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href="http://samidoun.net/2016/11/balfour-declaration-99-years-of-colonialism-99-years-of-resistance/">http://samidoun.net/2016/11/balfour-declaration-99-years-of-colonialism-99-years-of-resistance/</a></font>
<h1 id="reader-title">Balfour Declaration: 99 years of
colonialism, 99 years of resistance</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">November 3, 2016</div>
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<p><span>On the 99th anniversary of the British empire’s
infamous colonial Balfour Declaration ostensibly
proclaiming the right to a “Jewish national home” in
colonized Palestine, Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner
Solidarity Network joins in with grassroots
Palestinian campaigns and the Palestinian liberation
movement inside and outside Palestine to demand
justice and accountability from the British state and
its international allies as we approach a century of
Palestinian resistance, struggle and revolution.</span></p>
<p><span>The Balfour Declaration, British Foreign
Secretary and former Prime Minister Lord Alfred
Balfour’s letter directed to Lord Walter Rothschild, a
prominent Zionist leader in Britain in 1917, pledged
to support a “national home for the Jewish people” in
Palestine – which at the time remained part of the
Ottoman Empire. The Balfour Declaration was part and
parcel of the imperial and colonial plans in the
region. It came nearly simultaneously with the
Sykes-Picot accords laying out the colonial division
of the Arab world for the benefit of Britain and
France. Support for the Zionist project fit firmly
into this category. Theodor Herzl himself appealed to
Cecil Rhodes for support for the Zionist project in
Palestine as “<a
href="http://mondoweiss.net/2010/09/actually-herzl-was-a-colonialist/">something
colonial</a>,” while Chaim Weizmann pledged to “<a
href="http://clkates.ipower.com/njs/resources/roots/chapter03.html">form
a very effective guard</a> for the Suez Canal.” And
far from an advocate of the rights of Jews facing
oppression and hatred in Europe, Balfour as Prime
Minister in 1905 passed the <a
href="http://www.jewishsocialist.org.uk/features/item/what-we-owe-to-balfour">Aliens
Act</a>, specifically intended to exclude Eastern
European Jews from Britain.</span></p>
<p><span>The Zionist project proudly asserted its own
status as part of the European colonialist project in
the region, and colonial powers responded in kind, not
with some form of support or protection for European
Jews, but with a deeply racist colonial partnership.
In 1919, Balfour wrote, “Zionism, be it right or
wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions,
in present needs, in future hopes, of <a
href="http://www.balfourproject.org/a-few-quotes/">far
profounder import</a> than the desires and
prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that
ancient land.” </span></p>
<p><span>Thus, the rights and existence of the indigenous
people of the land, the Palestinian Arab people of all
religious backgrounds, including Christians, Muslims
and Jews, were dismissed and erased as expendable, in
a chilling re-statement of the settler colonial logics
seen in the United States, Canada and Australia. </span></p>
<p><span>Today, the Israeli state remains a colonial
project in Palestine and the region and a key partner,
defender and strategic partner of U.S. imperialism and
its European colonial allies. And the Balfour
Declaration has remained for 99 years an infamous,
purely colonial justification of the theft of
indigenous land and resources and the expulsion of
millions of indigenous people. Palestinians today
throughout historic Palestine continue to suffer
through racism, apartheid, settler colonialism,
occupation and oppression as a direct and unbroken
line from the Balfour Declaration to Benjamin
Netanyahu. </span></p>
<p><span>The Balfour Declaration also marked another
milestone, however: the birth of the modern
Palestinian resistance movement.<a
href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/11/britain-destroyed-palestinian-homeland-161102054348710.html">
For 99 years</a>, Palestinians have been organizing,
struggling and rising up, relentlessly, to throw off
colonial oppressors and build a revolutionary movement
for liberation and return. The Palestinian resistance,
rising up again and again, in 1922, 1929, 1936, 1948
and on and on until today, has inspired and built deep
bonds with its fellow anti-colonial and liberation
movements around the world, an example of resistance
and revolutionary struggle continuing in the face of
the most powerful imperial forces aligned against
their struggle.</span></p>
<p><span>At the same time, Zionist forces were empowered
and actively supported by British colonial power,
especially as a mechanism to suppress Palestinian
resistance, including arming and training the Zionist
militias and Israeli forces who expelled nearly a
million Palestinians from their homes and lands in the
Nakba of 1948. </span></p>
<p><span>Throughout the history of 100 years of
Palestinian struggle, political imprisonment has been
a tool of colonial control directed against the
Palestinian people. From administrative detention to
land confiscation, identity stripping to home
demolitions, the tools of terror and military rule
used by today’s Zionist state were introduced to
Palestine by British colonial authorities as a means
of suppressing indigenous revolt for liberation.</span></p>
<p><span>Over a million Palestinians have been imprisoned
in colonial prisons since Balfour’s letter in 1917.
