Thursday, Nov 2, was exactly one hundred years since the announcement of the fateful Balfour Declaration by the British government. Coming shortly before the end of World War I in 1918, it declared support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small Jewish population. Some six million Palestinians of varying descent live as displaced refugees, by and large in poverty, across the Middle East. As many as 2.5 million live in torturous conditions within the occupied West Bank and 1.7 million in hovels in the tiny Gaza Strip, the largest open prison camp on the planet.

President Mahmud Abbas, the elected chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, has summarized the historic tragedy of the people profoundly wronged by history through a declaration contained in a letter that Britain’s Foreign Secretary Sir Arthur Balfour handed over to Lord Walter Rothschild, a leader of the country’s Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. According to Abbas, who was 13-year-old when his family and other Palestinians were expelled from their ancestral homes and lands in 1948. Britain must atone for the Balfour Declaration and the century of suffering of the Palestinian people. In the article he contributed to The Guardian, the Palestinian leader has argued, among other things, that “Israel, and the friends of Israel, must realize that the two-state solution may well disappear, but the Palestinian people will still be here. We will continue to strive for our freedom, whether that freedom comes through the two-state solution or ultimately through equal rights for all those inhabiting historic Palestine. It is time for the British government to do its part. …Only once this injustice is set right will we have the conditions for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East — for the sake of Palestinians, Israelis and the rest of the region.”

How unfortunate, therefore, that Britain has been celebrating the Balfour Declaration’s centenary, regardless of the fact that there is no ending to the sufferings of those adversely affected by it continue to suffer even today. British prime minister Theresa May unabashedly said in the House of Commons that her country is proud of its role in the creation of the State of Israel, unmindful of the fact that while that infamous document ultimately led to the creation of Israel, which continues dispossessing the Palestinians of their land to this day. Palestinians mark Israel’s illegal creation in May 1948 as the darkest day in their history. The British prime minister has every right to see Britain’s relationship through the economic and strategic prism, she must also recognize the fact that the event that took place years ago has inflicted a deep wound on the sensibilities and consciousness of the Arabs in particular and the world that believes in justice, equality and non-discrimination in general. There is therefore nothing that makes the British prime minister proud as the role played by her ancestors in fact provides a moment to her countrymen and women to ponder and reflect with magnanimity. The argument often advanced by pro-Israeli commentators such as Bernard Lewis, Thomas Friedman, Daniel Pipes, Benny Morris, Alan Dershowitz and the late Fouad Ajami that since its creation Israel has stood as a bastion of freedom and democracy in a region where liberties cannot be taken for granted does not acquire any plausibility or legitimacy mainly because of the fact that the creation of a homeland for one people resulted in the dispossession and continuing persecution of another. This injustice has placed the Middle East in a perpetual conundrum of violence that continues to simmer, generating new upheavals and triggering new conflicts with the passage of time. The present-day formidable challenge of ISIS, for example, undoubtedly owes its existence to the myriad acts of injustice, including the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, committed by the West on the people of the Middle East over a period of time. The West has literally failed to grapple with it in any meaningful and effective manner despite a slew of concrete measures that various countries, including France and Britain, have taken so far. The entity has demolished the so-called sanctity of another highly heinous agreement also inked during World War I — the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 or a map that has spawned a century of resentment and hatred in the Middle East.

It is about time the global community respond to the Middle East in the most befitting manner that Mahmud Abbas has articulated on the occasion of the centenary of the Balfour Declaration: “The physical act of the signing of the Balfour Declaration is in the past — it is not something that can be changed. But it is something that can be made right. This will require humility and courage. It will require coming to terms with the past, recognizing mistakes, and taking concrete steps to correct those mistakes.”