A painting of Lord Balfour housed at the University of Cambridge’s Trinity College was slashed by protest group Palestine Action.
The painting of Lord Balfour was made in 1914 by Philip Alexius de László inside Trinity College. The Palestine Action group specifically targeted the Lord Balfour painting, describing his declaration as the beginning of “ethnic cleansing of Palestine by promising the land away—which the British never had the right to do.”
I don’t know much about Balfour. Was he a genocidal maniac?
He was the one who promised the Zionist movement their own state in Palestine (which at the time was in the hands of the Ottomans).
On top of that he was a racist and antisemite.
Also don’t forget how the Brits promised to the Arabs, just a bit earlier, how they would support the funding of independent states if the Arabs were to rebel against the Ottomans.
I think a statue should be erected to him, but a tarred and feathered one.
So…no?
the problem is people were already there. Getting their “own state” meant, and still does, forcibly removing the people already there, usually by death.
Poland was given a lot of territory in the west and the Soviet Union took a lot of territory from the east, without mass killings. And yes there were people in all of those regions.
In fact a lot of borders changed after WW2, and the only (or one of very few) place this devolved into a decades long murder fest is the middle east.
Ah. That makes sense. So basically like all contemporary governments in the Americas and Australia and…
Well. Most places except the imperial powers I suppose. Even then, idk! Seems kind of shady.
He specifically created the problems we are dealing with in the Middle East. He figured that you could displace a group of people and let the heat stay away from Europe. Basically modern Israel was created as a terrorism target so that western powers didn’t have to deal with it. Also notable that he was a territorial governor is the area as part of the former British empire.