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Abbas and the Strategy of Falsehood

(Israel Hayom) Zalman Shoval - The announcement by PA President Mahmoud Abbas that the Palestinians intend to sue Britain for the 1917 Balfour Declaration might cause some chuckles, but there is a method to the madness. Since neither history nor the law is on the Palestinians' side in their struggle against Israel, their preferred method is to fabricate history in an attempt to undermine the legality of international agreements that contradict their objectives. The Balfour Declaration is dangerous for them, not just because it spoke of a national home for the Jews in the Land of Israel, but because it relates to the Arab population in the land in the context of its religious and civil rights, without any mention of national rights. It was clear to the British statesmen that Arabs in that part of the Ottoman Empire called Palestine did not have the history of a nation. The Balfour Declaration corrected a historical debt toward the Jewish nation, as stated by Winston Churchill in 1949 when he said, "The coming into being of a Jewish state in Palestine is an event in world history to be viewed in the perspective not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of 1000, 2000, or even 3000 years." The State of Israel would have been established with or without the Balfour Declaration. As David Ben-Gurion, then-chairman of the Jewish Agency, testified before a royal British committee in 1937, "Our right to Eretz Israel does not derive from the [British] mandate and the Balfour Declaration. It predates those....The Bible, which was written by us, in our own Hebrew language and in this very country, is our mandate." The writer is a former Israeli ambassador to the U.S.
2016-08-02 00:00:00
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