In a remarkable admission, the Guardian has ranked its support for the Balfour Declaration promising a “homeland” for the Jewish people as one of its “worst errors of judgment over 200 years.” The British newspaper made its startling announcement on May 7.
“Whatever else can be said, Israel today is not the country the Guardian foresaw or would have wanted,” it said. “When Arthur Balfour, then Britain’s foreign secretary, promised 104 years ago to help establish a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, his words changed the world.”
The controversial Balfour Declaration was made when Jews were no more than five per cent of the population in Palestine.
Noting that the most noticeable mistakes stemmed from the editorial pages, the Guardian appeared to take responsibility for what it appears to suggest is the failed project of creating a “Jewish homeland” in Palestine. “The Guardian of 1917 supported, celebrated and could even be said to have helped facilitate the Balfour declaration,” it noted. The editor at the time, CP Scott, was a supporter of Zionism which may have “blinded him to Palestinian rights”.
In 1917 Scott wrote a piece displaying the kind of racism that was typical of western writers and politicians at the time who supported the Zionist project. On the day that the Balfour Declaration was announced, Scott dismissed any other claim to the Holy Land with the racist statement that, “The existing Arab population of Palestine is small and at a low stage of civilisation.” Muslim and Christian Palestinians at the time made up more than 95 per cent of the population.
Balfour’s promise to the Zionist movement was seen by Europeans as a humanitarian gesture by a “noble white Englishman” towards a group of hopeless natives. This was all before the Holocaust, the concentration camps and the gas chambers which would garner public support for the narrative pushing the “need” for the “national home” which turned into a nation-state called Israel. The painful truth is that the Guardian’s “error” contributed to the creation of a formal infrastructure to implement the seizure of Palestine and the displacement of its people.
Although in itself the newspaper’s admission is a sign of a shift in European and American public opinion regarding the Palestinian-Zionist issue, this has not always been reflected in its editorial policy. While the admission is appreciated, it would be more effective if it had been accompanied by a detailed apology. It would also be useful to publish a timeline of articles from that period to the present day. The damage caused by such “errors of judgement” all those years ago is behind the ongoing tragedy of the Palestinian people and the violation of their legitimate rights.
This admission by the Guardian comes as Israel’s status as a deeply racist country that practises a system of apartheid has become impossible to dispute. Last month, the pre-eminent human rights organisation Human Rights Watch (HRW), joined a host of other prominent groups to declare that Israel is committing the crimes of apartheid and persecution.
Prior to HRW’s report, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem branded Israel as an “apartheid” state that “promotes and perpetuates Jewish supremacy between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.”