01.04.26
Editorial Note
Last week, Justice for Palestine Society occupied two key buildings at the University of Edinburgh (UoE) campus as part of a pro-Palestine protest movement in a campaign to pressure the University to divest from Israel-linked companies and universities. The group has been protesting for a number of years. The University has threatened legal action if the protesters do not leave.
The group announced: “Following continued impunity by Balfour University, students have reclaimed the building to reiterate the majority student demand. Divestment is inevitable. Liberation is unconditional. Shame on Balfour university. Meet our demands.”
The University of Edinburgh has been targeted because the famous Arthur James Balfour (1848–1930) was the chancellor of the University of Edinburgh from 1891 to 1930, including in 1917, when he issued the Balfour Declaration expressing British support for a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. In 1925, Balfour visited Palestine to inaugurate the Hebrew University, wearing his academic robes from the University of Edinburgh. Balfour presided over the university during his time as Prime Minister (1902–1905) and Foreign Secretary (1916–1919).
Last month, Nicola Perugini, a long-time anti-Israel activist and a senior lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh, featured before by Israel Academia Monitor, co-authored an article titled “Balfour University: Race, Imperial Education, and the Declaration on Palestine” with his UoE colleague, Shaira Vadasaria. The article discusses “the University of Edinburgh’s racial entanglement with the British Empire and settler colonialism in Palestine through the figure of its former chancellor, Arthur James Balfour. It explores two intertwined aspects of Balfour’s legacy: his role as a statesman who advanced racial policies and settler-colonial dispossession in Palestine, and as an academic leader who promoted race thinking and imperial education. The analysis situates the 1917 Balfour Declaration within these overlapping domains, showing how Balfour’s imperial and academic roles were inseparable. It analyzes the declaration as not solely a matter of historical harm, but as a formative moment in the longue durée of the university’s entanglement with imperialism and Zionist settler-colonial violence enacted in Palestine.”
To be more precise, Perugini’s and Vadasaria’s article largely focuses on political activism: “Edinburgh’s student and staff mobilization against the genocide in Gaza exposed this historical nexus, revealing how institutional legacies of colonial and imperial violence remain present even within so-called moments of racial and decolonial redress.”
According to Perugini and Vadasaria, “Balfour Must Fall Everywhere.”
The University of Edinburgh is home to a number of pro-Palestinian activists. These academics frequently deal with themes of displacement, colonial violence, and Palestinian agency: Samer Abdelnour (Senior Lecturer, Business School): Engages with analyses of the Economies of Occupation and Genocide, and has discussed the “University of Edinburgh complicity in the conflict.” Lotte Segal (Senior Lecturer, Social Anthropology): Focuses on the everyday life, violence, and displacement, including work on “Caring for the Ordinary in Palestine – When Ongoing Occupation Becomes Maddening.” Nicola Perugini & Shaira Vadasaria: Academic researchers who have written on the University of Edinburgh’s historical and contemporary complicity in the context of Palestinian rights, published in the Journal of Palestine Studies. Pietro Stefanini (Researcher): Specializes in settler colonialism and humanitarianism, with a focus on Palestine and the Nakba/Naksa. Mona Siddiqui (Professor): Professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies, and International Dean for the Middle East.
The activists enjoy the support of UCU Edinburgh, the local branch of the University and College Union, representing academic and academic-related staff at the University of Edinburgh, which usually campaigns against job cuts, pensions, and working conditions. However, on December 6, 2025, it published a petition titled “Suppression of freedom of expression on Palestine at the University of Edinburgh must stop!” Stating, “We the undersigned unions, organizations, networks and individual staff and students write to condemn our institution’s senior managers for their suppression of Palestine-related expression at the University of Edinburgh.”
The petition argued that UoE “senior managers have adopted increasingly intimidatory behavior towards student groups who are supporting Palestine and speaking out against Israel’s ongoing war of annihilation in Gaza and attacks in Lebanon, including threatening members with disciplinary action for social media posts and protests that would not have carried such consequences before. This is part of broader suppression of on-campus manifestations of solidarity with the people in Palestine and Lebanon.” The petition listed all the incidents and was signed by 363 staff, 126 PhD researchers, 70 students, and 6 alumni.
In July 2025, the British Guardian reported that “Edinburgh University could unadapt antisemitism definition after report into its colonial links,” stating that the UoE is “considering whether to unadopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism because critics say it “inhibits freedom of speech on the subject of Israel and Palestine.” UoE is also considering “whether to divest from companies accused of enabling alleged human rights violations by Israel,” the Guardian stated, and that these issues are being “reviewed by university authorities as a report on the legacy of its historical links with the region is published. The report is part of a broader investigation of the university’s involvement in colonialism and slavery. It recommends that the university divest from companies allegedly complicit in Israel’s military actions in Gaza and the West Bank.”
The Guardian notes that the UoE is also considering the establishment of a Palestine Studies Center to “investigate the legacy of the Balfour declaration and offer scholarships to students of Palestinian origin.”
The Guardian discusses that article by Perugini and Vadasaria, who told the Guardian the decision to include Balfour’s legacy in the research was a “direct response” to pressure on the university leadership by campus protests over the Gaza war. The pair, both of whom taught for several years at al-Quds University, a Palestinian institution on the outskirts of occupied East Jerusalem, had already been researching Balfour’s legacy for several years. They have been involved in divestment campaigns on campus, and last year Perugini demanded Mathieson apologize publicly after the principal met the Israeli deputy ambassador to the UK.”
Perugini and Vadasaria’s research on “the legacy of the Balfour declaration was added to the broader study of the university’s links to colonialism a year after the Hamas atrocities of 7 October 2023, which triggered the war in Gaza,” the Guardian claimed.
The IHRA definition of antisemitism was adopted by the UoE in 2020, “without broad consultation with students and staff,” according to the report of Perugini and Vadasaria. For them, the definition “violates academic freedom and freedom of speech by framing any criticism of Israel’s policies of settler-colonial dispossession driven by state racism as a form of antisemitism.” The IHRA also offers contemporary examples of antisemitism that “critics say are used to protect Israel from legitimate criticism. Supporters of the definition say it is essential in helping to protect Jews from hate crimes and abuse. In 2020, Gavin Williamson, the education secretary in the Conservative government, threatened to cut funding to universities in England that failed to adopt the IHRA definition. The majority have done so,” the Guardian concluded.
According to the Guardian, “The state of Israel was declared within hours of the end of the mandate in May 1948. The subsequent war drove hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes during what became known as the Nakba, or catastrophe. Many Palestinians still blame Balfour for what they see as an act of perfidy and betrayal.”
Perugini and Vadasaria’s article “points out that the declaration defined Palestinians as ‘non-Jewish communities’ rather than an Indigenous people with national rights to self-determination, and referred only to civil and religious rights rather than political and national rights. In the Nakba, Palestinians were forced into ‘permanent exile that continues into the present.’ Balfour’s legacy was ‘not merely a matter of historical harm,’ it says. According to the Guardian, “Indeed, harm to Palestinians today can be seen as an extension of Balfour’s legacy in the present. While this violence may have begun with Balfour’s declaration, it remains through ongoing policies that continue with the trajectory of imperialism, settler colonialism and the dispossession of Palestinian land and life.”
Israel Academia Monitor has frequently discussed the genre that Perugini and Vadasaria’s article follows: it is full of disinformation and falsifications and totally decontextualized from real-life events. For starters, it fails to mention that the Nakba was a self-inflicted wound by the Palestinians who received the larger part of Mandatory Palestine when the United Nations voted on the Partition Proposal in 1947. The Palestinians were persuaded by their Arab allies to reject the offer and started a war against nascent Israel, which they had lost. In 2000, during the Camp David Summit, Yasser Arafat refused to sign an agreement that would have given the Palestinians virtually all of the West Bank and Gaza. Instead, he launched the Second Intifada. Iran, which supported Hamas as part of its “Axis of Resistance,” was closely linked to the group that carried out the brutal attacks against civilians on October 7, 2023. Documents recovered from Hamas tunnels indicate that the violence was intended, in part, to disrupt the Abraham Accords—most notably by preventing Saudi Arabia from joining the normalization process.
More to the point, nowhere have Perugini and his peers mentioned Hamas’s extreme violations of a wide range of international humanitarian law during the conflict. To list just a few, the group built its tunnel system under civilian spaces, including hospitals, schools, and mosques. Noncombatants were turned into human shields, causing considerable civilian casualties.
The growing prominence of pro-Palestinian activism in higher education has contributed to the diffusion of highly contested narratives. This development has had several consequences: it has intensified campus polarization, complicated efforts to sustain open scholarly debate, and, in some cases, blurred the line between political advocacy and academic inquiry.
REFERENCES:
Edinburgh University threatens legal action as pro-Palestine activists occupy second building
Gordon Aikman and Appleton Tower have now been occupied
3 days ago
Students at the University of Edinburgh have occupied two prominent campus buildings as part of a pro-Palestine protest movement.
Edinburgh University Justice for Palestine Society (EUJPS) has occupied the Gordon Aikman lecture theatre and Appleton Tower.
The university has threatened legal action if the protesters do not leave.
Gordon Aikman has been locked down by EUJPS since the early hours of Tuesday morning while Appleton Tower appears to have been occupied during the early hours of Friday.
The society has occupied the buildings as part of a long-term campaign to pressure the university to divest from Israel-linked companies.
Gordon Aikman had been occupied since Tuesday
Announcing the Gordon Aikman occupation on Facebook, EUJPS said: “We are reclaiming this building in the name of martyr Adnan Al-Bursh.
“Al-Bursh was a healthcare worker wrongfully taken into custody in December of 2023 per his refusal to evacuate a hospital that was to be targeted by IOF [Israeli Occupation Forces] bombs.
“Taken to a detention camp and subsequently tortured by the IOF, he was later moved to the Israeli prison service in April of 2024 where he was martyred shortly after arrival. Adnan Al-Bursh’s death in custody is a result of the IOF’s war crimes unto Palestinian prisoners.
“We name this reclaimed building in his honour. May he resit in power. Glory to the martyrs”.
The statement goes on to say that there is “no business as usual during genocide”, calling for the university to divest from companies that are linked to Israel’s military and occupation of Palestinian territories.
Protesters have set up signs and flags in Appleton Tower
Announcing the Appleton Tower occupation, the group said: “We have reclaimed JAWAD ABU NASSAR TOWER (formerly Appleton Tower), alongside ADNAN AL BURSH BUILDING [Gordon Aikman].
“Following continued impunity by Balfour University, students have reclaimed the building to reiterate the majority student demand.
“Divestment is inevitable. Liberation is unconditional. Shame on Balfour university. Meet our demands.”
The group is campaigning for divestment from firms like Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Leonardo, among others, that have been linked to Israel’s operations in Palestine. The university holds more than £25 million in investments in these companies.
Last year, Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, named the University of Edinburgh as one of “the most financially entangled” institutions in the UK to Israel.
The report stated: “The University of Edinburgh holds nearly £25.5 million (2.5 per cent of its endowment) in four tech giants – Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM – central to the Israeli surveillance apparatus and the ongoing Gaza destruction.
“With both direct and indexed investments, the university ranks among the most financially entangled institutions in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
“The university also partners with firms aiding Israeli military operations, including Leonardo S.p.A. and Ben-Gurion University, through the AI and Data Science Lab at Ben Gurion University, sharing research that directly links it with assaults on Palestinians.”
The occupations come after a series of over EUJPS protests, including occupying Gordon Aikman twice in 2024 and encampment at Old College which coincided with a hunger strike.
The society has also blockaded the entrances to various university buildings, disrupted career fairs and spray painted slogans like “Divest Now” on university buildings.
A University of Edinburgh spokesperson told The Tab Edinburgh: “Our students’ education is always our priority. While we respect the right to peaceful and lawful protest, occupying buildings and interfering with teaching and our students’ learning experience is unacceptable.
“Each day our buildings are occupied, thousands of students face their lectures and tutorials being disrupted at short notice – a situation that cannot be tolerated, particularly at such a crucial time in the academic year.
“We have asked those occupying the Gordon Aikman Lecture Theatre and Appleton Tower to leave. If our request is ignored, we will consider all legal action available to us to prevent further disruption.”
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Edinburgh University Justice for Palestine Society
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Emergency rally held in support of student occupations and in protest against Balfour University’s complicity in Palestine at reclaimed Jawad Abu Nassar Tower, followed by a March to reclaimed Adnan Al-Bursh Theatre! First time in JPS history that two uni buildings have been occupied at once – POWER TO THE STUDENTS
See previous posts for full statements regarding reasons and demands of each occupation.
Edinburgh University Justice for Palestine Society ·Follow
Sontesdrpo2ff4l7m302057f2318aufh69a6aa10hrt14 :48 h3atiMc2a ·
We have reclaimed JAWAD ABU NASSAR TOWER (formerly Appleton Tower), alongside ADNAN AL BURSH BUILDING
Following continued impunity by Balfour University, students have reclaimed the building to reiterate the majority student demand.
Divestment is inevitable. Liberation is unconditional. Shame on Balfour university. Meet our demands
Edinburgh University Justice for Palestine Society
Inn Ann (feat. Shabjdeed & Al Nather) · Daboor ·
We have reclaimed ADNAN AL-BURSH
THEATRE (formerly Gordon Aikman)
Divestment is inevitable — it’s only a matter of time, it’s only a matter of principle.
We will not stop and we will not rest until Balfour university meets our demands.
