Activists from the Palestine Action association destroyed this Friday a portrait at the University of Cambridge (southeast England) of the British statesman Arthur James Balfour, who promoted the creation of a Jewish state in the Middle East.
A video posted on the internet by the organization, which is calling for the closure of the Israeli arms company Elbit Systems in the United Kingdom, shows a militant spraying red paint and tearing a canvas made in 1914 by Philip Alexius de László of the former minister of Foreign Affairs (1916-1919) and British Conservative Prime Minister (1902-1905).
As head of Foreign Affairs, the politician issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917, in which he promised to build "a national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, then under the Ottoman Empire and later a British protectorate, until the creation in 1948 of the State of Israel.
"He gave away the Palestinian homeland, a land that was not his place to give" and whose native population was not Jewish, activists say on their website.
After the Declaration and until 1948, "the British burned indigenous villages to pave the way", with arbitrary killings, arrests, torture, sexual violence, the use of human shields and the introduction of house demolitions as collective punishment to suppress resistance Palestinian, they denounce.
According to Palestine Action, the British thus began the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and promoted the Zionist objective of locating a 'home' for Jews on Palestinian lands and communities.
The militants recall that the Palestinians refer to this moment as the Nakba or great catastrophe and point out that the current war in Gaza can be considered the second Nakba.
Palestine Action also criticizes the involvement of the United Kingdom in the formation of the Zionist militia that in 1948 expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and imposed the occupation, in a process that, they say, continues now with the war in the Strip.
"The United Kingdom's support for the continued colonization of Palestine has not wavered since 1917," say the militants, who emphasize that they will continue their direct action campaign until Elbit is closed and "British complicity with the colonization of Palestine ends." .
