AMMAN – The Palestinian poet Ibrahim Tuqan (1905–1941) addressed the British occupiers and the calamities they brought upon Palestine and the Arab world, writing: “Since you occupied us, the ill omen of life has weighed us down, with poverty, hunger, hardship, and corruption. By your hand, the flood of their exile overflowed, and the promise we received turned out to be expulsion.”

Abd al-Rahim Mahmoud, another Palestinian poet, reproaches both Palestinians and Arabs together, saying:
“Balfour—what of Balfour? What was his pledge,
if not what our own decisive deeds enabled?
By our hands, we wounded our own hearts,
and through us our pains came upon us.”

We add: the “Balfour promise” would not have seen the light or been realized on the ground in Palestine had the Arab nation, its states, and its regimes then—and even up to the present—borne their national and historical responsibilities.

Palestine would not have been lost, usurped, and Judaized if the Arabs had confronted the Zionist project as they should have; Palestine would not have been transformed into “a national home for the Jews” had the Arabs risen to meet the scale of the promise and the moment.

Between “Balfour then” and “Starmer and Trump today” lies the same lesson: Balfour’s pledges would never have been implemented had the Arabs united and risen to confront the gathering dangers pressing in from all four directions.

Between the “Balfour promise,” the “Bush promise,” the “Trump promise,” and the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza, the Palestinian homeland, its legitimate and entrenched rights, and the very foundations of Palestinian independence are being assassinated amid Arab and international incapacity to intervene effectively and halt the historical destruction underway in Gaza.