[4] Muhawi is a world authority on the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, and has translated both his memoir of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the poet's experience of house arrest, detentions in prison and interrogations by Israeli soldiers interrogators.
[5] Muhawi notes that the Balfour Declaration, with its outline of a policy of establishing a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine, referred to the actual historic majority of the population in purely negative terms: indigenous Palestinians were 'non-Jews', as the phrasing in the document, 'the existing non-Jewish population', shows.
[1] The paradoxical consequence of this distinction was to transform the native inhabitants into a diaspora people in their own country.
Balfour himself duplicated as an historical event what a tribal god, Yahweh had done for the mythical figure of Moses: on both occasions, real and imagined, an external authority, speaking in a tongue unknown to the autochthonous people, promised their land to another people.
[1] In addressing the Peel Commission in 1937, Winston Churchill was later to dismissively liken Palestinian claims to their country as equal to those of a dog in a manger: though it might have resided there a long time, 'a higher grade of race' takes over the place.