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Balfour University: Race, Imperial Education, and the Declaration on Palestine
Pages 26-50 | Received 09 May 2025, Accepted 26 Aug 2025, Published online: 18 Feb 2026
Abstract
This article discusses the University of Edinburgh’s racial entanglement with the British Empire and settler colonialism in Palestine through the figure of its former chancellor, Arthur James Balfour. It explores two intertwined aspects of Balfour’s legacy: his role as a statesman who advanced racial policies and settler-colonial dispossession in Palestine, and as an academic leader who promoted race thinking and imperial education. The analysis situates the 1917 Balfour Declaration within these overlapping domains, showing how Balfour’s imperial and academic roles were inseparable. It analyzes the declaration as not solely a matter of historical harm, but as a formative moment in the longue durée of the university’s entanglement with imperialism and Zionist settler-colonial violence enacted in Palestine. Edinburgh’s student and staff mobilization against the genocide in Gaza exposed this historical nexus, revealing how institutional legacies of colonial and imperial violence remain present even within so-called moments of racial and decolonial redress.
Keywords:
During the spring of 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter (BLM) global protests, a renewed sense of political consciousness emerged in large parts of the Global North across a spectrum of political sensibilities. The killing of Breonna Taylor, a twenty-six-year-old Black woman shot by US police officers in her own home, and the 9 mins., 29 secs. lynching of George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old Black man killed in broad daylight by asphyxiation with a police officer’s knee to his neck, were two cases among many that evidenced the routine constancy in which Black life is rendered disposable and killable.Footnote1 Neoliberal corporate responses immediately capitalized on the momentum by celebrating the BLM movement and promoting so-called decolonizing initiatives, which, in the context of higher education, coalesced with a resurgent wave of student- and faculty-led movements for racial justice. An uncanny constellation began to form, bringing together forces with different political inclinations around anti-racism, from critiques of white supremacy via abolition of policing and prisons, to a surge in equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) initiatives.
At the University of Edinburgh (UoE), this period raised questions around the university’s direct and indirect involvement in the Atlantic slave trade through financial investments in plantations and the exchange of epistemic knowledge. As a leading Western academic institution established firmly in the era of colonial modernity and consolidated under the rise of the British Empire, some of the most notorious racial scientists, physicians, architects of colonial settlements, positivist sociologists, and political philosophers developed their racial views about the world at UoE, working hand in hand with military and imperial administrative servants. This included some of the university’s esteemed alumni and former faculty and students, such as Charles Darwin, David Hume and Patrick Geddes, all of whom introduced ideas that came to justify and naturalize systems of racial hierarchy. These racial views were not simply a matter of individual prejudice or cultural norms of an era, as their apologists like to proclaim. Rather, these viewpoints shaped imperial reason and helped institute and prolong systems of racial and economic domination under modern colonial and imperial rule that have lasting impact in the present. As the racial legacy of such figures began to surface, UoE took some swift actions, including the decision to rename some of its buildings. In September 2020, after a petition was addressed to the university’s senior leadership about Hume’s racist worldviews,Footnote2 the David Hume Tower was renamed 40 George Square. UoE seemed to be on some kind of path toward recognition of its historical wrongs.
By the end of 2020, and amid this political climate of racial redress, we came to notice another one of UoE’s skeletons. Out of curiosity, we opened the university chancellor’s official webpage. As we scrolled through the list, we read: “1891–1930: Earl of Balfour.”Footnote3 Between 1891 and 1930, Arthur James Balfour presided as chancellor of the University of Edinburgh. The timeline around Balfour’s appointment was striking not only because he was the second longest serving chancellor since the inception of the university in 1583. It was also during his appointment at UoE that he decisively contributed to the racialization of the Palestinian people who, through his 1917 declaration, came to cast the Palestinian people outside of the legal parameters of “personhood” by negating their national sovereignty as a people with political rights to self-determination on their land.Footnote4 The strategic wording of his 1917 declaration came to authorize a historical process of race making through dehumanizing Palestinians as a people incapable of self-governance. The final draft of what would come to be known as the Balfour Declaration was adopted almost immediately into the British Mandate for Palestine and, unlike other wartime statements, inscribed verbatim.Footnote5 We asked ourselves: If university leadership would rename a building because of Hume’s irredeemable views on race and slavery, how might they respond when asked to account for the fact that their own chancellor, while in post, issued a “false promissory note”Footnote6 that categorically set into motion a century-long process of imperial expansion, settler-colonial dispossession, and racialization in Palestine by means of forced displacement, ethnic cleansing, occupation, apartheid, and genocide? So began our research into UoE’s entanglements with the question of Palestine, Zionism, and settler-colonial dispossession.Footnote7
In UK academia, the roles of chancellors and other institutional appointees are often dismissed as simply ceremonial, lacking weight or influence. In our encounters, such claims are especially prominent when institutions are asked to account for their historical records of violence. The past deeds of such figures are exempted from scrutiny or institutional accountability in the present, their erstwhile views excused as signposts of a historical time and culture that normalized racial and colonial sensibilities. But such appointments were made at a time when institutions of higher education were at the fore of advancing imperial knowledge in service of the British Empire, and as a means of governance and domination within its colonies. The ongoing imperial and settler-colonial attempts at annihilating Palestinians as a group reveals the violence of Balfour’s legacy in the present and compels us to reckon seriously with this genealogy. We would be remiss if we ignored this continuity.
During the nomination speech of Balfour to the chancellorship on October 31, 1891, Vice Chancellor Alexander Campbell Fraser defined the role as “the supreme head of the university.”Footnote8 In the speech, Fraser also likened Balfour’s public and intellectual life to English philosophers like John Stuart Mill, and described Balfour as a “remarkable combination of intellectual power and high academic sympathies,” coupled with “practical statesmanship, which was too rare in the annals of our English history.”Footnote9 Today, the chancellor still represents one of the highest positions in the institution and aims to enhance “the profile and reputation of the University on national and global levels.”Footnote10
Balfour’s academic associations and institutional roles were intimately tied to his racial worldviews. Indeed, as evidenced in his domestic and foreign imperial policies, Balfour the imperial statesman and Balfour the university chancellor were hardly separable. The very tenure of his appointment as chancellor coincided with the years in which he played a decisive role in Britain’s imperial foreign policy—at the height of British empire, no less. What connected his various political and academic careers, including his chancellorship at UoE and the University of Cambridge (UoC) from 1919 to 1930, and his role as president of the British Academy (1921–28), was his philosophical commitment to the development of racial thought in support of imperial projects advanced under the British Empire. It was this duality between his political and academic appointments that made him an ideal candidate to serve as chancellor, being at once a scholar and a well-positioned figure of public affairs.Footnote11
This article highlights these two interconnected elements of his biography—namely, Balfour’s racial thinking and policies as a statesman, where he instituted a process of settler-colonial dispossession in Palestine, and second, Balfour as an institutional academic who dedicated himself to the promotion of race thinking and imperial education more widely. In this twofold role, he signed the declaration that would come to be named after him, and which inaugurated a process of dispossessing Palestinians. Critical scholarship on the Balfour Declaration—and on Balfour more generally—has largely overlooked the significance of this twofold role. Scholars and biographers have mostly focused on Balfour the statesman, and when they have addressed Balfour the “man of science,” they have tended to compartmentalize it from his political career.Footnote12 In this article, by contrast, we situate our analysis precisely at the intersection of his dual careers, exploring their encounters, overlaps, and interconnections as a productive space for thinking about institutional accountability.
We read Balfour’s legacy, and student and staff calls for accountability at UoE since the start of the genocide, through an active divestment campaign and a reparative justice process titled “Decolonised Transformations: Confronting the University’s Legacies of Slavery and Colonialism.”Footnote13 Drawing on David Scott’s engagement with reparatory history as a method of genealogical critique, we revisit the Balfour Declaration, the divestment movement, and the Decolonised Transformations Project and its relevance to ongoing struggles for Palestinian reparation, by recomposing the scattered fragments of Balfour’s engagement with governmental policies, scholarship, public intellectual life, and philosophical writing on race and imperialism.Footnote14 By reading the 1917 declaration alongside Balfour’s wider racial career and alongside mobilization in support of Palestinian self-determination at UoE, we consider what is at stake when the academy enters into the arena of reparatory history and racial redress to the question of Palestine.
The article is organized into four parts. First, we contextualize the political terrain upon which both the divestment movement and Decolonised Transformations developed and overlapped, despite emerging from different trajectories and constituents of the university. Next, we analyze the Balfour Declaration and its repercussions in Palestine, historically and to the present day, and reread it as emblematic of Balfour’s wider racial career, including his antisemitic legislation and his academic associations, circles, and appointments. We read these connections alongside the development of Balfour’s racial thinking and policies as a statesman that systematically targeted Palestinians, South Africans, and Jewish immigrants in Britain at the very time that he was serving in the ranks of the British Empire and representing UoE. We then turn to Balfour’s one and only visit to Palestine in 1925, eight years after the signing of the declaration and the military conquest of the country by British General Edmund Allenby, who would likewise be celebrated by UoE. We analyze how, during this visit, Balfour inaugurated the Hebrew University in Jerusalem as part of his broader commitment to the development of imperial education and racist ideas around civilizing the so-called Orient. The fourth and final section describes the imperial afterlife of Balfour at UoE amid the genocide, and student and staff’s protests and demands for divestment.Footnote15 Building from Stuart Hall’s concept of conjuncture, we introduce the Balfour conjuncture as a method for analyzing the multifaceted forces shaping ongoing racial, settler-colonial, and imperial politics around the question of Palestine within higher education, and as a tool for intervening in and challenging them.Footnote16
Divestment and Decolonized Transformations: Reparative Justice in a Time of Genocide
Following Hamas’s armed resistance operation on October 7, 2023, which broke Israel’s seventeen-year siege of Gaza and ushered in its war of annihilation, university campuses across the world became settings of unprecedented community mobilization for Palestine. The surge in student encampments and renewed calls for divestment marked a new era of Palestine solidarity praxis. These movements owe their ethical inheritances and political debts to a century-long Palestinian liberation struggle that drew from preceding anti-colonial movements and echoed throughout the era of third-world internationalism. We must understand present-day student encampments and divestment campaigns as part and parcel of these longer traditions of Global South resistance, refusal, and affirmation of the right to self-determination. Inspired by the longue durée of Palestinian defiance through boycotts, revolt, hunger strikes, uprisings, and other forms of resistance, the student-led encampments following October 7, which were supported by many university staff, deployed a diversity of tactics to hold universities to account for their complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza and their wider investments in the political economy of Israeli settler colonialism. Though varied, university administrative responses to student encampments reproduced the same liberal and at times fascist logic constitutive of decades of Western discourse and reactions to the struggle for Palestinian liberation. Rather than genuinely addressing the global demands for justice for Palestine, academic institutions complicit in Israel’s settler-colonial dispossession reacted through a combination of genocide denial, the frequent adoption of repressive measures in coordination with state apparatuses, and the implementation of bureaucratic processes aimed at managing protests and preventing divestment.
By October 2023, we were three years into active community mobilizations on UoE’s links to Palestine, conducting archival research at the university’s Centre for Research Collections, alongside other Scottish archives. After October 7, our campus became one of the UK’s epicenters of academic protest against the genocide. Students and staff coalesced in a multi-racial and multi-religious alliance that carried out a sustained divestment campaign led first and foremost by the student encampment.Footnote17 As a result of the political pressure of the divestment movement on our institution, UoE finally included Palestine among the questions to be examined in the Decolonised Transformations Project.Footnote18 This initiative, commissioned by UoE’s vice chancellor in 2021 as a “sector-leading” effort aimed at strengthening the university as a global institution,Footnote19 was structured around two main components. The first was a research-focused working group led by “distinguished scholars on issues of race and racism,” which also included student representatives and racialized community members from outside the university.Footnote20 The second component was a community engagement program focusing on reparatory justice both as a participatory process involving racialized communities and as the central goal of the initiative. In addition, a steering group was created to advise the working group on research and community engagement activities. The group was led by the late Sir Geoff Palmer, a former alumnus of UoE and Scotland’s first Black professor, who died shortly before the release of the group’s report in July 2025. The steering committee also involved other alumni, including donors to the university.
Initially, the project opted not to include Palestine in its remit despite our encouragement. Following pressure from the divestment struggle, in which students and staff asked for acknowledgment of the university’s relationship to Balfour and his actions, alongside divestment and reparations from what they renamed as “Balfour University,” senior leadership made a concession. For the first time in history, a Global North academic institution brought Palestine within the remit of a university reparative justice inquiry into historical wrongs committed by the university. This period was marked by an unprecedented conjuncture of events and a powerful assemblage of epistemic and political forces galvanized by the student- and staff-led anti-genocide and divestment movement at UoE. It was this constellation of forces that led to the inclusion of Palestine in the academic review of our institution’s entanglement with slavery and colonialism. Our contribution to this review—which brought into view a section of the report titled “University of Edinburgh and the Question of Palestine: Balfour’s Imperial Legacy and Its Afterlife”Footnote21—was rooted in our involvement in the Palestinian divestment movement and research into Balfour’s imperial practices and racial worldviews.
We entered into this reparative justice inquiry not because we believe that any meaningful or easy repair can be done to redress a century of dehumanization and dispossession of Palestinians. To ameliorate the wreckage, incalculable racial horror, grief, and loss that political Zionism and its colonial and racial supremacist ideology have cast upon Palestine and on its Indigenous people from the river to the sea and beyond, feels an impossible task. There is no sanitizing this institutional record. The litany of horrors remains with us. The reconstitution of Gaza as a death world marks a world of no return—not for the hundreds of thousands who have been martyred, nor for those tortured and maimed, nor for those who might survive this mass slaughter and face the consequences of forced starvation. Those who do survive will inherit an afterlife marked by genocide, in the absence of kin, limbs, homes, and the sanctity of life itself. These unconscionable horrors belong to us all now and we live with them. There is no coming back from this, and certainly no reparative formula to heal this moment or the century of colonial dispossession of Palestine and Palestinians. Nonetheless, justice and accountability for Palestine remain at the core of a just and free world. It is an ethical imperative and a political compass for crafting a different world order entirely, free from imperialism, colonialism, and interconnected forms of domination. Reparation for us is about accountability and building alliances with subjugated peoples, and with all the communities in struggle against hegemony and systems of domination. For this reason, we entered the reparative justice process by way of duty, as a way to mobilize and at the very minimum, ensure the cessation of the university’s ongoing harm through its investments in the genocide and ties to Israel’s settler-colonial economy.
