differences of opinion between the White House and the State Department on the business of Palestine’, he wrote in his memoirs, ‘there was…
A 20-page booklet is now available containing the speeches at the conference of the Balfour Project in partnership with King’s College London (see below). The booklet also includes the Balfour Centenary Declaration, which has now been signed by 141 British public figures including 83 Members of the British Parliament. Below is a 20 minute YouTube…
The American Magazine November, 1947 Summary This appeal to the American people, written by King Abdullah, son of Sharif Hussein and grandfather of the current King of Jordan, appeared in the United States six months before the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. In the article, King Abdullah disputes the mistaken view that Arab opposition to Zionism (and…
Occasionally there are topics that have been written about at such length that it helps to clear the air, or to establish the vantage point from which I intend to consider my subject. My aim therefore is to take a fresh look at the Balfour Declaration in the light of recent scholarship. What I propose…