On 2 November 1917, Britain wrote with the ink of politics what it had no right to write with the ink of history.

The Balfour Declaration, a document of no more than 67 words, was not merely a letter from the British foreign secretary to a leader of the Zionist movement. It was a written authorisation to unleash a humanitarian tragedy that continues to this day.

More than a century later, Palestinians still live with the consequences of that catastrophic sentence: “His Majesty’s government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

What Balfour did not write in his letter — and deliberately ignored — was the fate of the people already living on that land, and the blood that would later be spilled in the name of “the promise” and “historical right".

Today, in Gaza, this promise manifests again, but in its most brutal form. The ongoing genocide since October 2023 is merely the latest chapter of the Balfour Declaration, where British ink has turned into Israeli fire, consuming Gaza’s children and burying them under rubble, while the world continues to repeat the same lies about Israel’s “right to self-defence".

From promise to permanent occupation

When Arthur James Balfour issued his promise, Britain was in the midst of World War I, seeking international Jewish support to secure political and military advantage for the Allies. But behind that support lay an imperial philosophy: controlling the Middle East by creating a settler entity alien to its surroundings, a permanent tool to protect Western interests.

The promise was not an expression of compassion for the “Jewish people,” as later portrayed, but a colonial vision that saw Palestine as a strategic location to extend British — and later American — influence.

Balfour promised what he did not own to those undeserving, yet at its core, he gave Britain a new colonial possession under the guise of religion and history.

In an internal memo just two years later, Balfour wrote: “In Palestine, we do not believe in the principle of self-determination for the existing population.”

This sentence encapsulates a century of Western policy toward Palestinians: denial, exclusion and erasure.

From Mandate to Nakba: Building a state on the ruins of a homeland

After World War I, as Palestine fell under British mandate, the promise began to be implemented in practice. Waves of Jewish immigration flowed under British military protection, and “Balfour’s care” translated into organised colonial projects: land expropriation, settlement building, the establishment of Zionist militias and the imposition of a new reality by force.

While Arabs demanded freedom, Britain armed and trained the Haganah and Irgun. While Palestinians were prohibited from bearing arms, the British Government supplied thousands of modern rifles to settlers. While Palestine’s uprisings were suppressed, London issued statement after statement calling for “calm” and “order".

In 1948, when Zionist militias declared the establishment of Israel on the ruins of Palestinian villages, the promise had been fully realised. Britain had handed over the land, arms, and political legitimacy, then quietly withdrew, leaving behind more than 750,000 Palestinian refugees, burned villages and new maps of the Arab world.

British historian Arnold Toynbee later wrote: “The Nakba was the natural outcome of the Balfour Declaration, not a deviation from it.”

From Deir Yassin to Gaza: A massacre that never ended

The tragedy of the Balfour Declaration did not end with the Nakba – it began there. Every massacre since 1948 can be seen as an extension of that promise. From Deir Yassin to Sabra and Shatila, from Jenin to Gaza, the target has remained the same: Palestinians, with the killer waving the banner of “historical right” granted by the West in 1917.

In Gaza in particular, the British prophecy has come true in its most horrific form. For over two years, Israeli daily bombardment of the besieged Strip has resulted in more than 70,000 casualties, most of them women and children. UNRWA schools have become graves, hospitals have been reduced to rubble, families have been reduced to names on UN lists.

Yet the world, especially the powers that inherited Balfour’s politics, still speaks in the same century-old language: “Israel is defending itself".

The Israeli genocide in Gaza is not a separate event from the Balfour Declaration; it is its ongoing field implementation: Palestinians have no rightful claim to their land and their existence can be sacrificed for a settler project born in London and nurtured in Washington.

The ongoing British sin: From Balfour to London’s silence

Sadly, Britain has never renounced its promise, continuing to regard it as a “source of pride”, as Theresa May said on the centennial in 2017. But what pride is there in a promise that sparked a century of wars? What honour in a document that displaced millions, turning them into stateless refugees?

Thus, the declaration transformed from a colonial text into a political doctrine inherited by Western capitals which see Israel as their regional extension.

Meanwhile, Palestinians have not forgotten that sin. Every Balfour anniversary, people in Gaza, the West Bank and the diaspora raise a single slogan: “Balfour started it… and you continue it.”

Palestinian memory: Resistance against oblivion

Some may think the Balfour Declaration is history, but for Palestinians, it is present in every detail of daily life: in the checkpoints that cut the West Bank in pieces, in the siege that strangled Gaza, in settlements swallowing the land and in the language attempting to convince the world that the victim is the oppressor.

Israel, backed by the West, has tried to erase Palestinian memory, but the opposite has occurred: memory itself has become a weapon of resistance. Generation after generation, Palestinians recount Balfour’s story as part of their national consciousness – not merely as a political document but as an open wound connecting past and present.

In Gaza today, this is clear. Children who have lost their homes know Balfour’s name before they know the names of current leaders. They instinctively understand that what is happening is not merely a war, but a continuation of a promise written over a century ago and still enforced on their bodies.

After 108 years: The world between recognition and denial

More than a century has passed, yet Britain has not apologised, the US continues to fund the killing and the truth remains: the Balfour Declaration is no longer just a historical event – it is a moral mirror exposing the falsity of its entire discourse.

The late Palestinian thinker Edward Said said: “Balfour is no longer a person, but a continuing mentality, viewing the East through the lens of control rather than justice.”

Today, as images emerge of children pulled from Gaza’s rubble, that mentality remains alive. The difference is that Palestinians no longer write their history in ink – they write it in blood and resilience.

The ongoing genocide is conclusive evidence that the “cursed promise” was not a page that turned, but a continuous project of destruction and erasure.

It is time for justice to erase this promise from humanity’s memory — not as a historical mistake, but as a continuing moral crime — and to rewrite history from the perspective of those buried beneath it, not those who wrote it.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.