Popular Conference for Palestinians Abroad holds a discussion seminar on the 104th anniversary of Balfour Declaration

The Popular Conference for Palestinians Abroad held a discussion seminar on Wednesday 3/11/2021 under the title "104 Years since Balfour Declaration". The seminar was moderated by Nour Abu Ghosh, and the conference hosted a group of Palestinian personalities, who spoke about the Balfour Declaration from legal and media perspectives, and its repercussions on Palestinian refugees.

On the legal dimensions of the declaration, the head of the Legal Committee of the Popular Conference for Palestinians Abroad, Moataz Al-Maslouki, said that "legally, the Balfour Declaration is a fact that does not carry any legal status and is invalid because it violates the rules of international law and cancels the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination."

He added that "the declaration is an expression of sympathy and feelings without any legal basis or obligation, which appears in a sentence that looks sympathetically in the text of the declaration."

Al-Masloukhi also confirmed that the statement denied an entire people living on their land, the Palestinian people, and canceled their existence.

He noted that the phrase "national home" was not mentioned before, and that it was a precedent in international law, where the talk was about a state or a safe place for the Jews, and there was no Jewish people in the sense of a people, but only a religion.

In his speech during the seminar, he referred to the British Mandate Instrument, where he stated that it came to implement the Balfour Declaration and it was a colonial instrument because it changed the Balfour Declaration and enabled the occupation in Palestine and facilitated the immigration of Jews.

He explained that Britain had "cleverly" drafted the Mandate in a way that it did not bear any obligation or responsibility for it with this declaration.

On the media side, media and filmmaker Rawan Al-Damen confirmed that the production of "animation" films and other media productions on Palestinian issues is in order to facilitate the delivery of information to generations that have become dependent on visual productions more than written ones.

She added that, as media professionals, they seek, through media productions, to clarify the wrong images about the Palestinian events, as if to show that Balfour is a statement and not a promise.

She stated that the media alone cannot influence without networking through which a bloc can be formed to build the future of the Palestinian cause.

In a related context, Al Damen said, "We need to document the Palestinian cause in media language and content, for fear of losing the Palestinian narrative with the death of generations of the Nakba and Palestinian history."

On the importance and accuracy of the information, she explained that real awareness is based on correct information, noting that there is a huge amount of false information that is being pumped to distract and mislead generations, especially in the Palestinian cause.

For his part, the Director General of Dar Al-Awda for Studies and Publishing, Yasser Ali, spoke about the Balfour Declaration and the refugee issue, stressing that the Balfour Declaration was a continuation of several previous statements, and part of a series of conspiracies carried out by Britain, and one of its most prominent results was the Nakba.

Ali said, "The Balfour Declaration was not only a promise to Zionism, but it came to reshape the region and to form a functional state barrier."

He stressed that the solution to the Palestinian issue will not be achieved without removing all the results and everything related to the Balfour Declaration.

This seminar comes within the activities of the media campaign launched by the Popular Conference for Palestinians Abroad on the occasion of the 104th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration.