Do we need a #BalfourMustFall movement? Contending with the statue and legacy of Arthur Balfour
In 2015, the #RhodesMustFall movement in South Africa led to the removal of the statue of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes from the University of Cape Town campus. Michael Kilmister wonders if a similar movement is needed for the removal of the statue of former British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour.
By Michael Kilmister
In November 2022, two female members of the group Palestine Action entered Britain’s House of Commons and splashed the statue of former prime minister and foreign secretary Arthur Balfour with fake blood. The women then glued themselves to the statue, unfurled a small Palestinian flag and shouted ‘free Palestine’ before being arrested by police for criminal damage. One of the demonstrators uttered: “Palestinians have suffered for 105 years because of this man, Lord Balfour — he gave away their homeland and it wasn’t his to give.”
Who was Balfour?
To understand these women’s dramatic act of protest a brief explanation of the Balfour Declaration is necessary. Signed by Arthur Balfour on behalf of the British government in 1917, it pledged support for the ‘establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.’ The document sought to protect ‘the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,’ but it did not give them political or national rights. The Balfour Declaration set the stage for the establishment of a Jewish state by creating conditions that marginalised the Palestinian Arabs as well as the 1948 Palestinian Nakba, during which Zionist armed groups forcibly displaced over 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral land.
As writer Yousef Munayyer wrote on the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, Balfour’s ‘support of Zionism was motivated to an extent by his desire to protect Britain from the negative effects… of having Jews in its midst.’
However, Balfour’s support for Zionism did not exactly make him a friend to the Jews. As prime minister he was an ardent racist who oversaw the enactment of the 1905 Aliens Act, primarily designed to limit Jewish immigration into Great Britain. As writer Yousef Munayyer wrote on the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, Balfour’s ‘support of Zionism was motivated to an extent by his desire to protect Britain from the negative effects… of having Jews in its midst.’
Against this background, the Balfour Apology Campaign established in 2017 an unsuccessful petition for the British government to ‘openly apologise to the Palestinian people for issuing the Balfour Declaration.’ The government responded that ‘[w]e are proud of our role in creating the State of Israel. The task now is to encourage moves towards peace.’
Failure to acknowledge the trauma and human suffering caused by the Balfour Declaration cannot build a stable foundation for peace. The fake blood splashed by the two pro-Palestine protestors on a statue that glorifies an architect of Palestine’s colonisation is not only a vivid reminder of the significant scars Balfour has left on Palestinian collective memory, but also the pain that physical symbols of colonisation hold for those who live with
the intergenerational trauma of colonialism. Monuments, after all, are not neutral representations of the past disconnected from our everyday politics. The role monuments play in contemporary politics and understanding the past was highlighted for me by the police cordons around war memorials during the National March for Palestine in London in November 2023. (Securing these memorials was a major focus of government rhetoric around the London protests in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza).
What do we do about the Balfour statue?
In moments of crisis, memorials, monuments and statues serve as ‘lightning rods of social conflict’. In recent years the #RhodesMustFall campaign, which led to the removal of the statue of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes from the grounds of the University of Cape Town in 2015, has sparked broader discussions about the legacy of colonialism and decolonising public spaces and cultural memory. More recently, the #BlackLivesMatter movement saw the removal of or threats to coloniser and Confederate statues in the US, the toppling of monuments to slavery and slavers in the UK including of the slave trader Edward Colston — whose statue was pushed into Bristol Harbour by anti-racism protestors — and the graffitiing of statues of British colonisers in Australia.
The idea of toppling statues is as appealing as curator and historian Paul M Farber suggests: ‘[t]here is glory in seeing monuments, once dedicated to colonisers, enslavers, and brutal leaders, removed from their pedestals and layered with new inscriptions for social justice.’
While politicians and commentators frequently frame these acts of protest as unlawful and unruly, historian Penelope Edmonds argues these acts ‘around monuments re-story them with higher and alternative orders of justice to counter histories of violence and trauma, colonialism and slavery.’
The idea of toppling statues is as appealing as curator and historian Paul M Farber suggests: ‘[t]here is glory in seeing monuments, once dedicated to colonisers, enslavers, and brutal leaders, removed from their pedestals and layered with new inscriptions for social justice.’ The removal of a monument to oppression can also create ‘space in which previously
constrained cultures can flourish’, but there are alternatives that still have the power to decolonise. We might, for example, engage in dialogical or counter memorialisation, whereby additional plaques, information or alterative monuments are added to the original site in acts of truth-telling, healing and reconciliation.
Re-storying the statue of Balfour requires us to reflexively contend with Britain’s imperial past in Palestine and the violence and trauma its actions continue to inflict on the people who live there. While the UK government rejects apologising for the Balfour Declaration, there might still be space to make an addendum to or reinterpret Balfour’s statue. Taking our cue from the extremely effective activist campaign that led to the removal of the statue of Rhodes, we might usefully start by popularising #BalfourMustFall. If we collectively take up the challenge of re-storying the statue of Balfour in the House of Commons, it is possible we can set ourselves anew on the path towards justice and reparation in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
This text is part of the anthology Reflections on US! compiled by researchers at Coventry University, The full volume can be downloaded here.
Dr. Michael Kilmister is an Academic Developer at the University of Reading. He has worked in several different roles in higher education across Australia and the UK. He was awarded his PhD in history from the University of Newcastle, and has published widely on critical education and teaching history.
