Allow me to respond. The world accuses you of eighty years of suffering, dispossession, exile, and death — of creating a catastrophe that spread cancer-like across generations. Gaza, Jenin, Deir Yassin. These are not single atrocities, but stepping stones to a century of calamity hatched in Whitehall salons. You lit the flame which ravaged Palestine, and now you recoil, your hands clean, as if you were never the arsonist. But history does not forget. And history accuses.

Few know the cynical origins of your promise. In 1917, when your treasury was drained by the First World War and your empire was on the brink of bankruptcy, your politicians turned to American loans for rescue. You needed the Washington bankers; you needed Jewish pressure to grant the loans. And so Lord Balfour, his pen moist with imperial arrogance, guaranteed that which he had no right to guarantee — a homeland for the Jews in a foreign land. A cheque drawn on someone’s account.

Israeli historian Avi Shlaim calls it “one of the most duplicitous documents in British imperial history.” You didn’t want to make peace. You wanted a strategic foothold in the Middle East as the Ottoman Empire disintegrated. The Balfour Declaration wasn’t an act of generosity — it was a cynical bargain, a bribe wrapped up in biblical rhetoric. You occupied Palestine under the League of Nations Mandate, promising “to prepare the inhabitants for self-government.” You governed instead by arming Zionist militias and........

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