The Balfour Conversations: British Human Rights Activists and the Call to Reckon with Implication

Abstract

As the Great Power which initially authorized the Zionist settler-colonial project in historic Palestine, Britain has played a decisive role in the one hundred-year war against Palestinians. This essay analyses moments of encounter between Palestinians and British human rights activists, which is to say between those who relegate British imperial history to a definitive past and those who continue to live with the resilient structures of the British imperial past and the ongoing settler-colonial present. Paying attention to these moments of encounter is shown to offer a way of understanding Palestinian experiences of the past as an “ever-living present”. Furthermore, in what I call these “Balfour conversations”, when British subjects were being asked to apologize for Britain’s historic actions, I suggest that something akin to the Althusserian “hail” is at work. Through its attempt to understand the processes by which interpellation functions in this context, this essay explores how implication is frequently unacknowledged or denied through reactions of defensiveness, shock, and anger – responses which are also shown to be illustrative of collective “imperial dispositions”. Throughout the essay, I unpick how it is that British activists are structurally implicated, and something of what lies beneath these imperial dispositions, in order that different ways of acting within transnational solidarity relationships might be imagined possible.

Keywords:

• Balfour Declaration
• British responsibility
• human rights activism
• implication
• interpellation
• Palestine

Acknowledgements

This work was made possible through Doctoral programme funding from the Economic Social Research Council. I would like to acknowledge the invaluable contributions made to various versions of this essay over the past few years by Professor Hagar Kotef, the SOAS postgraduate political theory workshop, Danilo Di Emidio, and several other friends and colleagues. I also want to thank the two peer reviewers for their very helpful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This essay is based on interviews with and emails from British participants in the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel. In addition, the essay relies on retrospective participant observation with the same organisation which took place in 2017: the year of the Balfour Centenary in Palestine when the issue felt particularly live. All of the names of participants in this study have been replaced with pseudonyms.

2 The influence of the League of Nations is important to note. As Khalidi (2020, 52) notes,

If it appeared that Palestinian pressure might force Britain to violate the letter or the spirit of the Mandate, there was intensive lobbying in the League’s Permanent Mandates Commission in Geneva to remind it of its overarching obligations to the Zionists.

3 However, Althusser admits that his narrative is limited in its accuracy of how ideology works. In reality these stages do not have a sequential nature:

The existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing … I must now suppress the temporal form in which I have presented the functioning of ideology, and say: ideology has always-already interpellated individuals as subject, which necessarily leads us to one last proposition: individuals are always-already subjects (1984, 49).

4 Every year a significant number of international activists are prevented from entering Israel and thus the oPt. Some reports indicate that the frequency of those being barred entry is higher for people of colour and those with a Muslim-sounding name. See for example Hoque (2012).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Economic and Social Research Council.