Open to Prime Minister Tony Blair on the Balfour Declaration

The Rt. Hon. Tony Blair, MP,
Prime Minister
10 Downing Street
London W1

Dear Prime Minister

On Sunday, the Arab World will commemorate in sadness and pain the 80th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration issued on the 2nd November 1917, a policy which resulted in 1948 in the dispossession and dispersion of the Palestinian people and plunged the Middle East in an unending cycle of war, occupation and resistance. For a major power to offer an inhabited country to an international political movement was an unprecedented act in international diplomacy. Although the Palestinian Muslim and Christians constituted 94 percent of the population, they were referred to in this important policy statement as the "non-Jewish communities". In a letter to Lord Curzon, Lord Balfour wrote "In Palestine we do not envisage undertaking the consultation of the will of the present inhabitants", adding that Zionism was, for Great
Britain, of greater importance than "the desires and prejudices of 700,000 Arabs who now live in this ancient land".

Different historians in an attempt to explain the political environment in which the Balfour Declaration was formulated, resort to several factors:

1.  the religious upbringing of Lord Balfour and a narrow, dogmatic and - one
   is tempted to add - fundamentalist reading of the Old Testament;
2.  an attempt to please the British Jewish community who though not
   enthusiastically pro-Zionist then, preferred to see East European Jewish immigrants channeled to Palestine rather than to the UK;
3. a feeling of gratitude to Chaim Weizman for his invention of an explosive that proved useful during World War I;
4.  a conviction that a pro-Zionist commitment would help mobilise the
   American Jewish community to lobby in favour of the United State joining the
   allies in the war against Germany.
5. an evaluation that Zionism could divert Jewish fervour and energies away
   from revolution in Russia towards Palestine since the destabilisation of the
   Czarist Regime would deprive the allies of their second front against Germany (because of a difference in calendars, the November Balfour Declaration paradoxically tool place in fact befor the October Bolshevik Revolution had occurred);
6. a belief that a friendly entity close to the Suez Canal, a major artery in
   international navigation mainly towards the Indian Subcontinent, would be a major strategic achievement;
7. a willingness to break the Arab World's geographic continuity at the point of intersection of the Asian and African continents pre-empting thus the possible emergence of a United Arab State.

Prime Minster, I personally believe that a Palestinian State besides Israel, in the West Bank and the Gaza Stripe with East Jerusalem as its capital in not only a Palestinian right but a British ethical duty and a Jewish-Israeli moral obligation.

Prime Minister, we, the Palestinian people, have a dream. A dream of a Blair or a Cook Declaration. A Declaration that takes the lead in spelling out sympathy for Palestinian sufferings and support for Palestinian aspirations.

I know Prime Minister, that some cynics might say that Britain in this fin de siecle in not what it used to be at the turn of the century but I am sure that British public opinion will "view with favour" that Britain again "punches above its weight" especially for a cause they perceive as just.

Prime Minister, I could have invoke a variety of geo-political and geo-strategic considerations, but I believe that the ethical dimension, on its own, ought to be sufficiently convincing.

Please accept, Prime Minister, the expression of my highest consideration.

Afif Safieh
Palestinian General Delegate to the UK
and to the Holy See.