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Balfour Declaration: ‘State’ or ‘Homeland’?

Presumably if the headline of an article on the Balfour Declaration states “what it means for the Middle East today,” shouldn’t that include both Jews and Arabs? Not for The Independent, which focuses solely on portraying the Balfour Declaration as the root of all evil when it comes to Palestinian victimhood.

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Bethan McKernan, no stranger to taking a one-sided approach to her reporting, may as well have reprinted Palestinian Authority talking points in her Balfour story. For her, the framing of the story is purely about alleged Palestinian suffering. Jewish rights to self-determination or any other rights are simply ignored in favor of the Palestinian narrative.

If The Independent is going to opine over the Balfour Declaration, the least it can do is to accurately describe its contents. The British pointedly did not express their support for a Jewish sovereign state, preferring to refer to the more ambiguous “homeland.”

This is not being overparticular on our part. The terms are not legally or practically the same, which is why we requested a correction from The Independent for the following erroneous references to “state”:

 

 

While The Independent won’t take back its bias, at least it corrected the error following a complaint from HonestReporting, changing the references to “Jewish homeland” and “Jewish home” respectively.

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With overall responsibility for HonestReporting’s content and output, Simon was part of the HonestReporting team from November 2005 to 2020, following several years working in a variety of non-profit organizations, including the Jewish Agency and the Board of Deputies of British Jews prior to immigrating to Israel in 2001 from London. In Israel, Simon has worked for BICOM and as Managing Editor of NGO Monitor as well as serving for a short period in the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit. Simon has a BSoc.Sc in International Studies and Political Science from the University of Birmingham and a MSc in History of International Relations from the London School of Economics.

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