Thousands of Palestinians protest Balfour centenary across West Bank

Thousands of Palestinians have taken to the streets in protest across the West Bank marking a century since the Balfour Declaration, Britain’s promise to create a Jewish home in what is now Israel.

In Ramallah, some 3,000 protesters marched from the city centre to the British Consulate, with many waving black flags and banners with slogans such as “100 years of dispossession”.

Smaller demonstrations took place in east Jerusalem and elsewhere in the West Bank.

Rawada Odeh, a demonstrator in Jerusalem, said she was protesting because Balfour promised a home to the Zionists while neglecting that there is a “Palestinian population here in our land”.

“The land does not belong to Balfour,” she said. “We are Palestinians, and we are living here and we are following our issue till we succeed.”

The 1917 declaration served as the basis for the British Mandate of Palestine, which was approved in 1920 by the League of Nations.

The following decades saw a spike in the number of Jews immigrating to Palestine as Zionist state institutions took root. With that came increased friction with the Arab population.

Israel views the pledge as the first international recognition granted to the Jewish people’s desire to return to its historic homeland.

It sees Britain as having played a supporting role in a narrative dominated by the determination, heroism and pioneering spirit of the early settlers who fought to build the state.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is marking the anniversary in London at a dinner attended by Prime Minister Theresa May.

The Palestinians see the declaration as the original sin, a harbinger of their “nakba”, or catastrophe, the mass displacement that resulted from the war surrounding Israel‘s creation in 1948.

That refugee crisis reverberates across the region today, and the Palestinians have castIsrael, through the declaration and its imperialist British patrons, as a colonial enterprise.