The West should take Macron’s cue on Israel-Palestine matter

Let’s hope that his aspirations for Palestine are not mere pious platitudes

- MUSHTAK PARKER

THE world is currently polarised along a troika of depressing and disruptive issues which many would agree ought to affect any member of the human race with a conscience and a moral compass.

Alas, the three defining foreign policy issues of our time — Palestinian statehood, the concentration camp called Gaza which doubles up as the asylum for the emaciated and the starving, and the neocolonialist US policy of lawfare by extraterritoriality which targets sanctions against foreign politicians deemed “corrupt or extremist” - in other words inimical to the interests of the incumbent administration of the day and of course their ideological allies.

The troika of issues have global implications which although steeped in history for at least a century if not longer have a knack of reincarnating as a monument to man’s perversity in enduring them as opposed to preventing or resolving them.

In the process this ambivalence of failure, inertia, obfuscation and intransigence over the years have unleashed incalculable suffering, death, moral corruption and lost opportunities on all sides - a sociopolitical playbook that may take generations to reset.

When Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, issued his controversial statement The Balfour Declaration on November 2, 1917, expressing British government support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population, at the expense of the majority Muslim and Christian Palestinian population, it was in reality a Manifesto of Sympathy and Empathy for the establishment of the future Zionist state.

I wonder if Balfour is turning in his grave about the devastating and history-changing consequences of his action, which must go down as one of the most one-sided and sordid affairs in British foreign and colonial history.