The Cursed Promise… The Balfour Declaration: A Betrayal That Crafted a Century of Wounds

Abdulaziz Yaqoub – Philadelphia
23 November 2025

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This article was first written in November 2020, and it is republished today—at a time when truths intersect with blood and masks fall before the awareness of nations—because the battle of consciousness is not won by bullets, but by a word that restores history to its rightful place.
Nations that lose their memory repeat their tragedies, and homelands that misread history hand their future willingly to those who write their endings.
And because the present—Arab and global—is shrouded in fog, returning to the roots of the scene is not a choice but a necessity no one has the right to evade.

After World War I, the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and colonial powers—with their weapons and greed—moved to divide an inheritance that was never theirs, guided by agreements whose poison still runs through the veins of the region.
At the forefront of those agreements was Sykes–Picot, which not only carved up borders but tore apart human fabric and laid the foundations for an international order that viewed the Arab world, with its civilizations and wealth, merely as a “geographic prize” to be distributed.

Between the fall of one empire and the rise of another, Britain played the great game of illusion.
It promised the Arabs independence and encouraged the Sharif of Mecca to revolt against the Ottomans. He complied, offering what any partner would offer when he believes he is helping build a new future.
But Britain saw the Arabs only as tools, and the revolt as a bridge toward its colonial project.
When the war ended, it did not extend its hand to its ally; instead, it exiled him and allowed its promises to evaporate as if they had never existed.
History recorded the moment as one of the most shameless acts of deception against a people’s rights.

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Then came the Balfour Declaration…
That dark day, November 2, 1917, which changed the face of the region and inaugurated a century of fire—one the world could have avoided had Britain not picked up a pen to grant what it did not own to those who did not deserve.

British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour wrote a letter to Lionel Rothschild announcing his government’s “sympathy” for establishing a national home for the Jews in Palestine—as though Palestine were a land without a people, and its inhabitants mere details to be erased with ink.

This was not “sympathy” but a political engineering project to reshape the East and plant a colonial entity built on uprooting an indigenous people from their land in favor of a Western-backed project that later became a strategic bastion for Western interests.

Even the line that claimed to respect the rights of non-Jews in Palestine was nothing more than an auxiliary deception—a carefully crafted language meant to soothe public opinion and present the coming occupation in an “ethical” disguise.
But the events that followed ripped that disguise apart and revealed the full truth:
The Balfour Declaration was not a political statement—it was an open license to violate an entire nation.

We no longer need additional proof.
If “ancient historical presence” were a valid justification for establishing states, then the entire world would have to redraw its borders.
By that logic, should Native Americans today—after more than two centuries—expel Europeans, Jews, Asians, and Africans from North America to rebuild the “original Native American state”?
If the world accepted such logic, humanity would plunge into endless wars.
But in Palestine alone, they wanted history to become a knife.

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What the Palestinian people have endured over the past century—killing, displacement, massacres, ethnic cleansing, siege, and systematic attempts to erase memory—is not a tragedy belonging to one nation, but an open wound on the face of human conscience.

That is why the great liberation movements—from Mandela to Nyerere to Gandhi to Latin American leaders—stood with Palestine.
Because Palestine embodies the single truth understood by all the free people of the world:
Occupation cannot be beautified, and injustice never becomes justice—no matter how long it persists.

But today’s world, burdened by hypocrisy, attempts to redefine rights based on interests and convince nations that power grants legitimacy, and that the weak have no right except silence.
Yet peoples—no matter how defeated their regimes or how submissive some rulers become—remain the final authority.
The will of the people cannot be bought, borrowed, or extinguished.

Many regimes have collapsed because they lost the compass of justice and believed that aligning with the stronger guarantees their survival.
But the history of the 20th and 21st centuries speaks clearly:
Those who do not stand with their people, geography, power, and wealth will not stand with them.

And Palestine—despite all the suffering—remains stronger than the oppressors imagine, because the strength of peoples is not measured by weaponry, but by their ability to endure and remain despite all attempts at erasure.

God is the Helper.

A Call to Every Living Conscience in the World

• Read history before passing judgments.
• Do not let propaganda be your only source.
• I do not ask you for blind alignment; I ask for one thing: awareness.
• Because ignorance is tyranny’s greatest ally, and nations that do not learn deliver their children into the hands of tomorrow’s oppressors.

Read history—perhaps the salvation of the future lies in a forgotten line between its pages.
Ignite awareness—for it is the most just, the longest-lasting, and the most resilient of all weapons.