#balfour

When culture exists only to assuage the pride of the powerful and secure their legacy, when the work of Palestinian children can be taken down on request by Zionist lawyers, when poets do not live to see another day and neither do their children, what is art? What power does it actually have when over 30,000 people have been killed with impunity by a settler state? Not even the power of a custard pie dropped on someones head. In this context, art does not mean anything. It is useless.

BREAKING: Palestine Action spray and slash a historic painting of ‘Lord’ Balfour in Trinity College, University of Cambridge.

Written in 1917, Balfour’s declaration began the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by promising the land away — which the British never had the right to do.

After the Declaration, until 1948, the British burnt down indigenous villages to prepare the way; with this came arbitrary killings, arrests, torture and sexual violence including rape.

The British paved the way for the Nakba and trained the Zionist militia to ethnically cleanse over 750,000 Palestinians, destroy over 500 villages and massacre many families.

The Nakba never stopped and the genocide today is rooted and supported by British complicity.

Reception of Balfour at the Experiment Station in Tel-Aviv, modern-day Israel

Text: In the words of Lord Balfour, “the four great powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desire and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land. In my opinion that is right.”