The Balfour Declaration is treated by Edward Said not as an isolated diplomatic reference but as a point in the longer history of imperial power, competing national claims, and the writing of the past. Its anniversary became the occasion for demonstrations in Egypt on November 2, 1945; Said’s comparison of accounts of those demonstrations shows how the framing of an event can shift responsibility from political actors to an allegedly instinctive religious crowd. The declaration also belongs to a broader history in which imperial decisions and the knowledge used to interpret them affected Palestine and other societies across generations.

Historical and imperial context

Said places the Balfour Declaration within the history of imperial intrusion that, in his account, cannot be reduced to a complaint that people have failed to take responsibility for their present. Such a reduction overlooks how empire has distorted the lives of peoples described as lesser or subject populations over successive generations. He names Palestinians alongside Congolese, Algerians, and Iraqis as peoples whose lives remain entangled with that continuing history.

The declaration’s place in this longer sequence is not simply symbolic. Said links the line running from Napoleon’s entry into Egypt through the rise of Oriental studies and the takeover of North Africa to later imperial undertakings in Vietnam, Egypt, and Palestine, and to twentieth-century contests over oil and strategic control in the Gulf, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Afghanistan. He sets that imperial sequence contrapuntally against anticolonial nationalism, brief periods of liberal independence, military coups, insurgencies, civil war, and later brutality against those newly labelled natives. Each phase, he argues, generates its own distorted knowledge and reductive images of the other.

Said also presents the declaration’s issuing as connected to United States war policy, citing a study of the Palestine Papers for that connection. In this account, the declaration belongs to a political history whose consequences cannot be understood apart from the larger arrangements of imperial strategy and the struggles that followed.

The November 2, 1945 demonstrations

On November 2, 1945, Egyptian political leaders called for demonstrations marking the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. The demonstrations quickly developed into anti-Jewish riots. In the earlier account Said cites, a Catholic church, an Armenian church, and a Greek Orthodox church were attacked and damaged. The specificity matters: the account identifies three churches and distinguishes the religious communities associated with each, rather than leaving the scale or targets of the violence indistinct.

Said asks what Catholics, Armenians, and Greeks had to do with the declaration. The question draws attention to the distance between a demonstration organized around a political anniversary and attacks on communities not identified as the declaration’s authors or sponsors. The riots therefore register both the danger of violence spreading beyond its stated political occasion and the importance of retaining concrete details when recounting what happened.

Competing accounts and political meaning

Said sets the earlier account beside a version published in Commentary in 1976. The later version says that demonstrations were held, rather than specifying that political leaders called them. Said argues that this grammatical change obscures agency: the earlier account names organizers, while the later formulation makes the demonstrations seem like an expression of collective instinct. The later retelling further says that the demonstration developed into an anti-Jewish riot and then into a more general outbreak in which several Catholic, Armenian, and Greek Orthodox churches were attacked. Said contrasts that generalized description with the earlier account’s precise identification of three churches.

For Said, these shifts help make the incident serve a polemical claim: that Islam is an irrational mass phenomenon governed by unreflecting passions and hostility toward Christians and Jews. He argues that this interpretation turns a historically situated event into evidence for an unchanging religious essence. Instead of attending to who called the demonstrations, how they developed, and which churches were damaged, it recasts Muslims as a population ruled by instinct and therefore to be feared. The contrast between the two accounts becomes a case study in how retelling redistributes responsibility and converts particular events into stereotypes.

A contested history of Palestine

The declaration’s continuing significance lies, in Said’s treatment, within an unresolved struggle over Palestinian history, political rights, and representation. He describes having advocated Palestinian national self-determination for thirty-five years while also giving full attention to the persecution and genocide suffered by the Jewish people. For him, equality in Palestine and Israel should be directed toward coexistence, not further suppression or denial. He also argues that Orientalism and modern anti-Semitism have common roots, while insisting that political analysis must not collapse distinct histories into a single antagonistic formula.

Said’s broader answer is historical and humanistic: widen the field of discussion rather than confining it to inherited labels and belligerent collective identities. The declaration, the demonstrations held on its anniversary, and the competing accounts of the resulting violence show why such attention matters. The record is not only about what occurred, but also about how later narratives assign agency, define whole communities, and obscure the long imperial contexts in which political conflicts unfold.