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What Anti-Israel Protestors Get Wrong about the Balfour Declaration
(Forward) Einat Wilf - The campaign waged by Palestinians and their supporters to demand that Britain apologize for the Balfour Declaration betrays their fundamental misunderstanding of how and why the modern State of Israel came into being. Israel is the outcome of deliberate Jewish action - not of foreign hand-outs. Israel is a country attained - not a land given. Without collective Jewish mobilization in the name of self-determination and liberation, this declaration would have come to naught. The idea of Jews as active players in history - as masters of their fate - still grates on the consciousness of peoples and civilizations that were structured on the presumption that the Jews should have headed to the dustbin of history. For too many, the story that Jews could attain something for themselves by operating, as all peoples do, on multiple fronts - diplomatically, economically, militarily - is still so fanciful that to some, the story of Israel only makes sense if presented as a series of handouts by foreign powers with shady motivations. To the chagrin of those who want to put the Jews back "in their proper place," the State of Israel came into being 31 years after the Balfour Declaration precisely because Zionist Jews were done entrusting their fate to others. Through their actions, from 1917 on, the Zionist Jews simply said to Britain, and the world: "Thank you very much Lord Balfour. We'll take it from here." Dr. Einat Wilf served in the 18th Knesset.