The Tory Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, is remembered above all for the famous Declaration he made as Foreign Secretary in 1917 supporting the creation of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. In early March a fine portrait of him by Philip de Laszlo in Trinity College, Cambridge, was slashed and sprayed with paint by a pro-Palestinian group. It made false cliams about Balfour, as Alistair Lexden pointed out in a letter published in The Times on 12 March.
Sir, Trinity College, Cambridge, might have been expected to condemn rather than merely “regret” the serious damage done to its portrait of Arthur Balfour, a formidable Tory intellectual who was a conscientious Chancellor of Cambridge University for 11 years (“Portrait of Balfour ripped and defaced by pro-Palestinian group”, Mar 9). The 1917 Balfour Declaration did not begin “the ethnic cleansing of Palestine”, as the vandals assert. Its author envisaged no more than “a small notch in what are now Arab territories being given to a people who for hundreds of years have been separated from them.” He hoped for “sympathetic goodwill on the part of Jew and Arab” to develop their common home.
Lord Lexden
Conservative Party historian
