Mick Hartley

The old Balfour apology routine comes round again:

Member of Parliament, Jeremy Corbyn, apologized sincerely for what he described as the historical mistake by Britain. He called on the British government to redeem its mistake and its ongoing impact.  Jeremy’s apology was echoed by Liberal Democrats MP David Ward who also called on the British government to help solve the problem and end the plight of the Palestinian people. Ward said that Britain had no right to issue a declaration which caused the displacement of millions of Palestinians.

Amongst those who apologised includes Baroness Jenny Tonge who emphasized the implementation of Palestinian rights especially the right of return which is guaranteed by international law. She stated that Balfour declaration produced an Israeli apartheid state and that the support of Britain to such a state should end. Lord Nazir Ahmed, also amongst the panelists, called on the British government to apologize for its role in the ethnic cleansing and exile of the Palestin people. He also asked Britain to apologise to those countries who suffered under Britain’s colonial past.

The usual suspects, in other words. 

Wasn't there quite a bit of "ethnic cleansing" going on around that time, right through from the Balfour Declaration right up to the time Israel was created, and beyond. Some kind of war in Europe for a start, if memory serves. And wasn't there some considerable ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arab lands as well? From Egypt and Iraq, Yemen and Tunisia, Morocco and Libya? And, widening the circle a little, let's not forget Greeks and Turks. Or Ukrainians and Poles. Million upon million of them, refugees driven out of their homes and forced to relocate elsewhere simply because they were deemed to have the incorrect ethnicity. None of them – or very few of them – guilty of anything more than belonging to the wrong ethnic group. Germans after the war, some eleven million of them, forced out of their homes in Eastern Europe and relocated to a shrunken "homeland" in appalling circumstances, with the loss of thousands of lives. Then there was partitiion and the birth of Pakistan, and the earlier break-up of the Ottoman Empire with all those artificial lines drawn across the map by the British and the French…. 

Terrible times; terrible suffering. Do all these refugees have a right of return? Jews back to Baghdad, Sudeten Germans back to the Czech Republic, Greeks back to Anatolia? I don't believe they do. The question doesn't arise, in fact – because they've all (or their descendants have all) now made their lives in their new homes, in wherever they ended up. The Baghdad Jews in Israel, or the US or Britain; the Sudeten Germans in Berlin or Leipzig; the Anatolian Greeks in Thessalonika or Melbourne or London. It's all history now.

With, of course, one exception….one group of people who are still refugees over sixty years later, because their fellow Arabs largely refused to take them in, despite all the talk of Arab Nationalism. Who even have a special UN agency devoted just to them. And who continue to maintain that history should be reversed, that Israel should cease to exist…should never, indeed, have existed.

And who continue to be supported in their fantasies by sundry foolish British politicians.