In the fall of November 1917, Lord Walter Rothschild, the influential British banker and pre-eminent leader of the Zionist Movement, coaxed the British imperial government to sign the ‘Balfour Declaration’. It pledged a home in Palestine for the scattered Jewish diaspora around the world. Little did the British cabinet know that this categorical approval of ‘Jewish Homecoming’ into the ‘Promised Land’ of their ‘Tanakh’ (Jewish Bible) and the Arab- Israeli war of 1948 that followed, would trigger human rights violations and ruthless evictions of indigenous Arab families in the Palestinian heartland.
The land of Israel was partially built on the abandoned homes of more than 750,000 Palestinians who were dispossessed by an onslaught of illegal evictions by Jewish immigrants, arriving mainly from mainland Europe, Near East and the Maghreb Jews from Arab nations.
After the creation of the State of Israel, post-war in 1948, ‘The Law of Return Bill’ passed by Israel’s Parliament, the Knesset, legally reinforced the right of any Jew in any part of the world to emigrate into Israel. Israel’s victory in the ‘Six Day War’ in 1967, further consolidated their territorial expansion by seizing East Jerusalem and West Bank from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt. West Bank is currently termed as ‘Occupied Territory’ by the International Court of Justice, European Union, The United Nations and the Israel Supreme Court (excludes East Jerusalem), as it is controlled both by Israel and Palestine.
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