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Palestinians Protest Balfour Declaration on Centenary

Palestinians Protest Balfour Declaration on Centenary
folder_openPalestine access_time6 years ago
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Local Editor

Thousands of Palestinians took to the streets in protest across the occupied West Bank Thursday marking a century since the Balfour Declaration, Britain's promise to Zionists to create a Jewish "home" in what is now the "Israeli" entity.

Palestinians Protest Balfour Declaration on Centenary

In Ramallah, some 3,000 protesters marched from the city center to the British Consulate, with many waving black flags and banners with slogans such as "100 years of dispossession." Smaller demonstrations took place in occupied al-Quds [Jerusalem] and elsewhere in the West Bank.

Rawada Odeh, a demonstrator in al-Quds, said she was protesting because Balfour promised a home to the Zionists while neglecting that there is a "Palestinian population here in our land."

"The land does not belong to Balfour," she said. "We are Palestinians, and we are living here and we are following our issue till we succeed."

The 1917 declaration served as the basis for the British Mandate of Palestine, which was approved in 1920 by the League of Nations. The following decades saw a spike in the number of Jews immigrating to Palestine as Zionist "state" institutions took root. With that came increased friction with the Arab population.

"Israeli" Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu marks the anniversary in London on Thursday at a dinner attended by Prime Minister Theresa May.

The Palestinians see the declaration as the original sin, a harbinger of their "nakba," or catastrophe, the mass displacement that resulted from the war surrounding the entity's creation in 1948. That refugee crisis reverberates across the region today, and the Palestinians have cast "Israel", through the declaration and its imperialist British patrons, as a colonial enterprise.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team

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