Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu called the campaign to force Great Britain to apologize for issuing the Balfour Declaration in 1917 a symptom of the true obstacle to peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the complete rejection of the Jewish State in any borders.
“The Balfour Declaration recognized this land as a home for the Jewish people, which obviously had consequences later on down the line,” Netanyahu said at the 2016 Jewish Media Summit in Jerusalem. “But if the Palestinians, 100 years later, are challenging even the idea that the Jewish people have a home here, you know that they are not really gung-ho on…a nation-state for the Jewish people.”
“It’s not about territories, even though that’s an issue,” he continued. “It’s not about settlements, even though that’s an issue. But it’s not ‘the’ issue. It’s not even about a Palestinian state…it was offered again and again and again. It was never and is still not about a Palestinian state. It’s always been about the Jewish state and the fact that there’s a challenge to the Balfour Declaration 100 years later tells you that we haven’t come very far.”
In October, the PLO's Department for Palestinian Affairs called on Arab towns in Judea and Samaria to hold memorial events over the next year marking the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration to protest what it termed the 'historic injustice' of the declaration.
Nabil Abu Rudeineh, the official spokesman of Palestinian Authority (PA) chairman Mahmoud Abbas, has called the Balfour Declaration "the crime of the century."
The PA has even threatened to sue Britain over the Balfour Declaration.