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The Battle Over the Balfour Declaration, 100 Years Later

(Ha'aretz) Danna Harman - At a meeting at the British House of Commons on Tuesday, MP Michael Gove, a former justice minister, attacked "the anti-Semitic," masquerading as "anti-Zionist," premises of the challenge to the Balfour Declaration. He spoke of his wish that Britain, to mark the 100th anniversary of the declaration, would move its embassy to Jerusalem and make sure Queen Elizabeth II finally made a visit. Israeli UK Ambassador Mark Regev reiterated Israel's "firm belief" that Britain should be proud of the declaration and that it had put Britain on the "right side of history" by "correcting historical wrongs" and "doing the right thing" for a "people who had suffered like no other people." Dore Gold, former director general of Israel's Foreign Ministry who today heads the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, focused on the Palestinian Return Center (PRC), which had earlier held a meeting in the House of Lords to demand an apology from Britain for the declaration. "Asking for an official apology fits into the zeitgeist of the West these days, that feels guilt about everything that happened in the last hundred years. That's what they are trying to tap into it. But Israel is no colonialist entity. Israel is a state restored," Gold argued. Gold said the PRC, despite having recently been granted consultative status at UNESCO, is a terror organization "intimately tied to Hamas." Some of the PRC's senior figures are Hamas activists who found refuge in Britain. In 2010, then-Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak outlawed the PRC as an "unlawful association because it is part of the Hamas movement." "This is not who you want to invite into your British legislative body," he suggested. Gold said it took real audacity for an organization that "calls for the killing of Jews" to "come to the greatest parliamentary democracy in the world and challenge Israel's legitimacy."
2016-11-30 00:00:00
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