Police are investigating a vandalism incident at Cambridge College that happened on 8 March, when two protesters slashed and destroyed a portray of the late UK politician Arthur Balfour. No arrests have but been made and Cambridgeshire police declined to remark.
The protesters, a part of an organisation referred to as Palestine Motion, posted a video exhibiting them spraying purple portray on the 1914 canvas by the artist Philip de Laszlo, after which slashing the work. The activists are regarded as the identical two girls who defaced a statue of Balfour on the UK Home of Commons in November 2022, masking the memorial in tomato ketchup.
Sally Davies, grasp of Trinity School, the place the portray is displayed, stated in an announcement. “I’m shocked by [the] assault in our faculty on our portray. I condemn this act of vandalism. We’re cooperating with the police to carry the perpetrators to justice.”
Balfour was a Conservative prime minister between 1902 and 1905. He later served as international secretary and wrote a letter that grew to become the Balfour Declaration in 1917, advocating the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.
In a web based assertion, Palestine Motion stated: “Arthur Balfour, then UK International secretary [in 1917], issued a declaration which promised to construct ‘a nationwide house for the Jewish individuals’ in Palestine, the place nearly all of the Indigenous inhabitants weren’t Jewish. He gave away the Palestinians’ homeland—a land that wasn’t his to present away… Britain’s assist for the continued colonisation of Palestine hasn’t wavered since 1917.”
The contents of the declaration have been interpreted in numerous methods nonetheless. Notably, the declaration stipulated that “nothing shall be finished which can prejudice the civil and spiritual rights of present non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. The doc doesn’t specify the political or nationwide rights of those communities and didn’t confer with them by identify.
