To mark the centenary of the notorious Balfour Declaration, the Inminds human rights group has projected images demanding an apology from the British government onto the Houses of Parliament.
The projections, which lasted for over an hour, also depicted images of Palestinian suffering, called for the arrest of Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu, and denounced British complicity in Israeli crimes.
The Balfour Declaration was a letter dated 2nd November 1917, sent by the British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour on behalf of the British government to Lord Rothschild, the chairman of the Zionist Federation, promising support from the British Empire to establish a Zionist entity in Palestine against the wishes of the indigenous people of Palestine.
Inminds chair Abbas Ali said “For Britain it’s a day of shame, a hundred years of shame. Balfour’s letter to the head of the Rothschild banking dynasty promising to give stolen land to the Zionist federation for their settler colony was a crime which wiped Palestine from the map and unleashed a 100 years of suffering on the Palestinian people.
“Yet the British government 100 years later still refuses to apologise, and in fact the current Prime Minister Theresa May says Britain is ‘proud’ of its role in destroying Palestine in creating Israel. She has rolled out the red carpet inviting the war criminal Netanyahu to Britain to celebrate this historic crime.
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“We are here to demand Britain apologise (and with it initiate a programme of reparations); and to demand an end to 100 years of ethnic cleansing; an end to apartheid Israel; for the decolonisation of Palestine; and the immediate arrest of the child killer Netanyahu who is currently at large in London.”
Abbas Ali added “It’s indicative of the nature of Zionism that its bastard state was born out of the womb of the colonial power of the time, the British empire, and a hundred years on, today it can only survive by the patronage of today’s imperial power, the American empire.
“At the time of the signing of the Balfour Declaration, Jews numbered less than 10% of the population of Palestine.. the Zionist colonial project always entailed the thwarting of democracy and self-determination for the indigenous 90% by wiping them out through ethnic cleansing and genocide, and by instituting a racist system of apartheid to deny the rights of the remaining survivors.
“We are here to say that a 100 years of genocidal ethnic cleaning has failed, Balfour’s 67 worded declaration might have destroyed Palestine but the Palestinian people remain undefeated and Palestine will rise again.”