As David Scott’s work on the moral and reparatory history of New World slavery helps us understand, the meaning of reparatory history is not only about reckoning with past evil but also present debts. For Scott, it is about the political repair of moral debt. As he explains, “unrepaired wrong remains wrong and, moreover, that the unrepair of such wrong is itself a grievous wrong requiring redress in conjunction with the repair of the original wrong. Wrong is not static; it compounds.”Footnote22 Yet, as he explains, in the case of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism, wrong can amount to forms of devastation and intergenerational harm that make loss almost “irreversible and irrecoverable.”Footnote23 We entered Decolonised Transformations knowing very well that the very concept of reparation operates within this tension between the aspiration to redress and the irreparability of anti-Palestinian violence. This tension becomes all the more pronounced in a time of genocide. Yet the alternative was to ignore UoE’s past and present complicity in the destruction of Palestine. Hence, we ambivalently and cautiously entered this work with an understanding of reparatory history as a horizon for forging ethical relations that challenge the imperial core and its contribution to the epistemic and material destruction of Palestine. For those of us within the Global North and in particular, Europe and the UK, we view decolonial work as the work of dismantling empire and its violence from within the metropole.
In our engagement with Decolonised Transformations, we conceived of divestment from the Israeli regime as a primary target of the project. We repeatedly made the claim that cessation of harm and guarantee of nonrepetition are the guiding and preliminary principles to any meaningful form of redress. It was a small crack, but an important one. In this ongoing work, we strive to pragmatically undo our institutional complicity while remaining fully conscious that the horizon of reparations is not a horizon of forgiveness and redemption. Rather, reparation is the process: The practice of anti-racist solidarity driven by the possibility of undoing not evil itself, but complicity with it. To achieve this limited but crucial objective, our particular archival research within the institution looked at the unique role that Balfour played during his tenure as chancellor of UoE from 1891 to 1930, as he established and set into motion a century-long process of imperial and settler-colonial dispossession in Palestine. The result of this process has been one of the longest military occupations and apartheid regimes in modern history, and the most protracted refugee crisis in the world today.Footnote24 As we were researching and writing the report on Balfour’s legacy, the very regime that Balfour so decisively contributed to instituting revealed its genocidal tendency, enabled, in part, by our institution’s investments. Confronting our university’s ongoing complicity with genocide and exposing our settler-colonial legacy in Palestine became the same struggle. The past and the present collapsed into one. The political struggle against genocide became the lens for writing about a past that refuses to pass: Balfour University.
The genocide in Gaza constitutes an unprecedented threat to the Palestinian people as an Indigenous people—a threat that introduces new ways of understanding how the past remains present through the convergence of new AI-driven technologies of violence, killing, and mass slaughter for the purpose of capital accumulation and settler land usurpation. In the case of the student- and staff-led movement at UoE, the conjuncture translated into new ways of understanding the relationship between the origins of the Nakba through Balfour’s negation of Palestinian self-determination on behalf of the Zionist movement, and the contemporary moment of Zionist eliminationist violence in which our institution is invested materially and epistemically. Thus, in the struggle against Israel’s genocide and toward divestment from it at our university, among other universities in the UK, the very enunciation of Balfour University became a call for action against the continuity of historical wrongs and ongoing academic financial complicity with genocide. The racial and imperial career of the chancellor statesman at the threshold of empire, government, and academia that we theorize through our research and direct engagement in the encampment, provides a lens through which to better understand this Balfour conjuncture.
Reading the Declaration Through the Imperial Chancellor’s Racial Career
By the time Arthur James Balfour mailed his sixty-seven-word declaration in 1917 to the home address of Lionel Walter Rothschild, the figurehead of the British Jewish community and prominent member of the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland in 1917, he was no stranger to race thinking and foreign policy. Indeed, when he entered politics in 1874, he was the second Scot to serve as prime minister and was also the wealthiest man in Great Britain.Footnote25 Besides their personal fortunes, Scottish aristocrats also benefited from university loans. Before becoming chancellor at UoE, Balfour received a £12,000 loan from the university (the equivalent of £1.5 million today), which he repaid immediately after his election in October 1891.Footnote26 Wealth was certainly an important factor in Balfour’s election, but in terms of reputation, UoE was also looking for someone who “united knowledge of the world and world affairs … [a] great public career, high scholarship and philosophic thought.”Footnote27
The first traces of Balfour’s imperial statesmanship appeared before he was elected chancellor. In 1886, when he was secretary for Scotland, Balfour initiated a colonization scheme for the crofters of the Scottish Highlands, encouraging them to settle in Canada.Footnote28 Immediately after this position, Balfour was nominated chief secretary for Ireland and administered Britain’s oldest settler colony until 1891. Like his disregard of the Palestinians’ right to self-determination years later, Balfour also opposed self-determination for the Irish people. He introduced repressive emergency laws and quelled the political agitations caused by economic depression and anti-British sentiments, earning him the epithet “bloody Balfour.”Footnote29
Balfour’s chancellorship coincided with what Jason Tomes has called “the zenith of the British Empire.”Footnote30 This role also coincided with a series of domestic and imperial decisions influenced by Balfour that would come to have a seismic impact on the racial and colonial configurations of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries at both national and global scales. In 1902, he became prime minister of the UK, and, in this position, continued to play a decisive role in imperial affairs. He was already directing the Foreign Office during the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), but it was only later that he articulated his vision for the British dominion of South Africa. While the South African apartheid regime was in the making, Balfour viewed racial segregation as a crucial means to preserve the racial purity of white supremacist democracies. As he explained in one of his reflections on imperial political reforms: “Where racial differences are clear cut and profound […] where a [White] race obviously superior is mixed with a race obviously inferior, the superior race may be constituted as a democracy, but into that democracy the inferior race will never be admitted. It may be kept out by law, as in South Africa, or it may be kept out by practice, as in the Southern States of America; but kept out it will be.”Footnote31 The imperial chancellor assumed race to be a social and biological fact, upholding the racial logic that “one European race” had to govern and dominate.Footnote32 He also explicitly claimed that “[a]ll men are, from some points of view, equal; but, to suppose that the races of Africa are in any sense the equals of men of European descent, so far as government, as society, as the higher interests of civilisation are concerned, is really, I think, an absurdity.”Footnote33
In 1907, two years after the end of Balfour’s mandate as prime minister (though still in post as chancellor), the Eugenics Education Society was established in the UK.Footnote34 Its creation was also a response to the social unrest resulting from capitalist development. The focus of the society, which expressed a conservative agenda of social reform and control of the proletariat (while also including socialist members), was predominantly on the prevention of the “degeneration of race” at a national level.Footnote35 In spite of his reluctance to embrace its most radical biological ideas, Balfour endorsed scientific racism. He considered eugenics a “splendid applied science” and directly supported the Eugenics Education Society.Footnote36 In 1912, Balfour as chancellor was the main guest at the Eugenics International Congress in London; and in 1913, he became honorary vice president of the society, reiterating the special place that racial reason played in his understanding of the world.
With this track record, it is no surprise that Balfour had no qualms erasing Palestinian peoplehood in 1917. In his promise to Rothschild, with no legal basis, Balfour endorsed the idea of a territorial-based, Jewish national home inside Palestine while simultaneously denying Palestine’s Indigenous community recognition as a people with national rights to self-determination. While there were several drafts of this declaration, the final version was issued on November 2, 1917, and publicly declared the following: “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 being clearly understood 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.”Footnote37 Sherene Seikaly has noted that the declaration defined Palestinians “by who they were not,” as non-Jewish communities entitled only to civil and religious rights, but not political or national rights, while rendering Palestine a “national home” for an incoming Jewish settler society.Footnote38 In leaving the status of Palestinian political rights unprotected, the declaration set a precedent for the continued denial of the rights of Palestinian peoplehood and for the installation of a new racial order by means of negation. Though Palestinians immediately and categorically challenged the basis of the declaration, it became juridically enshrined verbatim in the British Mandate for Palestine as a result of Balfour’s political role as representative of Britain at the League of Nations Council.Footnote39
The territorial realization of modern political Zionism as a settler colony inside of Palestine was first instituted through the material, discursive, and military support of the British Empire in the lead-up to and during the British Mandate for Palestine (1922–48), and in coordination with leading figures of the Zionist movement. The transition from the mandate to the declaration of Israeli statehood in May 1948 was accomplished through the Nakba: an aggressive ethnic cleansing campaign of systematic elimination by means of massacre, dispossession, the destruction of 531 villages, and the forced expulsion of approximately 750,000 of Palestine’s Indigenous people by Zionist militias, namely, the Haganah (the future army of the state of Israel) and the Irgun. Over the course of the 1947–48 Nakba, in addition to those who fled to nearby countries, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were internally displacedFootnote40 to different areas of Palestine, including the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where Nakba survivors and their descendants have been subjected to an ongoing war of annihilation by Israel since October 2023.
As historians have argued, settler colonialism in Palestine did not begin in 1948 at the time of Israel’s inception, but in 1917 through the signing of the Balfour Declaration.Footnote41 As a British imperial statesman, and in coordination with the Zionist movement, Balfour issued this political statement “of dubious legal standing,” since Britain had no authority over the land of Palestine.Footnote42 However, the juridical framework he architected instigated a process of governance in Palestine based upon naturalized racialized categories that treated Palestinians as political infants unfit for national self-determination. This was evident in Balfour’s other writings. In a 1919 memo to UK Foreign Secretary Lord George Curzon for circulation to cabinet ministers, he wrote: “Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-old traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”Footnote43 The casualness with which the fate of a people and the dispossession of an entire nation was declared reveals just how little the people and history of Palestine mattered to British imperial and Zionist leaders alike.
The results of Balfour’s racist logic and policy would come to sow death and destruction in Palestine during and after the British Mandate, both from British forces and Zionist militias, through ethnic cleansing and depopulation. The declaration also set in motion the processes leading up to the UN General Assembly’s Resolution 181 of November 1947, which proposed the partition of Palestine and set a precedent for fragmenting the land in a way that disproportionately favored settler colonists at the expense of an Indigenous people firmly rooted in the land and engaged in an ongoing struggle for sovereignty. The Jewish population, which made up roughly one-third of the total population, was offered close to 56 percent of the land. Conversely, Palestinians who were in the majority were expected to settle for approximately 40 percent.Footnote44 The sixty-seven-word declaration thus triggered what Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi has defined as the one-hundred-year war on Palestine.Footnote45
It should be noted, however, that Balfour’s disdain for Palestinians and his allegiance to Zionism did not mean that he held favorable views toward Jewish people. On the contrary, his domestic policies restricted Jewish immigration into Britain under the 1905 Aliens Act, which passed twelve years before the promulgation of the declaration on Palestine when Balfour was prime minister. This legislation constituted the first modern anti-immigration law in the United Kingdom. Its principal aim was to prevent Jewish immigration from eastern Europe after a surge in anti-Jewish hatred and religious persecution in the Russian Empire, forcing one million Jews to flee to western Europe and the Americas between 1880 and 1905.Footnote46 Within this period of mass Jewish migration, “aliens” meant Jewish people. In Balfour’s racially charged opinion, “It would not be to the advantage of the civilization of this country that there should be an immense body of [Jewish] persons who, however patriotic, able and industrious […] remained a people apart.”Footnote47
These details of his intellectual and public life are neither an aberration from his political views as an imperial statesman, nor a deviation from his involvement in global affairs, such as the question of Palestine. While our research was under review by the steering committee of UoE’s Decolonised Transformations initiative, an alumnus and donor to the university tried to exclude our research and recommendations to the university executive, arguing that our investigation failed to distinguish “between an individual’s principal professional activities and voluntary non-executive roles they might take on.”Footnote48 The argument is certainly representative of a sensibility that would like to set the clock back to an era in which knowledge, political power, and institutional roles were analyzed separately.
But besides displacing the scholarly untenability of this approach, what the examination of Balfour’s multifaceted career through the lens of his race thinking allows us to do is crucial for understanding the continuity between Balfour’s racial reason and the establishment of a settler colony in Palestine. The 1917 Balfour Declaration demonstrates most explicitly the ways in which his forms of race thinking had matured into explicitly racist policy. As Balfour himself commented: “the deep underlying principle of self-determination really points to a Zionist policy” that excluded Palestinians from becoming part of the family of nations.Footnote49 Indeed, as he later admitted, his ultimate goal with the declaration was to create the conditions for a Jewish settler “numerical majority in the future” that was entitled to exclusive national sovereignty in virtue of their alleged superior civilization and capacity to govern themselves.Footnote50 According to Balfour, in the best of cases, Palestinians could aspire to civil and religious rights, but not to national ones.
There are thus two interconnected elements of the Balfour Declaration that mark its contribution to what scholars such as Edward Said have called a settler-colonial order in Palestine. First, as Said succinctly described in The Question of Palestine, Balfour took “for granted the higher right of a colonial power to dispose of a territory as it saw fit.”Footnote51 Second, he gave credence to the rights of an incoming settler society that gradually but forcefully secured their settlement through colonial dispossession, theft, and expulsion. The Balfour Declaration was therefore the sine qua non for the constitution of a settler-colonial order in Palestine that endures into the present.
