The unmasking of an illusion: Britain’s reckoning and America’s last stand |
The masks are off. Eight decades of American support to maintain the myth of a virtuous Israel have finally come crashing down. September 2025 marked a new stage in this brutal saga when Britain, the original sinner behind the Balfour Declaration, took a tangible step of admitting its guilt by recognising the State of Palestine.
Britain’s move was not a diplomatic gesture. In reality, this marked a pivotal moment in history. As confessed by Britain’s Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, “We are acting with ‘the hand of history on our shoulders,’ mindful of Britain’s central role in the 1917 Balfour Declaration,”
One power stands alone in political delusion. The United States, which puts the support of evangelical Christian Zionists above human rights, remains the frantic defender of a nation that, according to international bodies, acts in a manner consistent with genocide. This policy keeps this region in a state of constant instability and renders America an accomplice to a “war without limits,” according to UN officials.
The first grand illusion: ‘A land without a people’
A comforting fiction was offered in place of the truth: “Jews fleeing from persecution settled in a desert land, ‘a land without a people for a people without a land.” This comforting fiction allowed Western countries to sponsor this colonialism without being forced to assess its moral implications or shoulder its guilt.
Palestine was not a land devoid of people. At the time of the Balfour Declaration, the indigenous population already accounted for more than 90 percent of the population. A living culture with a productive peasantry and a history dating back thousands of years existed in this society.
The phrase encapsulates Terra Nullius ideology—the colonial mentality where lands not worked in a “modern” way were deemed to be empty and ripe for colonization. In his 1974 speech at the UN, Yasser Arafat said: ‘It pains........