If you type “Balfour portrait” into your favorite search engine (and we note as a public service that it does not have to be Google), the first spate of stories that pop up concern the vandalizing last month of a century-old portrait of Arthur James Balfour, Lord Balfour, by a group called Palestine Action. The large portrait, by the Anglo-Hungarian painter Philip de László, hung in Balfour’s alma mater, Trinity College, Cambridge.

Note that when we say that it was “vandalized,” we indulge in understatement. Assaulting works of art has become a popular pastime for the terminally bored and perpetually disgruntled. Often, the damage they inflict is superficial and remediable. For example, in January, some “climate activists” threw soup at the Mona Lisa. But since the picture is protected by glass, the gesture amounted to little more than a publicity stunt and housekeeping nuisance. Assessing the damage done to the spiritual resources of civilization requires a different calculus. The rage against the symbolic world shatters more than windows and storefronts.

In any event, the portrait of Balfour was not as lucky as the Mona Lisa. If you dig into this story, you will come across a video clip, proudly posted and publicized by Palestine Action. It shows a young woman spraying red paint over the unprotected picture before deeply slashing it several times with some sort of sharp object. The hissing of the spray paint adds an eerie note of malevolence. The picture, as one news story observed, was “effectively destroyed.”

Why the animus against Lord Balfour? He was about as distinguished a public servant as it is possible to be. The prime minister from 1902 to 1905, he later served as Conservative leader of the opposition and first lord of the Admiralty. Relevant for this story was his stint as foreign secretary from 1916 to 1919. It was then, in 1917, that he issued what became known as the Balfour Declaration. This was a brief letter to the British Zionist leader Lord Rothschild indicating Britain’s official support for a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. The letter also underscored the understanding that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities” in the area. This support evolved into an international commitment when the League of Nations formally adopted it and Mandatory Palestine was created. The “national home for the Jewish people,” affirmed in a resolution adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1947, was finally realized in 1948 when the state of Israel was created out of those remnants of the defeated Ottoman Empire.

The succeeding history, as we noted in this space in December, is complex. Its chief feature has two aspects. One is the story of attack after attack by Arabs against Israel, beginning just hours after Israel was born. The other is the series of compromises, negotiations, and concessions by Israel, whose overriding desire has been peaceful coexistence. All the while, Israel, unlike its neighbors, has made the desert bloom. It has developed into an economic and technological powerhouse. It is also the only democratic state in the region.

In a press release accompanying its video, Palestine Action boasts that it “ruined” the portrait of Balfour. The red paint, they said, symbolized “the bloodshed of the Palestinian people since the Balfour Declaration was issued.” Balfour, the document charges, “gave away the Palestinians [sic] homeland—a land that wasn’t his to give away.” It vowed to continue its “direct campaign” until “British complicity with the colonisation of Palestine ends.” The press release also inveighs against the “genocide in Gaza” but glosses over the slaughter perpetrated in Israel on October 7, 2023. It was then that the Tehran-backed terrorist organization Hamas launched a surprise invasion into southern Israel from Gaza and brutally murdered more than 1,100 people, mostly civilians, and took some 250 hostage. At least thirty Americans were killed in the carnage, which made no distinction between man and woman, young or old. The savagery was untrammeled and deliberately executed to stun the world. It was the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.

Like many other pro-Palestinian outlets, Palestine Action bewails “Israeli apartheid,” claiming that Gaza has suffered for decades “under a brutal reign of occupation.” Has it? Well, yes. But the occupier is not Israel. Indeed, Israel withdrew all of its civilian settlements and military outposts from the Gaza Strip in 2005. The following year, Hamas won power in a legislative election. That was the last such election in Gaza. Hamas then expelled other political factions and has ruled the area as a theocratic war party ever since. Its chief victims are the people it rules. Hamas has gobbled up billions of dollars in Western—largely U.S.—aid. But it has deployed the funds not for the humanitarian purposes for which they were bestowed but in building tunnels and acquiring weapons with which to wage war against Israel. It deliberately locates military infrastructure alongside or underneath schools, hospitals, mosques, apartment complexes, and the like, thus transforming the entire population into human shields. Hamas’s procedure not only guarantees civilian casualties, which it then trumpets as evidence of Israel’s callousness, but also underscores the savage barbarism of the way it operates. Any domestic opposition is swiftly and brutally extinguished. Some pro-Palestinian commentators say that the Gaza Strip is a prison state. If so, as one observer put it, Hamas is the warden.