Balfour in Palestine and Imperial Education
On July 8, 1903, the first Allied Colonial University Conference took place in London. The development of a colonial space for knowledge production through university networks was intended to support British imperial rule.Footnote52 As both prime minister and chancellor, Balfour was one of the main architects of this imperial turn to academia. At the Hotel Cecil, Balfour presided over the conference dinner attended by delegates of colonial universities, heads of colleges, and “men prominent in educational and scientific work.”Footnote53 After the customary toasts, Balfour delivered a speech in which he celebrated the foundation of a new British colonial-academic alliance and explained why this was a remarkable political achievement:
We are here representing what will turn out to be, I believe, a great alliance of the greatest educational instruments in the Empire—an alliance of all the universities that, in an increasing measure, are feeling their responsibilities, not merely for training the youth which is destined to carry on the traditions of the British Empire, but also to further those great interests of knowledge, scientific research, and culture without which no Empire, however materially magnificent, can really say that it is doing its share in the progress of the world.Footnote54
For Balfour, the new colonial-academic alliance was a crucial tool for cementing the same British global domination to which he was contributing as a statesman. But it was also a key instrument for affirming a racial sense of White Anglo-Saxon unity, since, in his own words, “we boast a community of blood, of language, of laws, of literature.”Footnote55
After terminating his mandate as prime minister in 1905, Balfour withdrew for almost a decade from imperial foreign policy, before making his return in 1916 as foreign secretary, one year before the Balfour Declaration. But in those ten years preceding World War I, UoE’s chancellor continued to contribute to the construction of the British imperial academic space. In 1912, perhaps due to his growing interest in the so-called Orient, Balfour was asked to chair a session of the First Congress of the Universities of the Empire on “The Problem of Universities in the East in Regard to their Influence on Character and Moral Ideals.” In his opening speech, he underscored what he saw as the inherent incompatibility between Eastern traditions and Western science. He commented that if there has been “mutual adjustment” between scientific knowledge and sociocultural traditions in Western universities, science and social customs are in a relationship of “collision” in Eastern universities.Footnote56
This idea of incompatibility was grounded in a concept of “natural” racial inequalities that Balfour had articulated a few years earlier in a philosophical essay titled “Decadence.” In this essay, Balfour explained how the history of the “unchanging East” is dominated by a monotony of “Oriental despotism” that pointed toward its inability to self-govern.Footnote57 In his own writing: “I at least find it quite impossible to believe that any attempt to provide widely different races with an identical […] educational [environment] can ever make them alike. They have been different and unequal since history began; different and unequal they are destined to remain.”Footnote58 While Balfour was developing his theories on racial difference, the Zionists were planning the establishment of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem as a move of high “practical and symbolic significance” toward the consolidation of their colonial settlement in Palestine. To quote its chairman, Chaim Weizmann, who was a leader in the World Zionist Organization and also played a prominent role in convincing Balfour to issue the declaration, the university was conceived as the “fulfilment of [the] particular dream of the early days of the [Zionist] movement.”Footnote59 In 1923, Weizmann invited Patrick Geddes, a former lecturer in zoology at UoE and a renowned Scottish sociologist and urbanist, to assist the British Mandate in replanning Jerusalem and the Zionists in the “design and layout of the university buildings.”Footnote60 The plans for this are preserved at UoE’s Centre for Research Collections.Footnote61 Later, Geddes was asked to help the Zionist movement develop plans for Tel Aviv (the first Zionist urban colony), Tiberias, and Haifa.Footnote62
Figure 1. Balfour inaugurating the Hebrew University in Jerusalem wearing UoE and UoC robes in 1925.
Source: Library of Congress.Footnote63
Two years later, Balfour visited Palestine for the first and last time. He was invited by the Zionists to inaugurate the Hebrew University and lay the foundation stone for the Balfour-Einstein Institute of Mathematics and Physics on a site selected by Geddes.Footnote64 As Jerusalem’s Palestinian inhabitants took to the streets to protest his visit, Balfour proudly appeared dressed in his UoE and UoC robes, delivering his inauguration speech on Mount Scopus, and celebrating the Hebrew University as an experiment of adapting “Western methods” developed by the “Jewish race” to an Asiatic site and as an institution capable of regenerating a stagnant Palestine.Footnote65 In this way, Balfour espoused the Zionist narrative about the need to develop a backward Palestine. Significantly, following this inauguration in 1925, Hebrew University was included in the network of allied imperial universities to which Balfour had contributed.Footnote66 The land and buildings of the university were registered in the name of the Jewish National Fund, the main organization leading “Jewish colonisation in Palestine” through the acquisition of land under British imperial protection that resulted in the dispossession of Indigenous Palestinian communities.Footnote67 After inaugurating the Hebrew University, Balfour also toured Tel Aviv and the first Jewish settlements established in Palestine. In Balfouria, a colony of mainly US settlers that was dedicated to him by the Zionist movement, Balfour celebrated the “great industrial and agricultural efforts” of the settlers and their colonial enterprise as a “triumph of civilisation.”Footnote68
Figure 2. Balfour visits Jewish settler colonies in Palestine, 1925.
Source: Library of Congress.Footnote69
Following Balfour’s visit to Palestine, UoE continued to celebrate its colonizers. As the Balfour Declaration was being signed, General Edmund Allenby occupied Gaza in the first days of November 1917, and six weeks later, on December 11, he captured Jerusalem from the Ottomans, marking a turning point in the destructive Palestine campaign. In 1926, UoE presented Allenby with an honorary degree in law,Footnote70 and the dean of the faculty celebrated his contribution to imperial conquest and the dispossession of Palestinians, explaining that the degree was a way for the university “to pay homage to the leader of the latest and most thrilling of the Crusades [and] the capture of Jerusalem out of the infidels’ hands.”Footnote71 In 1935, shortly before his death, Allenby was also made rector of the University of Edinburgh.
Today, in the UK, Palestine’s imperial oppressor and contemporary genocide enabler, universities continue the tradition of honoring Palestine’s violent British colonizers. At least two prominent “Balfour universities” still celebrate Arthur James Balfour: The University of Glasgow lists him among the “individuals who had already achieved or would go on to achieve great things,”Footnote72 while UoE refers to its chancellors as distinguished individuals who enhance “the profile and reputation of the University on national and global levels.”Footnote73 These commemorations deliberately obfuscate the racial careers and the foundational roles of figures like Balfour in creating the conditions for the displacement and elimination of the Palestinian people.
The “Balfour Conjuncture”: Genocide and the Chancellor’s Imperial Afterlife
As we read and explored Balfour’s career as a “man of science”Footnote74 at the intersection of imperial and racial governance, and alongside his commitment to advancing imperial academia while holding prestigious positions, we sought and received support from UoE to investigate our institutional archives and organize initiatives aimed at raising awareness in our community about our historical entanglements with the question of Palestine and Israel’s settler-colonial violence. Some of the preliminary findings of our research were published in Retrospect Journal as part of the special issue “Race in Retrospective,” which explored the university’s entanglements with race and racialization from the eighteenth century to the present.Footnote75 This special issue served as an important tool for raising awareness about the university’s links to racism and undoubtedly helped prepare the ground for the Decolonised Transformations Project.
A year later, in November 2022, despite the exclusion of our Balfour research from the university reparatory justice initiative, we invited Salman Abu Sitta, the founder and president of the Palestine Land Society, to address our former chancellor, Arthur James Balfour. The event, titled “A Palestinian Address to Balfour: In Honour of Truth, Memory, and Justice,” was organized by RACE.ED, an inter-university network focused on race, racialization, and decolonial studies at UoE, and the Kenyon Institute, in collaboration with various university networks and research groups. This event marked a significant milestone in acknowledging UoE and the British academy’s involvement in settler-colonial dispossession in Palestine, and in understanding Balfour’s relevance to ongoing Zionist violence.
Abu Sitta’s address was preceded by an attack against Balfour’s legacy at the UK House of Commons, in which Palestine Action activists squirted ketchup on Balfour’s statue around the anniversary of the 1917 declaration. “Palestine Action won’t stop until British complicity does,” said the activists.Footnote76 Ten days later, in his lecture at Balfour’s academic home in Edinburgh, Abu Sitta traced the chancellor’s racial legacy, including his antisemitic immigration policies. He examined the relationship between the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the Nakba, using maps and memories archived in the Palestine Land Society Centre and his autobiography to illustrate the continuities between British occupation after the declaration, and Zionist settler colonization leading up to 1948. Crucially, through Abu Sitta—a man whose family fought Balfour’s troops in Beersheba in 1917 and who was himself exiled from Palestine as a child in the Nakba—this event created a powerful sense of historical afterlife and reincarnation. Standing before Balfour’s portrait, which UoE owns and once displayed in the gallery of its main building, Abu Sitta spoke as if summoning him: “If you did not die in 1930,” he said, “you would be alive today and would be judged by people during your imagined life, so that we can hear firsthand what they say about your deeds.” Footnote77
Figure 3. Salman Abu Sitta delivers “A Palestinian Address to Balfour: In Honour of Truth, Memory, and Justice,” November 2022.
Source: Salman Abu Sitta.Footnote78
Balfour’s legacy as the most prominent imperial chancellor of UoE, who triggered a process of settler-colonial dispossession and dehumanization in Palestine, is not merely a matter of historical harm. Harm to Palestinians today must be seen as an extension of Balfour’s legacy. While this violence may have begun with Balfour’s declaration, it remains through ongoing policies that continue the trajectory of imperialism, settler colonialism, and dispossession of Palestinian land and life. Abu Sitta’s dialogue with Balfour was thus a critical moment and a materialization of Balfour’s afterlife in the physical space of the room with the portrait.
But to grasp further the relevance of our research project and community initiatives to the present, and how the sources and materials we explored in different archives—along with the literacy and community awareness activities we organized—have become salient, we build on Stuart Hall’s notion of conjuncture. More precisely, we must understand the contemporary moment since October 7, 2023, as a “condensation of contradictions”Footnote79—an accumulation of historical, political, and epistemic forces that are erupting in the struggle between the global front supporting settler-colonial genocide and the front opposing it. This opposition has found university campuses and student encampments therein to be key spaces for expression and articulation. At UoE, staff and students organizing for Palestine use Balfour and the university’s historical entanglement with the dispossession of Palestinians as tools for understanding and acting in the conjuncture, in the “immediate terrain of struggle”Footnote80 in which our institution is implicated.
Let us analyze the conjuncture further. Following October 7, 2023, unprecedented community mobilization at UoE began to cohere and coordinate. Students and staff investigated the university, revealing how our direct and indirect investments contributed to multiple war crimes carried out as part of Israel’s regime of settler-colonial apartheid—ranging from the arms industry and high-tech surveillance to companies profiting from illegal settlements. As later revealed in a report by Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, our university is among the most heavily invested in the UK in high-tech companies that have intensified their collaboration with the Israeli Ministry of Defense since the beginning of the genocide.Footnote81 After weeks of student and staff protests, which were met with threats in weekly messages from UoE’s senior leadership—without any acknowledgment of the crimes perpetrated by Israel in Gaza—the university decided to make a concession to the anti-genocide front. One of the movement’s key demands since the first weeks was for the university to apologize for the historical harm it caused through the figure of Balfour and the 1917 declaration. In November 2023, for the first time in its history, and for the first time in the history of academic institutions situated in the imperial center, the university publicly acknowledged in a statement that it “has a historical link to this conflict […] in the Middle East” and that “the issue of coloniality will play a factor in any decisions taken” to address our seminal involvement in the process of denial of Palestinian self-determination.Footnote82
The Balfour conjuncture manifested further at UoE, and with global media coverage, in December 2023. In the days following the university’s announcement on the race review, we were tasked by colleagues in charge of the Decolonised Transformations Project to curate the section of the race review on Palestine, focusing on Balfour. While we were beginning to develop our investigation, our research informed “Balfour Reparations 2023–2043,” a performance lecture by Palestinian artist and University of Glasgow scholar Farah Saleh developed in collaboration with us, in which she confronted UoE’s imperial legacy. Dressed like Balfour in his UoE robe during his inauguration of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1925, she distributed a letter of apology that she asked the audience to read as part of the performance. In the fictional letter, printed on UoE letterhead, the university pledged to “disclose and divest from all investments in companies that directly or indirectly profit from the illegal military occupation and colonisation of Palestine.”Footnote83 Fiction somehow became reality. A picture of the letter taken by the audience went viral, framed as “a public apology for Balfour,” shared globally and quoted by the press to such an extent that, after circulating it as official news, Reuters Fact Check had to issue a statement clarifying that the “University of Edinburgh’s apology letter to Palestinians is fictional.”Footnote84
Figure 4. Farah Saleh performing “Balfour Reparations 2023–2043” at UoE in December 2023. Source: Photo taken by Lucas Chih-Peng Kao and used with permission.
