Balfour Declaration Centenary

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Wednesday 5th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, the wording of the Balfour Declaration referred to the preservation of certain rights for non-Jews in Palestine and Jews in other countries. The Arabs who stayed in Israel are now 20% of the population, 17 members of the Knesset, judges, university professors and army officers, with equal rights. But 800,000 Jews were driven from Middle Eastern states in the aftermath of the creation of Israel, most of whom were resettled in Israel—unlike the deliberate abandonment of the Palestinian refugees, rejected by the countries in which they are resident and kept as supplicants and pawns by the UNRWA and other Arab nations. Before the establishment of Israel, there were hundreds of thousands of Jews in Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Iraq and Libya. Where are they now? They are all gone, bar a handful—cleansed and expelled in defiance of the Balfour Declaration.

What do we regret and what do we celebrate? We regret that Israel was not established 10 years earlier, which would have largely prevented the Holocaust. We regret the 1939 White Paper, which all but halted Jewish immigration to Palestine when most needed. We regret that anti-Semitism continues to thrive, often in the guise of anti-Zionism—an extraordinary phenomenon when one considers that there is no anti-Turkeyism, anti-Chinaism or anti-Saudiism, to quote but a few egregious examples of repression of the population.

We celebrate self-determination for the Jewish people after thousands of years of dispersal and persecution. We celebrate the miraculous success of Israel; its world leadership in innovation; its 13 Nobel Prize winners; its development of everything from the Intel processor to the five-minute cell phone charger, from radiation-free X-rays to desalination of sea-water, from genetic counselling for the Bedouin to the epilator; its diversity and freedom of speech. It has liberated Jews and given them pride and shown what a persecuted people can do when given control over their own destiny in a tiny state.