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A portrait of Lord Arthur James Balfour at Trinity College in Cambridge was defaced last week by pro-Palestine activists opposed to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Palestine Action, said in a statement that one of its activists destroyed the 1914 Philip Alexius de László painting using red paint and a sharp object. Video emerged online showing the incident.
The group correctly identified Balfour as a “colonial administrator and signatory of the Balfour Declaration.”
The group posted on X: “Written in 1917, Balfour’s declaration began the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by promising the land away—which the British never had the right to do.”
One commenter posted on X: If you think that painting is carved up and bloodied, you should see what Balfour did to the Middle East.
TRENDPOST: It is worth noting that The Trends Journal had forecast that Crusades 2000 is underway and was put into motion in 1917, when the Balfour Declaration was signed. The declaration laid the foundation for Israel—with Britain’s aspirations when the land was being divided during and after World War I.
The brief letter was from Balfour, the British foreign secretary, to Lionel Walter Rothschild, “Lord Rothschild,” a leader of the British Jewish community.
“His majesty’s government views with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object,” the letter read, in part.
Al Jazeera noted that the declaration promised the Jewish people a land where the natives made up more than 90 percent of the population.
“The pledge is generally viewed as one of the main catalysts of the Nakba—the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948—and the conflict that ensued with the Zionist state of Israel,” the report stated.
In our Spring 2006 issue of The Trends Journal, when it was a quarterly, we wrote:
“Regardless of England’s reasons or intentions—self-serving or otherwise—Crusades 2000 was set in motion by the 1917 ‘Balfour Declaration,’ that laid the foundation for Israel: ‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object … .’
“Right or wrong, good or bad, like it or not … during the 25 years of the Palestine Mandate, from 1922 to 1947, large-scale immigration of impoverished and persecuted Jewish refugees—from Germany to Russia—returned to redeem their Promised Land after 2000 years of exile. Consequently, the Jewish population of Palestine increased from less than 10 percent in 1917 to over 30 percent in 1947, the year Israel was granted statehood by the UN.
“The local inhabitants, who worshiped God differently and rejected the ‘God promised us this land’ version of the Jewish returnees, waged numerous battles and rebellions in an effort to hold onto their property and to stop further Jewish immigration.
“Underlying it, in the Western world, there is and was a deep-seated, organic anti-Islam bias.”
It is now front and center for all who are not deaf, dumb and blind to hear, understand and see.
Israel is continuing its bombardment and massacre in Gaza, and its war of genocide has been framed in the Western media as a fight of good vs. evil.
Ralph Wilde, who represented the Arab League at the International Court of Justice in the case against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, told the court last month that the Palestinian people have been “denied the exercise of their legal right to self-determination through the more than century-long violent colonial racist effort to establish a nation-state exclusively for the Jewish people in the land of mandatory Palestine.”
He gave a brief history and noted that the Jewish population on the land after the First World War was about 11 percent.
He said the legal right of self-determination of the Palestinian people “originates in the sacred trust obligations of article 22 of the League Covenant, part of the Versailles treaty.”
“Palestine, an A-Class mandate under British colonial rule, was, after the First World War, supposed to have its existence as an independent state provisionally recognized, a sui generis right of self-determination. The UK and other members of the League Council attempted to bypass this, incorporating the 1917 Balfour Declaration commitment to establishing a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine into the instrument stipulating how the Mandate would operate.”
He continued, “However, the council had no legal power to bypass the Covenant in this way; it acted ultra vires, and the relevant provisions were legally void. There was and is no legal basis in that mandate instrument for either a specifically Jewish state in Palestine or the UK’s failure to discharge the sacred trust obligation to implement Palestinian self-determination.”