Not long after Saleh’s performance, South Africa initiated proceedings at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against Israel for violating the Genocide Convention in Gaza. A month later, in January 2024, the court ruled that South Africa’s claims were credible and that Israel had carried out acts that plausibly amounted to genocide.Footnote85 In the months following the ICJ decision, as we continued our research while mobilizing alongside our campus community, students escalated their direct actions for divestment through multiple occupations of different university buildings. The historical complicity of our university through Balfour and the demand for an official apology for our historical entanglements remained one of the fundamental requests advanced by students in their divestment negotiations with the institution. However, the university’s intransigent approach to campus protests against our financial links with settler-colonial genocide pushed students to organize a vote on divestment. At the end of March 2024, the university’s Student Council overwhelmingly voted in favor of divestment, with a staggering 97 percent majority.Footnote86
In the same month, the relationship between Balfour, British academia, and the ongoing genocide became a focal point of struggle at UoC.Footnote87 A member of Palestine Action entered Trinity College and attacked a portrait of Balfour. The direct action organization released an official 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.”Footnote88 The slashing of the UoC portrait—what Nicholas Mirzoeff called “slashing the screen”—allowed people to “see in the dark” of genocide and its imperial genealogy through Balfour.Footnote89 The slashing was an act of solidarity with Gaza that revealed the deep financial link between a world-leading university in the imperial center and Israeli arms manufacturers. Two months later, UoC divested from Israeli military companies.Footnote90
The Balfour conjuncture erupted irreversibly at the core of the UK Russell Group, in Edinburgh, a few weeks later, at the beginning of May 2025, when students joined the international student encampment movement spreading across continents, and set up tents at UoE’s Old College, home to the university administration. In their opening message on social media announcing the encampment, they declared: “Students take Lord Balfour University, known internationally as the University of Edinburgh.”Footnote91 They emphasized “the special legacy” of the University of Edinburgh “in the colonization of Palestine” and demanded that it “divest entirely from companies tied to Israel.”Footnote92 Our ongoing research, the community-led forms of truth-telling led by Abu Sitta and Saleh, and the archival materials we retrieved, helped inform both the student movement and the increasing involvement of staff in the anti-genocide and pro-divestment movement at UoE.
While “Balfour University Still Complicit with Genocide” became the official banner of the encampment, it was more than just a slogan. The connection and convergence between past and present—what we call Balfour’s afterlife—became a political conjuncture that took shape through the intersection of various processes and forces, giving the encampment a sense of historical mission. Multiple constituencies began to believe that the trajectory of historical injustice in which our institution has been implicated and that our research revealed in its granular aspects, could be challenged. This process led to the condensation and accumulation of multiple forces and community activism on campus, culminating in the largest mobilization for divestment since the 1970s.Footnote93
Balfour Must Fall Everywhere
This article has demonstrated, though only partially, the historical continuities of Balfour’s violent racial legacy and his imperial afterlife. In reading the breadth of his racial thinking, we showed how his declaration on Palestine was inscribed in his racialized imperial worldviews and quintessentially emblematic of them. We read this genealogy alongside an active movement at UoE calling for Palestinian liberation. Through various forms of political struggle at UoE, including a protracted hunger strike, students managed to mobilize over six hundred members of staff in support of divestment. This was achieved through a letter we drafted with colleagues, which was signed by the entire Decolonised Transformations network—meaning all the scholars engaged in reviewing our institution’s entanglements with colonialism and imperialism. As a network, we collectively signed the call for divestment, expressing full support for the student hunger strike and anti-genocide mobilization. We recognized that colonialism and imperialism are not merely historical legacies, but ongoing realities.
Our collective research on institutional entanglements with different forms and contexts of racial domination in the past became a tool for political struggle in the present. From the Palestine exception and the exclusion of Palestine from the race review, we reached a moment where Balfour and Palestine came to symbolize contemporary anti-colonial struggles. In this conjuncture, as scholars leading the Balfour section of the race review and as organizers of the Divestment Committee representing six hundred signatories, we engaged in the anti-genocide struggle by merging research, activism, and the pursuit of institutional change.
Figure 5. Student and staff mobilization for divestment and against Balfour University at UoE on June 17, 2024.
Source: Photo taken by Nicola Perugini.
Figure 6. Student and staff mobilization for divestment and against Balfour University at UoE. This was taken at Old College on May 29, 2024. Old College is where Balfour’s portrait once resided and has since been taken down. It is also where Abu Sitta and Saleh staged part of their interventions.
Source: Photo taken by Nicola Perugini.
Figure 7. Student and staff mobilization for divestment and against Balfour University at UoE. This was taken at Old College on May 19, 2024.
Source: Photo taken by Meher Vepari and used with permission.
UoE continues to resist divestment when it comes to Palestine. Despite issuing an official statement in response to the anti-genocide protests acknowledging its historical involvement in the dispossession of Palestinians through Balfour, the university remains unwilling to recognize that true reparations and justice can only come by ending the cycle of harm—particularly through financial profiteering from settler-colonial annihilation. Instead, the senior leadership team has deployed what one member of staff termed a “conflict agnostic” approach, refusing to engage with the Nakba and its settler-colonial afterlife. This Nakba denialism delimits the outcomes of the working groups that are informing court decisions on responsible investments and preventing precautionary divestment from companies involved with the Israeli military in Gaza. This approach also means that UoE runs the risk of eluding due diligence and exposing itself to complicity with genocide, crimes against humanity, and an illegal military occupation. Instead of financial disentanglement, the university prefers repetition of the colonial and imperial harms that the Balfour Declaration institutionalized more than a century ago.
In spite of our institution’s resistance to divestment, the collective process of understanding the relationship between past and present through Balfour’s violent legacy has triggered an irreversible political process. For the first time, a Western academic institution was forced, through anti-colonial political mobilization against Israel’s ongoing settler-colonial genocide, to transform Palestine from an exception to one of the core questions at the center of its investigations into the legacies of colonialism and imperialism in academic institutions. This is only the beginning of a much larger and urgently needed process. Our work at the intersection of research, anti-colonial mobilization, and reparatory justice is only a drop in the ocean compared with what remains to be done to delink Western academic institutions from their legacy of dispossession in Palestine. Indeed, this research and analysis of community engagement at UoE should serve as an invitation to colleagues and students in other institutions in the imperial center to look for and follow the traces of Palestinian dispossession in their archives, in their collections, in the names of their buildings, and in the names of their scholarships. Balfour must fall everywhere.
Acknowledgments
We wish to thank a number of people who worked with us and provided support toward this project: The UoE’s student-staff divestment movement and in particular the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. The former president of Edinburgh University Justice for Palestine Society and our research assistant Hajar Ibrahim, who helped us archive the mobilization for divestment, as well as Henry Dee and Tom Cunningham for their research assistance in the Centre for Research Collection (CRC). Our colleagues in CRC, Rachel Hosker and Daryl Green for their support in amassing relevant and helpful materials. Salman Abu Sitta for putting Balfour on trial in his centenary lecture on the British Mandate in Palestine, alongside Toufic Haddad for co-organizing this joint lecture. Farah Saleh for her lecture performance “Balfour’s Afterlife: Balfour Reparations 2025–2045” and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities for providing support around these various events. The Research and Engagement Work Group for their support toward the encampment and divestment movement, and toward our contribution with the reparations project. Nadim Bawalsa and R. R. Abdelnabi for their close and incisive editorial suggestions. This article was prepared with equal contribution by the authors.
Additional information
Funding
SRSF.
Notes on contributors
Nicola Perugini
Nicola Perugini is a senior lecturer in international relations at the University of Edinburgh.
Shaira Vadasaria
Shaira Vadasaria is a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Edinburgh.
Notes
1 See Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s definition of racism as “state-sanctioned and/or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death, in distinct yet densely interconnected political geographies.” Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Race and Globalization,” in Geographies of Global Change: Remapping the World, ed. R. J. Johnston et al. (Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 261.
2 Full petition here: “Rename David Hume Tower at UoE,” Change.org, June 29, 2020, https://www.change.org/p/university-of-edinburgh-rename-david-hume-tower-at-uoe.
3 “The Chancellor,” University of Edinburgh, last accessed December 22, 2025, https://www.ed.ac.uk/about/people/officials/chancellor.
4 Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), 15–17.
5 Susan Pedersen, “Writing the Balfour Declaration into the Mandate for Palestine,” International History Review 45, no. 2 (2023): 279-91, https://doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2022.2123377.
6 Salman Abu Sitta, “A Palestinian Address to Balfour: In Honour of Truth, Memory, and Justice,” Palestine Land Society, November 8, 2022, https://www.plands.org/en/articles-speeches/speeches/2022/A-Palestinian-Address-to-Balfour.
7 We came together on this project having both joined UoE after teaching for several years at Al-Quds Bard College in Abu Dis—an experience that marked our lives and teaching by bringing us into Palestinian spaces of learning shaped by everyday resistance to settler-colonial occupation and dispossession. With Palestinian campuses under siege, students and staff strive to carry out their academic lives while resisting all forms of violence—restrictions on movement, invasive surveillance, arbitrary detention, torture, death, land and resource theft, and dispossession—we carried these memories with us and learned from them. With a deep sense of comradeship, solidarity, responsibility, and love for the communities we lived with during our years at Al-Quds Bard College, and with an unwavering commitment to the Palestinian struggle for liberation, we both joined UoE with a sense of loss and duty to maintain our bond to Palestine by engaging in new epistemic and political battles through which we do our small part. It was from these affective and political trajectories and commitments to Palestine’s liberation struggle that our research into Balfour’s deeds of destruction began.
8 “The Chancellor.” Alexander Campbell Fraser, “Professor Campbell Fraser’s speech on the occasion of the University of Edinburgh’s election of Balfour,” The Scotsman, Edinburgh University General Council, October 31, 1891, as cited in Tommy Curry et al., Decolonised Transformations: Confronting the University of Edinburgh’s History and Legacies of Enslavement and Colonialism (University of Edinburgh, June 2025), 45, https://www.ed.ac.uk/about/race-review/read-the-review.
9 Fraser, “Speech,” as cited in Curry et al., Decolonised Transformations, 48.
10 “The Chancellor.”
11 See Fraser’s speech in The Scotsman (1891). Balfour was succeeded by two other imperial chancellors who similarly spanned the worlds of academia and public affairs: John Buchan, Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield, was chancellor from 1937 to 1940, and was a well-known Scottish novelist, governor general of Canada (1935–40), an imperial administrator with Balfour in South Africa, and played a prominent intelligence role in the Middle East; and Victor Alexander John Hope, Marquess of Linlithgow, was chancellor from 1946 to 1952, and was both the general governor in India (1936–43) and a politician.
12 Lord Rayleigh (John William Strutt), Lord Balfour in His Relation to Science (Cambridge University Press, 1930); Sydney H. Zebel, Balfour: A Political Biography (Cambridge University Press, 1973); Ruddock F. MacKay, Balfour: Intellectual Statesman (Oxford University Press, 1985); Blanche Elizabeth Campbell Dugdale, Arthur James Balfour: First Earl of Balfour (Hutchinson, 1936).
13 Full project description here: Decolonised Transformations: Confronting the University’s Legacies of Slavery and Colonialism (blog), University of Edinburgh, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/decolonise/.
14 As David Scott explains, the idea of reparatory history refers to a “dimension of moral history concerned specifically with historical wrongs that remain unrepaired in the present.” David Scott, Irreparable Evil: An Essay in Moral and Reparatory History (Columbia University Press, 2024), 27.
15 The concept of imperial afterlife draws inspiration from the work of Saidiya Hartman who coined the phrase “afterlife of slavery,” which is now a widely used analytic for understanding the ongoing material and psychic conditions of subjugation as instituted under the racial and economic structures of chattel slavery. This historiographical framework draws attention to the relentless and ongoing systems and structures of racial domination that define anti-Black violence, constitutive of Atlantic slavery, and instituted after formal abolition. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997). We pay homage to this concept and its legacy and draw on it as a way to also think about the afterlife of British empire and its lasting legacy in Palestine and on Palestinians, which many Palestinian scholars refer to as the “ongoing Nakba.” As Nasser Abourahme details in his recent work, Nakba, translated to catastrophe, first appears in the work of Constantin Zureiq, in his book, Ma´a al-Nakba, written amid the ethnic cleansing campaign in 1948. Nasser Abourahme, The Time Beneath the Concrete: Palestine Between Camp and Colony (Duke University Press, 2025). The concept of ongoing Nakba is also a historiographical frame that explains how the colonial dispossession of Palestine and Palestinians, and resistance to it, is part of Palestine’s ongoing liberation struggle against settler-colonial and imperial domination.
16 Primary sources include, but are not limited to, the University of Edinburgh’s institutional records (Court, Senatus Academicus, Accounts), student societies journals, and archival records on Arthur James Balfour, Edmund Allenby, and the Patrick Geddes collection. In person and remote research in archives beyond the University of Edinburgh records include the National Records of Scotland, National Library of Scotland, Library of Congress, and British Pathé. The research on contemporary university investments supporting settler-colonial dispossession and genocide in Palestine is based on: International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court records of investigations on events in Gaza after October 7, 2023; media; the United Nations; advocacy and human rights organizations; staff/student reports on companies that are complicit with human rights, international law, and Genocide Convention violations in the occupied Palestinian territories; the University of Edinburgh’s official institutional communications on the process of the reform of responsible investments; as well as the archives of the community mobilization preserved by different groups and divestment campaign participants.
17 Kerr Simeon, “Edinburgh Student Hunger Strikers Demand University Divests over Gaza ‘Complicity,’” Financial Times, May 16, 2024, https://www.ft.com/content/e5ddee87-be2b-4283-8a1f-ecddbd95c368.
18 Curry et al., Decolonial Transformations.
19 University of Edinburgh (UoE), “Statement from the Principal,” news release, January 19, 2021, https://www.ed.ac.uk/news/2021/addressing-contemporary-and-historic-racism/statement-from-principal.
20 UoE “Statement.”
21 “Member Bios: Researchers on the UoE and the Question of Palestine,” University of Edinburgh, last accessed December 10, 2025, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/decolonise/2024/11/07/member-bios-researchers-on-the-uoe-and-the-question-of-palestine/.
