………In an address to the ‘Palestine Royal Commission’ (the Peel Commission) in 1937, Winston Churchill (believe it or not) said the following:-
“I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time………. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come and taken their place”.
This quote appears in Bernard Regan’s excellent book (‘The Balfour Declaration”) about the 1917 document that changed- and blighted- the history of the Arab land of Palestine when, after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WW1, the League of Nations mandated Palestine to be administered and governed by Britain. The Balfour Declaration was drafted by Lord Balfour and imposed by the Mandate upon the land and people of Palestine, designating Palestine as “A homeland for the Jewish people” from then onwards.
Churchill’s statement, above, epitomises Britain’s cavalier attitude towards the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine and how the administration of the Mandate frustrated Palestinian efforts and desire for self-determination. Although the British Mandate ended in 1948, that shameful legacy continues to blight the lives and rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination, to this day.
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