PA libel: The Balfour Declaration was "a complicated act of fabrication" to "invent 'the Jewish people'" who "did not exist until that point"
Excerpt of a column by Bassem Barhoum, regular columnist for the official PA daily
Headline: “Analyzing the vagueness and the details of the Balfour Promise”
“The [Balfour] Promise (i.e., Declaration)…is the summary of a large and dangerous colonialist project that indicates a complicated process through which a people – ‘the Jewish people’ – was invented that did not exist until then in history, but rather there were simply Jews of different races and nations (sic., the Jewish people have been documented in history for millennia, and genetic research has proven Jews share a common origin in Israel).
In the framework of a complicated act of fabrication, the project included establishing a national homeland for the Jewish people, which was just invented, establishing this homeland on the homeland of another people. The establishment of the Jewish homeland will not take place except through the negation of the ownership of the land, taking the Palestinian people’s land, and expelling it from its homeland. This is because the Balfour project cannot be carried out without a large transfer of residents (a process of ethnic cleansing) [parentheses in source] and forcibly settling new residents in their place.”
The Balfour Declaration of Nov. 2, 1917 was a letter from British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Baron Rothschild stating that "His Majesty's government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." In 1922, the League of Nations adopted this and made the British Mandate "responsible for putting into effect the declaration," which led to the UN vote in favor of partitioning Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state in 1947. In response, Britain ended its mandate on May 15, 1948, and the Palestinian Jews, who accepted the Partition Plan, declared the independent State of Israel. The Palestinian Arabs rejected the plan and together with 7 Arab states attacked Israel, in what is now known as Israel's War of Independence.