An anti-Israeli protest group named “Palestine Action” has vandalized and ruined a historic portrait on display in Trinity College, Cambridge, of Arthur Balfour, a UK politician and former Prime Minister whose 1917 declaration expressed Britain’s support for a Jewish homeland in then-Palestine to Baron Lionel Walter Rothschild.
“A pro-Palestine group has defaced and slashed a painting of Lord Arthur James Balfour, the British foreign secretary whose 1917 declaration was instrumental in justifying support for the establishment of the state of Israel.
A video released by Palestinian Action, showed an activist spraying the 1914 portrait of Balfour by Hungarian-born artist Philip Alexius de Laszlo that was hanging in Trinity College, Cambridge, and repeatedly cutting it with a sharp object.
Palestinian Action claimed that the Balfour Declaration marked the start of ‘ethnic cleansing in Palestine’.
The Balfour declaration promised to build ‘a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, where the majority of the indigenous population were not Jewish’, the statement published on the group’s official website reads. ‘He gave away the Palestinians homeland – a land that wasn’t his to give away’.
The UK has seen frequent pro-Palestine and pro-Israel protests since October 7th last year, when the militant group Hamas attacked southern Israel, killing around 1,200 people and taking more than 200 hostages. Israel responded by declaring war on Hamas and launching a military operation in Gaza. Over 30,000 Palestinians have died in the conflict so far, according to Gaza health authorities.
Earlier this week, students from the University of Leeds occupied a campus building in protest at the university’s ties with Israel. The demonstrators demanded that university authorities dismiss the university rabbi, who returned to serve in the Israeli army after October 7th.
Last month, tens of thousands of people reportedly took part in a pro-Palestinian march in central London, calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
In January, a group of pro-Palestinian activists were arrested on suspicion of plotting to disrupt the work of the London stock exchange, and another group of protesters briefly blocked roads outside parliament. In November, Palestine supporters staged a sit-in at King’s Cross station in central London”. -RT
Defacing art is hardly a newly popularized form of political protest.
Ironically, the portrait of Arthur Balfour was painted by Hungarian-born artist Philip Alexius de Laszlo in 1914, the very same year that a Canadian suffragette and member of the Women's Social and Political Union, Mary Richardson, used a meat cleaver to hack six times into the prized oil painting by Diego Velázquez, The Rokeby Venus, at The National Gallery in London.
“As Richardson was bundled out of the Gallery, she proclaimed, 'Yes, I am a suffragette. You can get another picture, but you cannot get a life, as they are killing Mrs. Pankhurst'.
Though Richardson admitted that she didn't like the Velázquez, she was no philistine.
In a signed statement addressed to the Women's Social and Political Union after the action, Richardson declared: 'I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs. Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history’”. -Victoria Ibbett, Suffragettes and Art Vandalism
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| Mary Richardson |
Richardson, who went on to run the Women's Section of the British Union of Fascists under Oswald Mosely, committed the attack in protest against the incarceration of the founder of the Women's Social and Political Union, Emmeline Pankhurst, a suffragette who led the White Feather campaign to jail men who did not volunteer to fight in the Great War.
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| Emmeline Pankhurst |
It’s fascinating to see that this young radical has mimicked the tactics of the English suffragettes’ campaign prior to World War I, considering how the Muslims whom she is militating in support of would, in all likelihood, sooner destroy any portraits or statues honoring Ms. Pankhurst and her egalitarian comrades then support her unfettered freedom of expression.