Many of the traditions of Palestinian prisoners’
struggle and the famous cultural legacy of the poetry
of resistance born in the prisons date from the day of
the British colonial mandate. The British execution of
Fouad Hejazi, Mohammed Jamjoum and Atta al-Zeir in
1930 in Akka prison inspired <a
href="http://falastininvideo.blogspot.be/2007/06/sijjin-akka-prison-of-akka.html">a
famous song of Palestinian resistance </a>that is
still sung today.</span></p>
<p><span class="embed-youtube"></span></p>
<p><span> In 1938, during the great Palestinian uprising
of 1936-1939, as Ghassan Kanafani noted, “Britain
sentenced about 2,000 Palestinian Arabs to long terms
of imprisonment, demolished more than 5,000 houses and
executed by hanging 148 persons in Acre prison, and
there were more than 5,000 in prison for <a
href="http://clkates.ipower.com/njs/resources/kanafani/kanafani4e.html">varying
terms</a>.”</span></p>
<p><span>Today, over seven million Palestinians are
actively expelled and denied their right to return to
their homes and lands. Palestinians are subject to
racism and oppression throughout the land of
Palestine; to siege, occupation, apartheid, land
confiscations, home demolitions, mass imprisonment,
killing and massacre: an entire range of Zionist
settler colonial crimes against the entire Palestinian
people, inside and outside Palestine. And Britain not
only continues to evade its fundamental responsibility
for the colonization of Palestine. It continues its
active complicity and support for the ongoing Nakba
and Zionist colonial project. British officials and
politicians threaten to prohibit the use of “<a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/uk-lawmakers-push-outlaw-criticism-zionism">Zionism</a>”
as a negative term and attempt to suppress the growing
popular movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions
in support of the Palestinian people, while acting in
the United Nations and other international arenas to
actively defend the Israeli state against
accountability for its continuous crimes.</span></p>
<p><strong>Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity
Network joins in the <a
href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSehoZNnSRrjbspKCZxNall8blFZkW8xifHWlzLVHD1Gg8SCEw/viewform?c=0&w=1">demand
for accountability, recognition, apology and
reparations</a> for the Palestinian people for the<a
href="http://www.bdcc2017.com/"> damages caused by
the Balfour</a> Declaration over nearly 100 years of
struggle, as well as an end to Britain’s ongoing and
active complicity and support for the Zionist
colonization of Palestine and the Nakba of the
Palestinian people. An apology is not sufficient to
address the ongoing colonial crime. Every Palestinian
denied the right to return home, imprisoned in
occupation prisons, stripped of their
self-determination and sovereignty is a victim of the
Balfour Declaration. </strong></p>
<p><strong>As we mark nearly 100 years of Palestinian
liberation struggle, we pledge to intensify our
struggle, activity and organizing in support of
Palestinian prisoners and the Palestinian people’s
struggle for the total liberation of Palestine, from
the river to the sea.</strong></p>
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<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
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