As the 2nd November 1917 anniversary of the infamous Balfour Declaration approaches, we are reminded of the fateful promise issued by the British government that would go on to define much of historical Palestine ever since. Eight years after issuing his government’s infamous pledge to establish a Jewish “national home” in Palestine—a promise that would later evolve into today’s Israel—Arthur Balfour visited Palestine for the first time in the spring of 1925. He was met by the Arab population, who constituted the overwhelming majority at the time, with a wave of fierce protests and general strikes. They acutely recognized that what he had set into motion in 1917 was the first structural nail driven by Great Britain—then governing Palestine under an imperial League of Nations Mandate—into the body of Palestine and its indigenous people, initiating a catastrophic process of displacement that continues to our very day.

Standing before the crowds during the dedication of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Balfour unblinkingly proclaimed the dawn of a new order, asserting: “A new epoch has begun within the Palestine which came to an end so many hundred years ago.” That grandiose declaration—utterly erasing the living, breathing Arab population looking on—reflected an aristocratic, colonial mindset completely detached from the daily realities of a people who were already beginning to fear for their homeland and their very survival.

The text of the 1917 Balfour Declaration itself exposes the fragility of one of modern history’s most enduring propaganda myths: the tired colonial slogan that Palestine was simply “a land without a people for a people without a land.” If Palestine were truly empty space, the British government would have had no legal or diplomatic reason to include the specific proviso that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing........

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