22 Scott, Irreparable Evil, 58.
23 Scott, Irreparable Evil, 15.
24 Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel)–Intervention, I.C.J., January 24, 2024, https://www.icj-cij.org/case/192/intervention. Also, see Rosemary Sayigh, The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (Zed Books, 1979); Walid Khalidi, All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992); Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948 (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992); Ahmad H. Saʻdi and Lila Abu-Lughod, eds., Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory (Columbia University Press, 2007).
25 Jock Gallagher, Scotland’s Global Empire: A Chronicle of Great Scots (Whittles Publishing, 2014), 140–41. Also, see Zebel, Balfour.
26 Meeting minutes of the University Court Finance Committee, July 9, 1891, as cited in Curry et al., Decolonised Transformations, 48.
27 Fraser, “Speech,” as cited in Curry et al., Decolonise Transformation, 48.
28 Emigration: Secretary of State’s Correspondence, 1885, file AF51/1, National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh.
29 Jason Tomes, Balfour and Foreign Policy: The International Thought of a Conservative Statesman (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 78–81.
30 Tomes, Balfour and Foreign Policy, 2.
31 Arthur James Balfour, “A note on Indian reform,” August 7, 1917, cited in Tomes, Balfour and Foreign Policy, 65.
32 South Africa Bill of Lords, remarks by Arthur James Balfour, August 16, 1909, UK Parliament, House of Commons, Hansard, vol. 9, Column 1002, https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1909-08-16/debates/1a5e419c-77c8-4cbe-aa0e-e24099f46f50/SouthAfricaBillLords.
33 South Africa Bill of Lords, remarks by Arthur James Balfour, August 16, 1909.
34 L. S. Jacyna, “Science and Social Order in the Thought of A. J. Balfour,” Isis 71, no. 1 (March 1980): 31, https://doi.org/10.1086/352406.
35 Stefan Kühl, For the Betterment of the Race: The Rise and Fall of the International Movement for Eugenics and Racial Hygiene (Macmillan, 2013), 12–20.
36 Cited in Kühl, For the Betterment of the Race, 26; Jacyna, “Science and Social Order,” 31.
37 “Balfour Declaration, 2 November 1917: Promising Palestine Away,” Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question, last accessed December 9, 2025, https://www.palquest.org/en/highlight/157/balfour-declaration-2-november-1917.
38 Sherene Seikaly, Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2016), 5–6.
39 Pedersen, “Writing the Balfour Declaration.” Also, see Sahar Huneidi, “Was Balfour Policy Reversible? The Colonial Office and Palestine, 1921–23,” JPS 27, no. 2 (1998): 33, https://doi.org/10.2307/2538282.
40 Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (One World, 2007); Sa’di and Abu-Lughod, Nakba; Nahla Abdo and Nur Masalha, eds., An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019).
41 As historians Rashid Khalidi and Sherene Seikaly argue, “To begin the story in 1917 is to name the struggle for what it is: settler colonialism. We know that Zionism was a response to centuries of Judeophobia in Europe and, more immediately, the consolidation of state-led anti-Semitism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, Zionism was not the most popular response to the oppression of Jewish people in Europe, nor was it the only one.” Rashid I. Khalidi and Sherene Seikaly, “From the Editors,” JPS 50, no. 3 (2021): 2, https://doi.org/10.1080/0377919X.2021.1947645.
42 Shawan Jabarin and Ralph Wilde, “How Britain Broke International Law to Stop Palestinian Independence 100 Years Ago,” Mondoweiss, September 29, 2023, https://mondoweiss.net/2023/09/how-britain-broke-international-law-to-stop-palestinian-independence-100-years-ago/. Also, see John Quigley, “Britain and the League of Nations: Was There Ever a Mandate for Palestine?,” JPS 53, no. 2 (2024): 35–49, https://doi.org/10.1080/0377919X.2024.2366771.
43 United Nations, The International Status of the Palestinian People, 1981, https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-204352/. Also, see Michael Adams, “What Went Wrong in Palestine?,” JPS 18, no. 1 (1988): 71–82, https://doi.org/10.2307/2537595. For the original source, see Letter from Mr. Balfour to Lord Curzon, Foreign & Commonwealth Office’s Public Records Office, August 11, 1919, file FO.371/4183, National Archives, United Kingdom.
44 Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 52–54.
45 Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 (Metropolitan Books, 2020), 17–54.
46 David Englander, ed., A Documentary History of Jewish Immigrants in Britain, 1840–1920 (Leicester University Press, 1994), 10.
47 Aliens Bill, Remarks by Arthur James Balfour, July 10, 1905, UK Parliament, Hansards, vol. 149, column 155, https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1905/jul/10/aliens-bill.
48 Decolonised Transformations Project, internal correspondence, February 5, 2025.
49 Arthur James Balfour, Speeches on Zionism (Arrowsmith, 1928), 25.
50 Tomes, Balfour and Foreign Policy, 212.
51 Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (Vintage Books, 1979), 16.
52 Tamson Pietsch, Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British Academic World, 1850–1939 (Manchester University Press, 2013). On Balfour as a white supremacist, see Yousef Munayyer, “It’s Time to Admit That Arthur Balfour Was a White Supremacist—and an Anti-Semite Too,” Institute for Palestine Studies, November 1, 2017, https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/232119.
53 Official Report of the Allied Colonial Universities, in The Empire Review, VI (London, 1904), p. 121, Special Collections, Main Library, University of Edinburgh.
54 Official Report of the Allied Colonial Universities, p. 121.
55 Official Report of the Allied Colonial Universities, p. 122.
56 Report of Proceedings: Congress of the Universities of the Empire (University of London Press and Hodder & Stoughton, 1912), 25.
57 Arthur Balfour, Decadence (Cambridge University Press, 1908), 35.
58 Balfour, Decadence, 46–47.
59 Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error: The Autobiography (Hamish Hamilton, 1949), 390.
60 Weizmann, Trial and Error, 391.
61 The University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Research Collections holds the largest existing archival collection on Geddes. Moreover, the university has a Patrick Geddes Hall, which includes a dedicated Geddes plaque at the entrance. “Sir Patrick Geddes,” University of Edinburgh, November 12, 2024, https://www.ed.ac.uk/about/people/plaques/geddes.
62 Nazmi Jubeh, “Patrick Geddes: Luminary or Prophet of Demonic Planning,” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 80 (Winter 2019): 26 and 38, https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1649528.
63 Hebrew University and Lord Balfour’s visit. Lord Balfour declaring university open, file LC-M32- B-434 [P&P], April 1, 1925, G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2019697069/.
64 “Hebrew University. Distinguished Visitors to Jerusalem,” The Scotsman, March 18, 1925, 10, as cited in Curry et al., Decolonised Transformation, 53. The Balfour-Einstein Institute of Mathematics and Physics was the initial name given to this institute, which can also be found in the American Jewish Yearbook of 1926 and 1927, vol. 28.
65 Roy Macleod, “Balfour’s Mission to Palestine: Science, Strategy, and the Inauguration of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem,” Minerva 46 (2008): 75, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-008-9087-x. Balfour, Speeches on Zionism, 78 and 83.
66 The Yearbook of the Universities of the Empire (Bell and Sons, 1925), 497.
67 The Yearbook of the Universities of the Empire (Bell and Sons, 1930), 528. Moïse Berenstein, “Jewish Colonisation in Palestine; II,” International Labour Review 30, no. 6 (1934): 797–819, https://researchrepository.ilo.org/esploro/outputs/journalArticle/Jewish-colonisation-in-Palestine-II/995219341902676?institution=41ILO_INST. For a history of the JNF and its role in Palestinian dispossession, see Walter Lehn, “The Jewish National Fund,” JPS 3, no. 4 (1974): 74–96, https://doi.org/10.2307/2535450.
68 Balfour, Speeches on Zionism, 110 and 112.
69 “Balfour at Jewish colonies,” Matson Collection negative numbers 13816-13914, file LC-M32- 13876 [P&P], 1925, G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2019695045/.
70 Senate minutes, University of Edinburgh, July 20, 1926, files 360 and 361, Centre for Research Collections, University of Edinburgh.
71 Senate minutes, University of Edinburgh, July 20, 1926.
72 “Rectors Past and Present,” University of Glasgow, last accessed December 9, 2025, https://www.gla.ac.uk/alumni/ouralumni/rectorspastandpresent/.
73 “The Chancellor.”
74 Robert John Strutt Rayleigh (Lord Rayleigh), Lord Balfour in His Relation to Science (Cambridge University Press, 1930).
75 Shaira Vadasaria and Nicola Perugini, “Arthur James Balfour: The University of Edinburgh’s Imperial Chancellor (1891–1930),” Retrospect Journal, no. 29 (June 2021): 24–27, https://retrospectjournal.com/race-in-retrospective-2/.
76 Katy Prickett, “Police End Balfour Portrait Damage Investigation,” BBC, March 13, 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2xpnx93epo.
77 Salman Abu Sitta, “A Palestinian Address to Balfour: In Honor of Truth, Memory, and Justice,” Mondoweiss, November 30, 2022, https://mondoweiss.net/2022/11/a-palestinian-address-to-balfour-in-honor-of-truth-memory-and-justice/.
78 Abu Sitta, “A Palestinian Address to Balfour.”
79 Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (Verso, 1988), 130.
80 Hall, Hard Road to Renewal, 43.
81 Francesca Albanese, From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied Since 1967, A/HRC/59/23, June 30, 2025, p. 25, https://docs.un.org/en/A/HRC/59/23.
82 “A University of Sanctuary: Israel and Palestine,” University of Edinburgh, December 4, 2023, https://university-of-sanctuary.ed.ac.uk/israel-and-palestine.
83 “Balfour Reparations (2025–2045),” FarahSaleh.com, last accessed December 9, 2025, https://www.farahsaleh.com/balfour-reparations.
84 “Fact Check: University of Edinburgh’s Apology Letter to Palestinians Is Fictional,” Reuters, December 21, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/university-edinburghs-apology-letter-palestinians-is-fictional-2023-12-21/.
85 Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel).
86 Agenda and papers of the Senatus Academicus, University of Edinburgh, May 22, 2024, https://registryservices.ed.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2024-07/22%20May%202024%20-%20Agenda%20and%20papers.pdf.
87 “Former Chancellors,” University of Edinburgh, last accessed December 12, 2025, https://www.cam.ac.uk/about-the-university/how-the-university-and-colleges-work/people/chancellor/former-chancellors.
88 Prickett, “Police End Balfour.” Official statement by Palestine Action. Link removed from the internet after Palestine Action was declared a terrorist organization by the UK government.
89 Nicholas Mirzoeff, To See in the Dark: Palestine and Visual Activism Since October 7 (Pluto Press, 2025), 102–3.
90 Imran Mulla, “Cambridge’s Wealthiest College Votes to Divest from Arms Companies,” Middle East Eye, May 12, 2024, https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/cambridges-wealthiest-college-divest-arms-companies.
91 Edinburgh University Justice for Palestine Society (eu_jps), “Gaza Solidarity Camp at the University of Edinburgh,” Instagram, May 5, 2024, https://www.instagram.com/p/C6lcH7VoFxX/?img_index=3&igsh=ang3cWVucm95OHkx.
92 Edinburgh University Justice for Palestine Society (eu_jps), “Gaza Solidarity Camp at the University of Edinburgh.”
93 The last comparable campaign on campus addressing the university’s complicity with a settler-colonial apartheid regime was the one that ultimately resulted in full divestment from South Africa in 1971.
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6 Dec 2025
Suppression of freedom of expression on Palestine at the University of Edinburgh must stop!
We the undersigned unions, organisations, networks and individual staff and students write to condemn our institution’s senior managers for their suppression of Palestine-related expression at the University of Edinburgh, as detailed below. We cannot tolerate the contradiction of an institution that claims to uphold freedom of expression, but actively works to shut down certain views and threaten those who continue to insist on speaking. There cannot be a Palestine exception to freedom of expression.
Since the beginning of the academic year, after the insensitive and inappropriate meeting between our Principal and the deputy ambassador of Israel, senior managers have adopted increasingly intimidatory behaviour towards student groups who are supporting Palestine and speaking out against Israel’s ongoing war of annihilation in Gaza and attacks in Lebanon, including threatening members with disciplinary action for social media posts and protests that would not have carried such consequences before. This is part of broader suppression of on-campus manifestations of solidarity with the people in Palestine and Lebanon.
Edinburgh students have been doing essential work in refusing to normalise genocide and carry on with our lives as if the killing of more than 43,000 Palestinians (with more than 10,000 uncounted under the rubble), the complete destruction of the educational and medical sectors, the destruction and damaging of more than 70% of homes, the obliteration of all life-saving and life-sustaining infrastructures, and the starvation of 2.3 million people, were not happening. They have organised events to educate themselves and others on the historical roots of the current extermination, called protests and occupied University spaces, put up posters calling for a ceasefire, set up memorials for the victims, all of which is precisely to oppose the normalisation of what has been going on in Gaza. Since the beginning of 2024, with the opening of the investigation against Israel at the International Court of Justice for the crime of genocide, students have informed our community about the financial entanglements of the University with what the ICJ then ruled as ‘plausible genocide’. As a result, students and staff have come together, unequivocally asking in all available fora (Student Council, Academic Senate, the encampment, public letters) for divestment from genocide, egregious human rights and international law violations, and Israel’s dispossession of Palestinians.
By contrast, the UoE senior leadership and Court have ignored the strong and consistent calls for divestment in our community. The Court’s repeated dithering and postponement of divestment from stocks of companies directly supporting the Israeli military is not only contributing to creating a university environment that normalises genocide, giving the impression that the financial involvement in the crime of crimes is not an urgent matter that requires an immediate cessation, but also implicates our community in its enactment. We cannot accept this.
