A sign on an empty building in the West Bank city of Hebron declares, ‘this land was stolen by Arabs’. The notice was hung there by the Jewish residents of a nearby settlement, but similar signs proliferate across the region – Hebrew designations supplanting Arabic place names along the freeway to Jerusalem or maps that give illegal settlements equal prominence to historic Palestinian towns. It is against such efforts to abrogate the existence of a place called Palestine – and of Palestinians themselves – that the fragmented entity now known as the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) has struggled to assert its statehood.
One hundred years ago, the British government was sent a receipt by its first High Commissioner for the territory to acknowledge that he had been mandated ‘one Palestine, complete’. The handover reflected one of many colonial betrayals of Arab aspirations to independence that saw Palestine’s territorial integrity dismantled over the following century. The 1917 Balfour Declaration had vouched British support for ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’ – a goal realized in 1948 with the declaration of the state of Israel.
