Balfour the criminal

Yossi Schwartz ISL (RCIT section in Israel/Occupied Palestine), 09.03.2024

Danielle Greyman-Kennard of the Jerusalem Post on 8.3.2924 to show how primitive barbarian and stupid are the Pro-Palestine protesters had a report titled: Pro-Palestine destroy historic Lord Balfour painting in Cambridge university. She wrote: ” Activists from the organization Palestine Action destroyed a historic 1914 painting of Lord Arthur James Balfour on Friday, the group confirmed alongside footage of the vandalism. The painting, painted over 100 years ago by artist Philip Alexius de László, was on display at the University of Cambridge’s Trinity College where activists threw red paint over it and slashed the homage. 

For the Zionists Balfour is a hero; he promised them the right to a national home in a country that did not belong to him or to the British Empire.

Then she added: Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden said he was “appalled by the moronic act of wanton vandalism.” Perpetrators should face the full force of the law,” he added in a post on X.

A spokesperson for Cambridge Police told Sky News “This afternoon we received an online report of criminal damage today to a painting at Trinity College, Cambridge.

“Officers are attending the scene to secure evidence and progress the investigation” [1]

I have a small question for Danielle Greyman-Kennard. Can you imagine what will be the reaction of the Zionists if on the wall of the Hebrew University some people will hang the 200 years painting of King Sennacherib and under it: “The great Warrior King of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.”

This king is Portrayed in the Bible as the villain responsible for finishing the scattering of 10 of the 12 tribes of Israel.

Who was Lord Balfour?

He was a known racist and while he may be most known for aiding the Zionist cause in 1917, it’s crucial to remember that Arthur Balfour was a white supremacist. He made that much clear in his own words. In 1906, the British House of Commons was engaged in a debate about the native blacks in South Africa. Nearly all the members of Parliament agreed that the disenfranchisement of the blacks was evil. Not so Balfour, who – almost alone — argued against it.

“We have to face the facts,” Lord Balfour said. “Men are not born equal; the white and black races are not born with equal capacities: they are born with different capacities which education cannot and will not change”

Balfour’s racist views were not limited to Africa. In fact, despite his now iconic support for Zionism, he was not exactly a friend to the Jews. In the late 19th century, pogroms targeting Jews in the Pale of Settlement in Russia had led to waves of Jewish flight westward, to England and the United States. This influx of refugees led to an increase in British anti-immigrant racism and outright anti-Semitism. Support for political action against immigrants grew as the English racists demanded immigration control to keep certain immigrants, particularly Jews, out of the country.

“The racists found a sympathetic ear in Balfour. In 1905, while serving as Prime Minister, Balfour presided over the passage of the Aliens Act. This legislation put the first restrictions on immigration into Great Britain, and it was primarily aimed at restricting Jewish immigration. According to historians, Balfour had personally delivered passionate speeches about the imperative to restrict the wave of Jews fleeing the Russian Empire from entering Britain.” [2]

“What the Zionists provided Balfour with was a solution to the challenges Jewish citizens posed to his ethno-nationalist vision, a solution that didn’t force him to reckon with them. Instead of insisting that societies accept all citizens as equals, regardless of racial or religious background, the Zionist movement offered a different answer: separation. Balfour saw in Zionism not just a blessing for Jews, but for the West as well. As he wrote in 1919 in his Introduction to Nahum Sokolow’s History of Zionism, the Zionist movement would “mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a Body which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb.” [3]

At the same time British imperialism has used the Zionists to guard the Suez Canal for the British and as military force against the desire of the Arab masses to be free from imperialist exploitation and repression.

That Balfour’s legacy of supremacy persists as much as British support for Israel does is no accident. We have arrived at this point today because the supremacist attitudes of Balfour informed policy, lending imperial might to a project in pursuit of national self-determination for European settler colonialists by trampling on the rights of native non-Jews.

Unlike Danielle Greyman-Kennard and the other Zionist groups, Palestine Action who destroyed the painting of Balfour knew who he was. They wrote:

“Arthur Balfour, then-UK foreign secretary, issued a declaration which promised to build “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, where the majority of the indigenous population were not Jewish. He gave away the Palestinians’ homeland — a land that wasn’t his to give away,” After the Declaration, until 1948, the British burnt down indigenous villages to prepare the way; with this came arbitrary killings, arrests, torture, sexual violence including rape against women and men, the use of human shields, and the introduction of home demolitions as collective punishment to repress Palestinian resistance” [4]

Down with all the imperialists!

Balfour was a criminal big time

For Palestine red and free from the river to the sea!

Endnotes:

[1] https://www.jpost.com/international/article-790993

[2] https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/232119

[3] Ibid

[4] Ibid

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