PM May has gone out of her way to insult the Palestinian people by declaring her pride in the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration which promised the Zionist movement that the UK would hand it Palestine, regardless of its people.
Speaking last Monday at a Conservative Friends of Israel lunch, she made her own declaration. She said: ‘On the 2nd of November 1917, the then Foreign Secretary – a Conservative Foreign Secretary – Arthur James Balfour wrote: “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country”.’
She continued: ‘It is one of the most important letters in history. It demonstrates Britain’s vital role in creating a homeland for the Jewish people. And it is an anniversary we will be marking with pride.’
May added: ‘No-one is saying the path has been perfect – or that many problems do not remain.’ This must be the understatement of the last 100 years. In 1948, the Zionist Stern Gang blew up the King David Hotel. 91 people were killed, including British government officials and soldiers.
In the same year, Zionist terror gangs ran amok destroying Palestinian towns and villages, and expelling hundreds of thousands of men, women and children into exile.
These atrocities were followed by the 1956 invasion of Egypt, with Israel to the fore as part of an alliance with the UK and France to overthrow the Egyptian leader President Nasser who had just nationalised the Suez Canal. This treacherous attack was defeated by Russian intervention.
This defeat was followed by the 1967 Six Day War when Israel defeated Syria, Egypt and Jordan, and then annexed the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights beginning a 49 year occupation.
Egypt managed to seize back the Sinai Peninsula in the 1973 Yom Kippur war. This was followed by repeated Israeli invasions of the Lebanon – it was driven out of southern Lebanon in 2001. Two major invasions of the Gaza Strip also cost thousands of lives, while three Intifadas saw tens of thousands of Palestinian youth jailed, gassed, beaten and killed in order to maintain the occupation of Palestine and maintain Israel as imperialism’s ‘bully boy’ in the Middle East.
This is what Balfour achieved! It is this vast bloodbath that fills PM May with pride!
In fact, the Palestinian people are demanding that this 100 year anniversary of the Balfour Declaration must be met with an official British government apology for the disaster it created, and also with UK recognition of the Palestinian State.
PM May, swelling with pride at Balfour’s work, has something else in mind – this is that the UK can now move back to playing a leading role in imperialist affairs East of Suez. In the face of the mountain of corpses that Israel has created, May aims to use the UK state to gag its opponents. She announced that: ‘In response to the work of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, Britain will be adopting a formal definition of anti-Semitism.’
This will allow the UK state to take legal action against those who attack the ‘Jewish state’ for its mass atrocities. May added: ‘I couldn’t be clearer: the boycotts, divestment and sanctions movement is wrong, it is unacceptable.’
May and Johnson have made no secret of the fact that the UK is trying to move back East of Suez to fight for their imperialist interests. Their major allies are the Israeli butchers of the Palestinian people, and the Saudi and Gulf feudalists.
The work of the Balfour Declaration is to continue as the UK seeks to impose British imperialism onto the whole region once again. The British working class must now enter this battle.
It must stop UK intervention East of Suez, and organise a general strike to bring down the May government. The UK must apologise for the Balfour Declaration, and must recognise a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital and give it every assistance. This is the way forward.
