On November 2, 1917, England’s foreign secretary sent a letter to an English Baron, declaring that the land of Palestine, which was in the process of being taken militarily from the Ottoman Empire by England, would be given to the Jewish people as their homeland. Known to history as the Balfour Declaration, the first draft was written by its recipient, Rothschild, and maneuvered by the Zionist movement’s secretary Chaim Weizmann. One Christian Palestinian warned in 1917 that “Politically, a Jewish State in Palestine, will mean a permanent danger to a lasting peace in the Near East.” How the British Empire and the Zionist movement, in the face of anti-Zionist dissent and objections on grounds of self-determination, set the region up for more than a century of war and the current genocide.
