Last week at the Arab League summit in Mauritania, Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki called upon Arab leaders to support the Palestinian effort to sue Britain. The legal case presented to the summit on behalf of the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, challenges the 100-year-old Balfour Declaration, which called for a national Jewish home in Palestine. Malki called that historic document a “fateful promise from the ones who don’t own to the ones who don’t deserve.”
Such efforts, which seek to delegitimize Israel, go beyond Abbas’ political posturing and infiltrate our day-to-day lives.
In 2016, with all the anonymity the internet has to offer, we find ourselves bombarded every day with new claims undermining the Jewish people’s right to a home in Israel. As trolls tweet and comment, they disregard historical facts, intending only to incite hate and encourage violence. Jewish university students are attacked by their peers and professors when they defend the right to a Jewish homeland in Israel. These efforts, as persistent and far-reaching as they are, ignore important moments in history and focus on undermining Israel’s legitimacy on the international stage.
On July 24, we celebrated the anniversary of one of those significant moments in Israel’s history — 94 years since the League of Nations recognized the historic connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel and called for a national home to be established in Palestine (Note: Palestine at that time referred to a geographical region without the ethnic or political connotations it carries today).
This 1922 declaration asserted the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in their ancestral home. The decision by the League of Nations did not come as a response to violence or a specific event, but rather looked to the history of the Jewish people to find an undeniable connection between this people and this land. The League of Nations also understood that beyond this connection there existed a pressing current need for a Jewish homeland — a need that the Holocaust would tragically confirm less than two decades later.
The League of Nations declaration is just one example of international recognition the Jewish people received in their quest for self-determination. The League of Nations was the predecessor to the United Nations, which signed the 1947 Partition Plan upon which Israel was established. While detractors try to undermine Israel’s legitimacy, it is irrefutable that Israel has had a clear foundation of international support since long before declaring independence in 1948.
While these important international documents are significant to the birth of the modern State of Israel, they did not create the historical connection between the Jews and the land of Israel. Rather, they simply acknowledged and officially recognized the historic existence of such a connection.
Israel maintains that in any peace negotiation the Palestinians must recognize the right of the Jewish people to a nation-state. The lawsuit the PA is seeking to bring against Britain is just the latest effort to deny the legitimate relationship between the land of Israel and the Jewish people. By bringing the case, Abbas has further distanced himself and his administration from any meaningful progress toward peace.
While Abbas tries to rewrite history, we will continue to celebrate these significant milestones and we invite our Palestinian neighbors to join us in using the lessons from our mutual history to guide us toward a better future together.
Andy David is the consul general of Israel to San Francisco and the Pacific Northwest.