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Refuting Balfour's Detractors
(Jerusalem Post) Herb Keinon - On Oct. 25, the Palestinian Return Center held a symposium in the House of Lords it trumpeted as the "launch of the Balfour Apology Campaign." On Tuesday an Israeli group will take to a room in the House of Commons to refute the Balfour Declaration's detractors. Dore Gold, the head of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and up until a month ago the Foreign Ministry's director-general, will hold a meeting to provide a high-profile response to the Palestinian efforts to get a British apology for the November 1917 declaration that paved the way for the Jewish state. Rather than take the affirmative step of recognizing the Jewish right to a nation-state in Israel, Gold said, the Palestinians are "doing the exact opposite by denying actively the very request for a Jewish homeland." Gold said he will prove at Tuesday's meeting that the Palestinian Return Center is a Hamas entity. Both Hamas and the current Palestinian government are united "in this attack on the Balfour Declaration." Gold said the return of the Jews to Israel began "well before General Allenby marched into Jerusalem" in December 1917. There was already a Jewish majority in Jerusalem in the mid-19th century, well before the Balfour Declaration. Speakers at the meeting will include Yair Hirschfeld, one of the key architects of the Oslo Accords, former Foreign Ministry legal adviser Alan Baker, British historian Andrew Roberts, British Conservative MP and former justice minister Michael Gove, and Ambassador to the UK Mark Regev.