Oxford Brookes: Gaza Lecture 2017

You are invited to book online now for the Oxford Brookes University 2017 Gaza Lecture, Britain and Palestine: One Hundred Years of Promises and Conflict, featuring Prof Avi Shlaim speaking to mark the centenary of the Balfour Declaration.

Tottenham Palestine Literature Festival

BWISP is getting excited! Sept 18-20 is the second Tottenham Palestine Literature Festival, organised by Haringey Justice for Palestine. A free weekend of literature, politics, music and Palestinian food, held at the West Green Learning Centre, the festival features an international cast including Ghada Karmi, Selma Dabbagh, Baroness Jenny Tonge, Ruqayyah Kareem, Brian Whitaker, Dervla Murphy, Sarah Irving, Naomi Foyle and Sarah Schulman. Guests will be exploring a wide range topics including Biography, Fiction, Poetry, Travel, Middle Eastern SF, LGBT in the Occupied Territories, and – you can’t discuss Palestine in the UK without it – the Balfour Declaration. The full programme is below, or here on the HJfP website. Directions here – if you’re in London, hope to see you there!

The 95th Anniversary of the Balfour Declaration

This letter, organised by Haringey Justice for Palestine, with the support of five BWISP members, appeared today in The Guardian.

Today is the 95th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, when the then foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, signed a fateful letter to Lord Rothschild announcing that the British government “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people”. Britain thus gave the Zionist movement carte blanche to transform the overwhelmingly Arab state of Palestine into a Jewish one.

To further this aim, from 1920 onwards, Britain encouraged the mass immigration into Palestine of hundreds of thousands of European Jews, expressly against the wishes of the majority population. As Palestine descended into chaos, the British washed their hands of their responsibility for the mess they had caused and stood by while hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were terrorised into fleeing their homeland, as Palestine was transformed into Israel.

We call for the British government to acknowledge publicly the responsibility of previous British administrations from 1917 to 1948 for the catastrophe that befell the Palestinians, when over threequarters were expelled deliberately and systematically by the Zionist army. Most of them remain refugees today without redress. The truth about their expulsions is still not officially established, since Israel officially denies any responsibility for it.

Ghada Karmi
Tim Llewellyn
Karl Sabbagh
John Rose
Kamel Hawwash
Naomi Foyle
Mona Baker
Mike Marqusee
Seni Seneviratne