Given its relationship to writing, which granted them a deep historical consciousness, the Jewish people were in a position to claim the right to a country (7.3); a matter denied to plenty of peoples, among them the Roma, that held on to their pre-modern mores and identities. Nevertheless, the situation of forced exclusion of European Jews continued to exist to a greater or lesser extent during the next four centuries, even after Napoleon tried to destroy the Italian ghettos and liberate the Jews while marching through Europe promoting the French Revolution, or that in 1917 British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour officially wrote to Lord Rothschild declaring that His Majesty’s government favored the establishment of a Jewish nation in Palestine, which by then was part of the Ottoman Empire.

In the second paragraph the Balfour declaration stated that the British government would 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.

Of course, since the “non-Jewish” communities—a huge portion of the original inhabitants of Palestine—had failed to constitute themselves as a modern nation and were, quite literally, stateless and thus, legally invisible (7.2, 7.3), a good deal of Britain’s actions towards a Jewish state went in detriment of the non-Jewish majority. The aim of establishing a Jewish state in order to avoid more abuses against the Jewish people led to an inevitably disastrous and long-lasting abuse against the Palestinians that, as time went by, became one of the most gruesome genocides in recent history.