As we can document below, UoE management has reacted to student mobilisation by arbitrarily cancelling room bookings for events without any prior consultation with student organisers; repeatedly removing posters in staff offices; removing at least four memorials, including throwing materials such as the photographs of students’ family friends and relatives killed in Gaza into the bin as ‘waste’; refusing student requests to be allocated a space for the commemoration of the victims of the violence in Gaza; and sending threats of disciplinary action to members of two student groups. These actions contravene the principles of freedom of thought and speech outlined in the UoE management’s own guidelines on events. Such restrictions on legitimate freedom of expression and association are not only violations of UoE policy, but are also discriminatory in character, in that they single out certain forms of expression and association for suppression. This appears to be a breach of the Public Sector Duty UoE holds under the Equality Act (2010).
We call on the UoE management to immediately cease all intimidation of students mobilising and raising awareness on campus in solidarity with Palestine. UoE management must change how it addresses Israel’s ceaseless assault on Gaza and its implications for students and staff. This means acknowledging the role of this institution as a contributor to the current violence through its refusal to confront its own historical responsibility for the continuing dispossession of the Palestinians and its current institutional financial support to the Israeli military operations. Suppression of Palestine solidarity is part of a pattern of complicity that we insist must end now.
List of incidents:
While we are in the process of compiling a comprehensive list of all incidents since the start of the Israeli aggression on Gaza, the table below outlines the most recent incidents related to solidarity with Palestine on campus:
Poster Removal
- Occurrences: Multiple. 8 incidents recorded between September and November, some with repeated instances.
- Location: Multiple. SPS staff and PhD student offices, LLC staff offices, Vet School, Geosciences.
There have been multiple reports of incidents involving the removal of posters from various areas of the university. These include UCU ‘Ceasefire Now’ posters and general Palestine solidarity posters that were taken down from the offices of staff and students by either Security or Estates. No clear explanation was given for the removals, other than the claim that the posters were deemed inappropriate and were interfering with the freedom of expression of staff and students.
Intimidation
- Occurrences: Multiple. 3 instances of intimidation have been reported so far between April and October.
- Location: Multiple. SPS CMB & PhD Offices, Vet School.
There have been incidents of intimidation directed at staff and PhD students, one of which escalated into racial abuse and harassment. These incidents stemmed from the distribution or display of posters and flyers in support of Palestine in public spaces or offices. The intimidation took various forms, including formal communications addressed to staff involved with their line managers copied in, or security and Estates interrogating PhD students in a threatening manner, particularly those from the BAME community, and demanding to see their student IDs. Additionally, one colleague experienced repeated harassment and racial abuse from a fellow staff member since March. Despite a formal complaint to HR, management decided to side with the perpetrator.
Gaza Victims Memorials (Martyrs Memorials) taken down and pictures of killed family members and relatives binned
- Occurrences: Multiple. The Gaza Victims Memorials were taken down 4 times (between June and October).
- Location: Old College. The Victims Memorial, created by UoE students and staff to honour the victims of the Gaza genocide, has been dismantled four times.
The first incident occurred in June when security disposed of photos belonging to Palestinian students and their relatives. After students complained, the memorial was reinstated, but was removed again in August mere days prior to the meeting of the Deputy Ambassador of Israel with the Principal. The memorial was once again reinstated at the end of August and in September, only to be removed twice again by security. Throughout these events, management refused to allocate space for students and staff to pay tribute to their lost loved ones.
Room Cancellations:
- Occurrences: Multiple. At least 2 cancelled room bookings were reported in October (other room bookings made by students and staff had also been reported as cancelled earlier in 2024 – currently gathering information from lead organisers)
- Location: Various locations.
It was reported that at least two student room bookings were cancelled by University Timetabling. The first one was made by a non-registered student group for a tutorial reading group scheduled for October 7th. As the activities of this particular student group, including their social media platforms, are closely monitored by the University, the event was flagged and Timetabling cancelled it on the grounds that it was considered a ‘public event’, and that there was not sufficient time for a risk assessment. Additionally, Timetabling indicated that the topic ‘might have been controversial’.
The second room booking, organised by a registered student society, was also cancelled by Timetabling who mistakenly claimed that the event was being organised by the aforementioned non-registered student group. When the lead organiser challenged the false allegation, the UoE Deputy Secretary – Students (whom the case was referred to) provided a different reason for the cancellation, claiming that the event was cancelled due to its ‘public’ nature requiring a risk assessment, hinting also at the topic being ‘controversial’.
In the two instances there was no prior communications with the students, they were only notified about the cancellation of their events via e-mail.
Threatening two student groups with disciplinary action
- Occurrences: November, via e-mail
Policing the social platforms of two student groups, management issued a formal letter to the students threatening disciplinary action, following two posts on X calling for divestment. The letter gave the students an ultimatum demanding that the posts be deleted or they would face disciplinary action, emphasising that the University would no longer engage with the two student groups unless their ‘approach changed’.
Organisational signatories:
- School of Social and Political Science Palestine Solidarity Network
- UCU Edinburgh
- Staff Bame Network
- Womxn of Colour Collective
- CRITIQUE, Centre for Ethics and Critical Thought
- Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropology (EdCMA)
- Staff Pride Network Committee
- Staff-Student Solidarity Network
- Edinburgh Race Equality Network (EREN) Committee
- Decolonised Transformations Research and Engagement Working Group (REWG)
- Geographies of Social Justice Research Group
- Food Researchers in Edinburgh (FRIED)
To date, the letter is also signed by 363 staff, 126 PhD researchers, 70 students and 6 alumni
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Professor Colm Harmon BA MA PhD
Vice Principal Students
Professor of Applied Economics
The University of Edinburgh
Old College South Bridge Edinburgh, EH8 9YL
Tel: +44 (0) 131 650 6443
Email: VP.students@ed.ac.uk
Web: www.ed.ac.uk
To: Edinburgh University Justice for Palestine Society
A safe and respectful campus
We want to underline how seriously we are taking the appalling episode that led to one of our students being assaulted last Friday. We understand how upsetting this is, and urge anyone affected to access the range of support we have available.
While we are assisting Police Scotland in its enquiries, we are also looking to ensure that we learn and improve from experiences, and are meeting with the Students’ Association to discuss this matter.
Edinburgh is a safe city and University to study, work and live in, which makes dreadful incidents such as this all the more shocking. Our hardworking teams are highly experienced in managing security across our city-wide campus, ensuring members of our University can carry out their day confident in their safety.
We are limited in what we can say in the context of an ongoing Police investigation, however we will continue to listen and engage with our community.
Looking ahead, we ask, as always, and like many other organisations supporting peaceful protest, that those organising any events, including protests, engage with our Security team in advance in order that they can support these as effectively as possible. Security have supported very many events, of many kinds, over many years, and these have taken place most effectively when that engagement has been strong. We have not had the benefit of that pre-engagement to date with EU-JPS, which means that we are obliged to plan reactively.
Your social media posts about the incident (e.g. Instagram on 30 March) are incorrect and irresponsible. Our University fully supports the lawful and respectful expression of views and opinions. Members of our Security team are always on duty across campus and attend events including protests as a matter of routine. Team members were present at Friday’s protest and provided immediate support to those affected during and after the incident.
Social media posts
Your recent social media posts (including on Instagram and X/Twitter on 28 March) in reference to ‘platforming’ a member of the Israeli Defence Forces directly refer to a current student. These are discriminatory, disrespectful and, more critically, potentially threaten that student’s safety.
We ask that you immediately remove these posts along with the template email (Google Docs).
We are disappointed by the way that you have chosen to frame what was an important discussion on antisemitism between staff and students, one that your supporters participated in with strength and conviction. The discussion took place in a constructive manner, with the direct purpose of reaching out to all sides towards a bridging of experiences.
The University will not tolerate bullying, intimidation and offensive behaviour, whether online or in person. Actions which target a student and encourage others to do the same have no place in this University. We have been very clear that disciplinary action may be taken should anyone breach the Code of Student Conduct.
As we mentioned in our previous email (6 November 2024), EU-JPS represents a small minority of students – many others will have different perspectives and they should feel safe to voice their views as well. We will continue to engage with our wider student and staff community in this spirit.
Regards,
Professor Colm Harmon BA MA PhD
Vice Principal Students, University of Edinburgh
Lucy Evans
Deputy Secretary Students
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336
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Professor Colm Harmon BA MA PhD
Vice Principal Students
Professor of Applied Economics
The University of Edinburgh
Old College South Bridge Edinburgh, EH8 9YL
Tel: +44 (0) 131 650 6443
Email: Colm.Harmon@ed.ac.uk
To: Edinburgh University Justice for Palestine Society
We note your response to our letter of 31 October.
In our most recent letter to you, we reiterated that the University supports the right to lawful, peaceful and respectful protest. You do not, however, have the right to prevent access to our buildings or to disrupt or interfere with events or the choices of our students and staff.
We remind you that your blockade of the entrances to Charles Stewart House on 18 October and your occupation of the Sanderson Building on 30 October, as well as your entry to the Main Library on 2 November when you were asked not to enter, are completely unacceptable and such actions will not be tolerated.
Your most recent social media posts (including 30 October on X and 3 November on X) are offensive and have taken an increasingly threatening tone against us, the Principal and other colleagues. We take these threats against our staff very seriously. You must remove these immediately.
The University will not tolerate bullying, intimidation and offensive behaviour of the type that has been witnessed in recent weeks, both online and in person. We have been very clear that disciplinary action may be taken should anyone breach the Code of Student Conduct. We have now reached that position and will be investigating these breaches with a view to pursuing disciplinary action against individual students thought to be in breach of the Code.
To date, we engaged with the demands you have made, and we have remained open to a dialogue with EU-JPS that is respectful, constructive and held in a spirit of collegiality. However, since your use of offensive language and threatening behaviour has increased, you have left us with no option but to cease all engagement with EU-JPS until your approach to dialogue, including what you post on social media, changes.
EU-JPS represents a small minority of students – many others will have different perspectives and they should feel safe to voice their views as well. We will continue to engage with our wider student and staff community in this spirit. This will not impact our planned approach to review the University’s Responsible Investment Policy.
Regards,
Professor Colm Harmon BA MA PhD
Vice Principal Students, University of Edinburgh
Lucy Evans
Deputy Secretary Students
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336
=================================================================
Professor Colm Harmon BA MA PhD
Vice Principal Students
Professor of Applied Economics
The University of Edinburgh
Old College South Bridge Edinburgh, EH8 9YL
Tel: +44 (0) 131 650 6443
Email: Colm.Harmon@ed.ac.uk
Occupation of the Sanderson Building, King’s Buildings
Dear Occupiers,
We note that your occupation of the Sanderson Building and the resulting disruption to the Careers in Engineering Fair has now come to an end.
Actions of this kind are completely unacceptable and will not be tolerated.
As we have highlighted many times over the last few months, the University supports the right to lawful, peaceful and respectful protest but we do not condone preventing access to our buildings. You do not, however, have the right to disrupt or interfere with events or the choices of our students and staff, and the University has been very clear that disciplinary action may be taken should anyone breach its Code of Student Conduct.
The Careers Service offers impartial support to all of our students, helping them make informed choices about their future by providing information and access to a range of industries and professional networks. It is the right of students to engage with these companies without disruption.
This action today is consistent with the ongoing inappropriate, aggressive and personal attacks on University colleagues that you have been posting on your social media channels. This must stop.
We remain open to a dialogue with EU-JPS that is respectful, constructive and held in a spirit of collegiality. That is far from where we are at the moment.
Regards,
Professor Colm Harmon BA MA PhD
Vice Principal Students, University of Edinburgh
Lucy Evans
Deputy Secretary Students
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336
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Dear Edinburgh University Justice for Palestine Society,
I refer to my previous letter from 29 August.
In that email I asked for care and caution in relation to social media postings and respect for the community of the University.
Your latest social media posting makes explicit reference to the events of October 7th. We view these comments as grossly offensive, not just to the Jewish community at large, but to the wider public. The abhorrence of the violence in Gaza does not mean that those in our community and beyond cannot feel abhorrence of the events which took place in Israel on that day.
While we respect your lens on events, we have been clear that protests including social media postings which negate in any way the feelings of the wider community are unacceptable. In this instance, the wording goes further, and portrays a terrorist act in a manner that is offensive.
We ask that you remove this posting (see here).
I support your right to freedom of expression, but this right is not without responsibility. I again ask for you to reflect on that, and ask always where and how your actions will intimidate or offend. In not doing so, we view you, as students of our University, to be potentially in breach of our code of conduct and subject to appropriate disciplinary considerations.
Yours sincerely,
Colm
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Edinburgh University could unadopt antisemitism definition after report into its colonial links
This article is more than 7 months old
One of Britain’s oldest and most prestigious universities is reviewing whether to launch divestment drive and drop antisemitism definition
Harriet Sherwood and Severin Carrell
Sun 27 Jul 2025 09.59 BST
The University of Edinburgh is considering whether to unadopt an internationally recognised definition of antisemitism that critics say inhibits freedom of speech on the subject of Israel and Palestine.
Edinburgh, one of Britain’s oldest and most prestigious universities, is also considering whether to divest from companies accused of enabling alleged human rights violations by Israel.
Both issues are being reviewed by university authorities as a report on the legacy of its historical links with the region is published. The report is part of a broader investigation of the university’s involvement in colonialism and slavery.
It recommends that the university divest from companies allegedly complicit in Israel’s military actions in Gaza and the West Bank, supports the reversal of its adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, and establish a Palestine Studies Centre to investigate the legacy of the Balfour declaration and offer scholarships to students of Palestinian origin.
The report focuses on the repercussions over the past century of the Balfour declaration, a 1917 statement by the British government in favour of “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”.
