Pro-Palestinian Arab activists from the Palestine Action group on Saturday stole two busts of Israel’s first President, Chaim Weizmann, from a glass cabinet at Manchester University, reported The Telegraph.
The incident was part of a series of vandalism on the 107th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration.
The Balfour Declaration, issued on November 2, 1917, was a letter from then-British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, expressing British support for “a national home for the Jewish people”, leading the way for the founding of Israel in 1948.
A video released by Palestine Action shows two masked individuals breaking into the glass cabinet with mallets before placing the sculptures in their bags. The video’s caption accuses Weizmann of securing the Balfour Declaration, which the group described as a “British pledge” that led to the “ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”
Meanwhile, in Cambridge, Palestine Action activists collaborated with students to spray red paint on the university’s Institute of Manufacturing in protest of Balfour’s association with Cambridge University, where a portrait of him was displayed at Trinity College until recently.
In London, Palestine Action also vandalized the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) on Hampstead High Street with red paint, asserting that it was “funded by wealth made from manufacturing Israeli weapons” and aligned with their mission to “dismantle Zionism.”
The group also took responsibility for an attack on a Jewish charity’s office in Hendon, where they drenched the Jewish National Fund building with red paint overnight.
A spokesperson for Greater Manchester Police stated, “Shortly before midnight last night, we received a report of a burglary at a university building on Oxford Road, Manchester. Officers have attended the scene and liaised with the university and their security team as part of their ongoing enquiries.”
This past March, members of Palestine Action defaced a painting of Lord Balfour at Trinity College Cambridge.
The group shared images of an activist spraying the portrait with red paint and slashing it.
Palestinian Arab organizations have long been waging a campaign aimed at forcing Britain to apologize for the Balfour Declaration.
The PA cabinet in Ramallah in 2017 demanded not just a British apology for the document, but also compensation.