Balfour Day

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Balfour Day is the name given to an annual commemoration of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, by Palestinians, Israelis and their supporters.

Balfour Declaration A letter written by Arthur Balfour in support of a "national home for the Jewish people"

The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British government in 1917 during World War I announcing support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population. It read:

His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

The Palestinian people, also referred to as Palestinians or Palestinian Arabs, are an ethnonational group comprising the modern descendants of the peoples who have lived in Palestine over the centuries, including Jews and Samaritans, and who today are largely culturally and linguistically Arab. Despite various wars and exoduses, roughly one half of the world's Palestinian population continues to reside in historic Palestine, the area encompassing the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Israel. In this combined area, as of 2005, Palestinians constituted 49% of all inhabitants, encompassing the entire population of the Gaza Strip, the majority of the population of the West Bank and 20.8% of the population of Israel proper as Arab citizens of Israel. Many are Palestinian refugees or internally displaced Palestinians, including more than a million in the Gaza Strip, about 750,000 in the West Bank and about 250,000 in Israel proper. Of the Palestinian population who live abroad, known as the Palestinian diaspora, more than half are stateless, lacking citizenship in any country. Between 2.1 and 3.24 million of the diaspora population live in neighboring Jordan, over 1 million live between Syria and Lebanon and about 750,000 live in Saudi Arabia, with Chile's half a million representing the largest concentration outside the Middle East.

Israelis are the citizens or permanent residents of the State of Israel, a multiethnic state populated by people of different ethnic backgrounds. The largest ethnic groups in Israel are Jews (75%), followed by Arabs (20%) and other minorities (5%). Among the Israeli Jewish population, hundreds of thousands of Jews born in Israel are descended from Ashkenazi Jew, Mizrahi Jews, Sephardi Jews and an array of groups from all the Jewish ethnic divisions, though over 50% of Israel’s Jewish population is of at least partial Mizrahi descent.

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Jewish celebration

From 1918 until World War II, Jews in Mandatory Palestine celebrated Balfour Day as an annual national holiday on 2 November. [1] [2] The celebrations included ceremonies in schools and other public institutions and festive articles in the Hebrew press.

Mandatory Palestine A former geopolitical entity in Palestine occupied from the Ottoman Empire in WW1 aiming to creat the conditions for the establishment of national home to the Jewish People. Ceased to exist with the establishment of the Jewish State - Israel

Mandatory Palestine was a geopolitical entity established between 1920 and 1923 in the region of Palestine as part of the Partition of the Ottoman Empire under the terms of the British Mandate for Palestine.

Palestinian mourning

Mourning on Balfour Day 1929 in the Old City of Jerusalem.jpg
Mourning on Balfour Day 1929 in the Old City of Jerusalem, with a group of local Palestinians.jpg
Palestinian mourning on Balfour Day 1929, Old City of Jerusalem

Palestinian Arabs began marking Balfour Day as a day of mourning across the country. This included a general strike, with shops were closed, newspapers printed with black borders, and black flags hung. The protests were often an occasion for Palestinian unity, since they had no religious significance. [3]

The British government in Palestine did not support the Palestinian Arab strike, so the Arab Executive did not always announce it officially. [4]

Arab Higher Committee

The Arab Higher Committee or the Higher National Committee was the central political organ of the Arab Palestinians in Mandatory Palestine. It was established on 25 April 1936, on the initiative of Haj Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and comprised the leaders of Palestinian Arab clans and political parties under the mufti's chairmanship. The Committee was outlawed by the British Mandatory administration in September 1937 after the assassination of a British official.

Strikes and protests also took place in other cities, such as Beirut, Damascus and Cairo. [5]

Formal commemoration was limited during the 1936–39 Arab revolt in Palestine, when most Palestinian political structures stopped functioning. [6]

The country-wide Balfour Day strike was formally restarted in 1945. [7]

Bibliography

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References

  1. ↑ Podeh, p.60
  2. ↑ Sorek, p.11
  3. ↑ Sorek, p.11
  4. ↑ Sorek, p.11
  5. ↑ Sorek, p.12
  6. ↑ Sorek, p.12
  7. ↑ Sorek, p.12
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