What are the aims of Hamas? We draw again on what we wrote here in December. The organization dates from the late 1980s. Its founding document, The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement, features two themes. One is jihad. Since the Muslim terror attacks of 9/11, timid commentators have regularly assured us that “jihad” encompasses much more than beheading journalists, murdering filmmakers, and steering jumbo jets into skyscrapers or the Pentagon. Essentially, they say, “jihad” refers to an “inner spiritual struggle.” The founding document of Hamas does not indulge in any such subterfuge. It extols red-meat jihad, noting that “Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.” In the words of one Palestinian official, the moral—or part of it—is that committed Islamists “love death more than life.”

That’s one theme. The other is the obliteration of Israel. Pro-Palestinian groups such as Palestine Action like to rehearse supposed historical grievances while chanting genocidal slogans like “From the river to the sea”—i.e., the entire area of Israel. Behind that demand for redress is a deep ideological commitment. “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it,” the covenant says. Some people seek to distinguish between anti-Zionism—i.e., anti-Israel sentiment—and anti-Semitism, i.e., anti-Jewish sentiment. Hamas is not so obfuscatory. Quoting Mohammed himself, its founding document predicts that

The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.

Palestine Action affects moral indignation that “Palestine” should be “occupied” by Israel. It is a theme much celebrated by ignorant Western elites looking for a radical cause to embrace. But what is Palestine? From time immemorial, Jews lived in the spot history knows as “Judaea.” What happened to that? In a word, Hadrian happened. Edward Gibbon regarded Hadrian, who ruled from A.D. 117 to 138, as one of the “five good emperors.” But Hadrian put down the Bar Kokhba revolt of A.D. 132–36 with unstinting ferocity. Further, in an effort to stamp out any remnant of Jewish nationalism, he killed or exiled the entire population and renamed “Judaea” “Syria Palaestina.” Hence the modern name.

Moreover, the “Palestinians” that we know and love today were an invention of the kgb and their puppet Yasser Arafat, an educated, middle-class Arab of Egyptian origin who devoted his life to murderous anti-American mischief. (Among other things, he arranged for the killing of Cleo A. Noel Jr., the U.S. ambassador to Sudan, in 1973.)

Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former chief of Romanian intelligence, defected to the United States and wrote about the links between Arafat and the kgb: “Arafat was an important undercover operative for the kgb,” Pacepa wrote in The Wall Street Journal:

Right after the 1967 Six Day Arab–Israeli war, Moscow got him appointed to chairman of the plo. Egyptian ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser, a Soviet puppet, proposed the appointment. In 1969 the kgb asked Arafat to declare war on American “imperial-Zionism” during the first summit of the Black Terrorist International, a neo-fascist pro-Palestine organization financed by the kgb and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. It appealed to him so much, Arafat later claimed to have invented the imperial-Zionist battle cry. But in fact, “imperial-Zionism” was a Moscow invention, a modern adaptation of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and long a favorite tool of Russian intelligence to foment ethnic hatred. The kgb always regarded anti-Semitism plus anti-imperialism as a rich source of anti-Americanism.

Somehow, those details are omitted by the “pro-Palestinian” lobby in their pursuit of ecstatic anti-Semitism. Also omitted is the inconvenient fact that, as Bob Ryan wrote in The Times of Israel, “prior to the plo Charter being released in 1964, no one referred to Palestinians with the same intent as used today. There is a reason no mention exists prior to that moment. The kgb had not created the fictitious people until that time.”

Don’t believe it? How about this statement from Zuheir Mohsen, a senior plo leader, in 1977:

The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. . . . Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct “Palestinian people” to oppose Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons.

The history of the Levant makes for a complicated story, not least its recent history. But the idea that the Jews are illegitimately occupying territory that really belongs to “the Palestinians” is a politically motivated historical falsehood that only an unhappy terrorist, or a half-educated Western lefty, could believe. In conclusion, it is perhaps worth noting that, as of this writing, the woman responsible for destroying the portrait of Lord Balfour has not been identified, nor have any arrests been made. Meanwhile, simply sharing a social-media post that the authorities in Britain do not condone can earn you a visit from the police, who will give a warning to you, and perhaps even charge you with a hate crime. The collapse of cultural confidence in the West, not to mention the collapse of elementary moral intelligence, could not be more patent.