Edinburgh students protest in the Old College quad, asking for the university to divest from companies complicit in the war on Gaza . Photograph: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert
As well as being British foreign secretary at the time, Arthur James Balfour was the University of Edinburgh’s chancellor – a ceremonial and ambassadorial role – between 1891 and 1930. He had been prime minister from 1902 to 1905.
Balfour played a “unique role” in “establishing and maintaining a century-long process of imperial and settler-colonial rule in Palestine, resulting today in one of the longest-standing colonial occupations and apartheid regimes in modern history”, the report says.
The IHRA definition and the university’s investments were already under review, Sir Peter Mathieson, the university’s principal, told the Guardian. The definition was a “hot topic” and “contentious”, he said. “There is not a unanimity of view. There are some Jewish people who think IHRA is a helpful definition, there are some people who think it’s unhelpful, and so those discussions are ongoing and we haven’t come to a conclusion.”
This year’s graduation ceremonies have been hit by a series of protests and walkouts by graduates, with about 200 students staging protests at 24 ceremonies; some directly accused Mathieson of complicity in the Gaza crisis. Last year, students occupied the quad in Old College, where Mathieson has his office.
The university was setting up a “responsible investment group” to examine its financial holdings, he added. Its remit included reviewing “investments in relation to companies which are allegedly supporting Israel”.
Research on the legacy of the Balfour declaration was added to the broader study of the university’s links to colonialism a year after the Hamas atrocities of 7 October 2023, which triggered the war in Gaza.
The report’s authors, Nicola Perugini and Shaira Vadasaria, both academics at Edinburgh, told the Guardian the decision to include Balfour’s legacy in the research was a “direct response” to pressure on the university leadership by campus protests over the Gaza war.
The pair, both of whom taught for several years at al-Quds University, a Palestinian institution on the outskirts of occupied East Jerusalem, had already been researching Balfour’s legacy for several years. They have been involved in divestment campaigns on campus, and last year Perugini demanded Mathieson apologise publicly after the principal met the Israeli deputy ambassador to the UK.
Balfour’s 67-word declaration said: “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 being clearly understood 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.”
During and after the first world war, Britain and other imperial powers were intent on dividing up the Middle East. Britain controlled Palestine under a League of Nations mandate between 1922 and 1948, during which its forces brutally suppressed Palestinian resistance to increased Jewish immigration in the wake of the Balfour declaration.
Palestinian refugees during the Arab Israeli war of 1948. Photograph: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
The state of Israel was declared within hours of the end of the mandate in May 1948. The subsequent war drove hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes during what became known as the Nakba, or catastrophe. Many Palestinians still blame Balfour for what they see as an act of perfidy and betrayal.
The report’s authors argue Balfour espoused openly racist views that explained his attitudes towards the Middle East, and had a record of supporting settler colonialism in Ireland, South Africa and Canada. In 1913, he became honorary vice-president of the British Eugenics Education Society. Some historians also say he was an antisemite who had backed the 1905 Aliens Act, which severely restricted Jewish immigration to Britain.
The main university report said this legislation constituted the first modern UK anti-immigration law that was designed to prevent Jews fleeing to the UK after an explosion of anti-Jewish hatred and religious persecution in Russia.
The academics who oversaw the university review believe Balfour’s views can be traced back to racist sciences that they say Edinburgh helped to formulate in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Although there is no evidence the university was involved in drafting the 1917 declaration, the report’s authors maintain it was closely aligned with Balfour’s career. It loaned him £12,000 – equivalent to more than £1.8m today – before he became its chancellor, and in 1925 Balfour wore his official university robes when he laid the foundation stone for the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Vadasaria told the Guardian: “Balfour signed a declaration that put in place an imperial and settler-colonial structure of racial domination inside Palestine, which has been sustained by military occupation, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide.”
The report points out that the declaration defined Palestinians as “non-Jewish communities” rather than an Indigenous people with national rights to self-determination, and referred only to civil and religious rights rather than political and national rights. In the Nakba, Palestinians were forced into “permanent exile that continues into the present”.
Balfour’s legacy was “not merely a matter of historical harm,” it says. “Indeed, harm to Palestinians today can be seen as an extension of Balfour’s legacy in the present. While this violence may have begun with Balfour’s declaration, it remains through ongoing policies that continue with the trajectory of imperialism, settler colonialism and the dispossession of Palestinian land and life.”
The Balfour declaration was given an effusive welcome by the Guardian in 1917. Its then editor, CP Scott, had facilitated key introductions between prominent Zionists and members of the government.
The report’s forthright language and recommendations, plus the absence of any reference to centuries of Jewish persecution and dispossession that led to the development of Zionism, or the horrific nature of the Hamas atrocities committed on 7 October 2023, are likely to be controversial in a climate of bitter divisions over the war in Gaza.
The IHRA definition of antisemitism was adopted by the university in 2020, “without broad consultation with students and staff”, according to the report. The definition “violates academic freedom and freedom of speech by framing any criticism of Israel’s policies of settler-colonial dispossession driven by state racism as a form of antisemitism”, it adds.
Alongside the definition, the IHRA offers what it describes as contemporary examples of antisemitism that critics say are used to protect Israel from legitimate criticism. Supporters of the definition say it is essential in helping to protect Jews from hate crimes and abuse.
In 2020, Gavin Williamson, the education secretary in the Conservative government, threatened to cut funding to universities in England that failed to adopt the IHRA definition. The majority have done so.
On the issue of divestment, the authors say the university authorities have “adopted a ‘conflict agnostic’ approach, a term that denies the Nakba and its settler-colonial afterlife”.
This month, a UN report highlighted the involvement of companies from around the world in supporting Israel during its war in Gaza. It noted that the University of Edinburgh was one of the “UK’s most financially entangled institutions”, with nearly £25.5m invested in four tech corporations – Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM – that were “central to Israel’s surveillance apparatus and the ongoing Gaza destruction”.
According to Perugini and Vadasaria’s report, the investments have left the university exposed to “complicity with genocide, crimes against humanity and illegal occupation”. A failure to divest would risk reputational damage and lead to further campus protests, the authors told the Guardian.
This article was amended on 29 July 2025 to correct a misquote in the opening line of the Balfour declaration. The British monarch in 1917 was George V, and the text referred to His Majesty’s government, not “Her Majesty’s government.”
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Fact Check: University of Edinburgh’s apology letter to Palestinians is fictional
By Reuters Fact Check
December 21, 2023 3:35 PM GMT+2Updated December 21, 2023
A fictional letter written by a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh for a performance lecture this month exploring the university’s colonial legacy and potential reparations for Palestinians has been falsely claimed online to be an official letter from the institution.
The letter is headed with the University of Edinburgh’s logo and is date stamped Dec. 14, 2023.
It apologises to Palestinian people for the Balfour Declaration, an authentic 1917 policy statement by Arthur Balfour – then Britain’s foreign minister and Edinburgh University’s chancellor – that said Britain favoured the establishment of a national home for Jewish people in Palestine.
Palestinians have long condemned the 1917 declaration, opens new tab as a promise by Britain to hand over land that it did not own.
On X, opens new tab (archived, opens new tab) and Facebook, opens new tab (archived, opens new tab), posts sharing an image of the university-headed apology suggested it was a bona fide statement by the University of Edinburgh.
But Palestinian dance artist and scholar Farah Saleh said in Dec. 17 posts on X, opens new tab (archived, opens new tab) and Facebook, opens new tab (archived, opens new tab) that the letter is fictional and is part of her performance lecture, “Balfour Reparations (2023-2043)”, opens new tab (archived, opens new tab), which was developed during her postdoctoral fellowship.
An Edinburgh University spokesperson said in an email: “This is not an official statement from the University of Edinburgh. It is a fictional text that was created for a private theatre event.”
VERDICT
Missing context. The image shows a fictive letter created for a performance lecture.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work.
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RACE.ED is a University of Edinburgh network concerned with race, racialization and decolonial studies from a multidisciplinary perspective,
The Chancellor Balfour Declaration: our university, imperial knowledge and the racialised global order
By
Author
11 February 2022
Photo from Wikimedia Commons
Blog post by Nicola Perugini, University of Edinburgh
On July 8 1903, the first Allied Colonial University Conference took place at the Hotel Cecil on the Thames Embankment in London. The development of knowledge production and university networks was meant to foster British imperial rule. One of the main architects of this imperial turn to academe was Arthur James Balfour, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom at that time, and also Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh. Balfour had been appointed to the Edinburgh post in 1891 and ultimately held the position until 1930 – the longest chancellorship in the history of Scotland’s most prominent university.
At Hotel Cecil, Balfour presided the conference dinner attended by universities delegates, heads of colleges, and “men prominent in educational and scientific work.” After the customary toasts, Balfour delivered a speech in which he celebrated the foundation of the new British-colonial academic alliance and explained why this was a remarkable political achievement: “It is not merely, or simply, or chiefly that there are here in this room representatives of scholarship, of science, of all the great spheres of activity in which modern thought is indulging itself. It is that we are here representing what will turn out to be, I believe, a great alliance of the greatest educational instruments in the Empire – an alliance of all the universities that, in an increasing measure, are feeling their responsibilities, not merely for training the youth which is destined to carry on the traditions of the British Empire, but also to further those great interests of knowledge, scientific research, and culture without which no Empire, however materially magnificent, can really say that it is doing to share in the progress of the world.”
In Balfour’s mind, the new academic alliance was a crucial tool for cementing Britain’s global dominance. But it was also a key instrument for affirming a sense of a racialised Anglo-Saxon unity: “We boast a community of blood, of language, of laws, of literature,” the ecstatic Chancellor-PM exclaimed at the conference dinner.
After ending his tenure as Prime Minister in 1905, Balfour withdrew for almost a decade from the centre-stage of imperial foreign policy, before making his return in 1916 as Foreign Secretary. But in those ten years, the Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh continued to construct British academic space as an imperial project.
In 1912, perhaps also due to his growing interest in “the Orient,” Balfour was asked to chair a session of the Second Congress of the Universities of the Empire on The Problem of Universities in the East in Regard to their Influence on Character and Moral Ideals. In his opening speech, he underscored how in Western universities there has been “mutual adjustment” between scientific knowledge and socio-cultural traditions, while in Eastern universities science and social customs were on course for “collision.” This idea of an inherent incompatibility between Eastern traditions and science was grounded in a concept of natural racial inequalities that Balfour had articulated quite clearly a few years earlier, in his book On Decadence. In this book, Balfour theorised that Oriental history was dominated by a monotony of despotism and an incapacity of self-government, and how “any attempt to provide widely different races with an identical […] educational [environment] can never make them alike. They have been different and unequal since history began; different and unequal they are destined to remain.”
This kind of racial thinking shaped Balfour’s imperial world-making both as a statesman and a man of science and academia. This racialised understanding of global order constituted the backbone of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which created a new imperial legal framework in the Middle East. The Declaration, issued on the 2 of November, endorsed the creation of a territorial based settler national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, while denying Palestinians their national rights and offering them only civil and religious rights. Ultimately, and in line with his writings, Palestinians were Orientals incapable of governing themselves or achieving self-determination.
Balfour wrote and signed the Declaration before visiting Palestine. In fact, his first visit took place in 1925, when he inaugurated the Hebrew University of Jerusalem dressed in the robes of Edinburgh and Cambridge (where he had become Chancellor in 1919). As a guest of the Zionist movement, he toured the first “Jewish colonies” established in Palestine, including Balfouria, a settlement dedicated to him by the Zionist leadership.
In his inauguration speech on Mount Scopus, Balfour celebrated the Hebrew University as an experiment of adapting “Western methods” (“Jewish science and theories”) to an Asiatic site and as an institution capable of regenerating a “stagnant Palestine.” Balfour-the-statesman espoused the Zionist narrative about the need to regenerate the arid Palestine also when he wore the clothes of Balfour-the-Edinburgh-Chancellor. As Chaim Weizmann – who played a decisive role in convincing Balfour to issue the 1917 Declaration and invited him to give the inauguration speech in 1925 – made clear in his Trial and Error, the Hebrew University was “the fulfilment of my particular dream of the early days of the movement” and a crucial tool for Zionist affirmation in Palestine. Significantly, after the inauguration, Hebrew University was included in the network of allied imperial universities Balfour had helped constitute in the beginning of the century.
The link between Balfour’s contribution to imperial governance and his contribution to the development of British imperial academia have for some reason been completely erased and does not appear in the vast amount of literature and the contemporary debates on his involvement in global imperial affairs and his infamous Declaration on Palestine.
That is why this year we might use the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration to rediscover this link and raise some fundamental questions on the imperial history of the University of Edinburgh, as well as Scottish and British academia, and its relevance to the present. As universities that formally and publicly embrace the decolonial agenda and try to decolonise curricula and academic spaces: how could we decolonise our historical imbrication with the injustice to which Palestinians have been subjected as a result of the imperial declaration issued by one of our chancellors? Why don’t we publicly acknowledge that the man that has been appointed to enhance our global academic reputation for forty years, was also a key political-intellectual actor in the production of a racialised imperial order that has dispossessed so many peoples? What would be the implications of such a recognition? And since the question of Palestine is still alive as a colonial question that continues to generate violence and dispossession, as we have seen also recently: how could we contribute, with concrete and tangible institutional actions, to decolonise Palestine and repair our institutional entanglement with a settler colonial project that continues to deny Palestinians the right to self-determination and uproot them from their land?
After all, the Balfour Declaration was also our Chancellor’s declaration.
This article is based on a research project on the imperial legacy of the University of Edinburgh in collaboration with the Centre for Research Collections and with the support of SPS and CAHSS.
Image credit: Balfour inaugurates the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1925 Source: Library of Congress.
israel-academia-monitor.com 