Lord Arthur James Balfour recognized what our activist class has failed to consider: that which has been stewarded for a generation cannot be cut down with an X-Acto knife.
Earlier this month, an anti-Israel protester destroyed a 110-year-old portrait of Balfour at Cambridge University. The masked woman sprayed red paint over the portrait and slashed the canvas with a box cutter, first in a methodical cross and then in quick, indiscriminate movements until Balfour hung in tatters from his frame.
Balfour, a public intellectual and begrudging Conservative statesman, was the British prime minister from 1902 to 1905. His most notable political contribution also made him a target of Palestine Action, the activist organization that took responsibility for the vandalism in a statement:
“Palestine Action ruined a 1914 painting by Philip Alexius de László inside Trinity College, University of Cambridge of Lord Arthur James Balfour — the colonial administrator and signatory of the Balfour Declaration.”
The organization added that the use of red paint symbolized the “bloodshed of the Palestinian people since the Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917.”
Balfour was serving as foreign secretary when he penned the 128-word letter to Zionist community leader Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild promising British assistance in the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object,” it reads in part, including the caveat “that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
At the heart of the document, which paved the way for Israel’s founding in 1948 (and the ensuing decades of conflict thereafter), are both an obvious dilemma and a biblical ideal. Balfour, a devout Christian who influenced apologist C.S. Lewis with his 1915 book Theism and Humanism, understood that his was a moment in history to right a historical wrong, to jump-start the anti-colonialist project of restoring ownership of Israel to its original Jewish inhabitants.
Indeed, Balfour’s convictions on legacy, posterity, and stewardship would have been informed by his theological meditations — by the study of the long and treacherous history of the Jews’ covenant with God and the promise of a homeland.
“People that were tapped out of Jerusalem, were scattered all over the world and persecuted left, right, and center, should finally go back there and create something very remarkable,” said Lord Jacob Rothschild, the great-nephew of Lord Walter Rothschild, of Balfour’s vision. “It’s one of the most extraordinary stories of mankind.”
In the wake of World War I, the Allied Powers were tasked with rebuilding a world still reeling from unprecedented conflict and catastrophic loss. The redistribution of territory once belonging to the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria) posed a unique opportunity to realize the promise of a Jewish homeland.
Mere weeks after the opening of the Paris Peace Conference in January 1919, the text of a covenant for a new League of Nations had been drafted by the victors. Balfour, who was serving as lord president of the Privy Council later that year, addressed the league’s many objectors at an Armistice Day meeting in the Queen’s Hall.
“The League of Nations has had many critics, but I am not aware that, among the multitude of criticisms that have been offered, any suggestion makes its appearance for finding a substitute for that organization which we desire to see entrusted, I admit, with the great task of preserving the peace of the world,” he said in the November speech. “Those who criticize the League of Nations have no substitute for the League of Nations.”
Ideas were the thing, and Lord Balfour was not inclined to discuss the future of international relations with those detractors who brought none to the table. “They are prepared, it seems,” he continued, “for the civilized world to go on in the future, as it has gone on in the past, oscillating between those scenes of violence and sanguinary disturbance and the intervals in which great and ambitious nations pile up their armaments for a new effort.”
Despite protests, the League of Nations was established on Jan. 10, 1920, as the dominant means of international cooperation. The Balfour Declaration was endorsed by the aforementioned powers and grafted into the British mandate over Palestine, and on July 24, 1922, Palestine was transferred from the Ottoman Empire to the British.
Balfour wouldn’t live to see his efforts fully realized, dying 18 years before the establishment of Israel. Yet, even 105 years later, his words spoken in the Queen’s Hall hold true.
The efforts of protesters who destroy precious works of art offer no material assistance to the people of Gaza, who languish under the jackboot of an authoritarian terrorist organization, nor do they provide an alternative to the untenable norm — simmering hatred punctuated by periods of bloody unrest. They have no blueprint for a stable future. They know not how to build, only how to tear down until those institutions, governments, and people unlucky enough to earn their hate hang formless and unrecognizable from their frames.
In September, during a conference on the “pursuit of beauty” at Cambridge University, I saw Balfour’s portrait. His gaze, which struck me then, spoke again to me last week — as the protester slashed at his feet, he looked up and out, eyes peering over the red paint into the future.
Grace Bydalek is a writer, performer, and administrator based in New York City. She works as a theater critic for the New York Sun, leads Young Voices’ Dissident Project, and is a visiting fellow at Independent Women’s Forum.
Instagram: @grace_daley
Published in the Washington Examiner in March 2024.