PRIME Minister Theresa May will sit down to a lavish celebratory dinner in central London next Tuesday evening. That same night, almost two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip will cook what food they have on Kerosene or bottled gas stoves or try to make do with an intermittent electricity supply. Most families in Gaza receive only two to four hours of electricity each day.

On the tables of the 150 or so VIP guests joining Mrs May at the bash there will also be bottled water. In Gaza, anyone drinking from available sources runs the risk of sickness, given that 90 per cent of the supply is too contaminated for human consumption.

This is nothing new for Palestinians in Gaza. On and off for decades they have struggled to exist like this in what is tantamount to the world’s largest open-air prison. An Israeli military and economic blockade has made sure of that, while wrangling among Palestinian groups Hamas and Fatah has compounded the suffering.

Attending the London gala evening, too, will be Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Along with the other guests he and Mrs May will celebrate the historic promise made a century ago to the day by British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour, in his letter to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, leader of the British Jewish community at the time. It was a promise that the British government would use its “best endeavours” to facilitate the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”.

Though only 67 words long, the Balfour Declaration changed the course of history and resonates across the Middle East and wider world to this day. The inescapable fact is that the declaration was a divisive and deceitful document in 1917 and remains no less so in 2017.

As the Jewish historian Avi Shlaim has said, it was a moment when Britain chose to recognise the right to national self-determination of a tiny minority of Jews and to flatly deny it to the undisputed majority of Arabs. Or, as that other Jewish writer Arthur Koestler was to sum it up, here was one nation promising another nation the land of a third nation.

Not that you would think that the declaration’s legacy was anything to be ashamed of, listening to Mrs May. While reiterating the mantra of remaining committed to a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine question, the Prime Minister insists Tuesday’s anniversary is one she will “be marking with pride”.

But what is there to be proud of? Is Mrs May seriously suggesting that a British political decision that helped set in train events that led to what Palestinians call the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe) of 1948, is something worth celebrating? Since then some five million Palestinians have found themselves living as displaced refugees, by and large in poverty across the Middle East.

When Mrs May sits down to dinner will there be a pang of conscience over the 2.5 million Palestinians who live in apartheid conditions across swathes of the West Bank and the near two million in Gaza for whom human rights and any hope for the future are alien? If Mrs May needs food for thought let her chew on the fact that, at times, some 80 per cent of Gaza’s population has depended on humanitarian aid for basic daily caloric needs.

Having spent some time in the region, I have no doubt that Israelis also have their narratives of victimhood. But I defy anyone to travel to Gaza or the West Bank and return without feeling a profound sense of outrage and injustice as to the way Palestinians are treated and have been for too long now by the state of Israel. In Gaza alone, according to the United Nations, some one million youngsters are suffering in “unlivable” conditions, many so traumatised they are unable “to sleep, study or play”. The UN estimates that more than 300,000 such children are in need of psychosocial support.

While the world’s gaze has been elsewhere of late in the Middle East, the subjugation of the Palestinians by the Israeli state has intensified. Mr Netanyahu’s government, the most right wing in Israel’s history, has worked with ultra-nationalist elements to expand and consolidate the settlement programme annexing more Palestinian land in the process.

At home, too, he is turning his political and legislative guns on Israel’s human rights organisations such as B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence, which assist Palestinians in making their case against such moves.

In this context the full Balfour Declaration is utterly contemporary, given that it held that a national Jewish home should not prejudice the rights of “existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. As Tuesday’s anniversary looms, there are those who insist that Britain should, in fact, be offering a formal apology to Palestinians.

Righting profound political wrongs of the past is never easy. Yes, some kind of recognition by Britain of the pain, dispossession and collective trauma the declaration caused for Palestinians would go some way towards helping the reconciliation process begin. But words are not enough. Substantive diplomatic action and pressure have to be brought to bear on Israel. That, by far, is the most effective compensation Britain could make for the declaration’s toxic legacy.

November is a painful month in the Palestinian calendar. It is dotted with commemorative days that have one theme in common: the partitioning of Palestine. Although the Balfour Declaration did not offer partition, it sowed the seeds for it. On Sunday Palestinians will also commemorate the UN General Assembly Resolution 181, which recommended in 1947 the partition of Palestine into two states, giving rise to the state of Israel.

As the great Israeli writer and historian Ilan Pappe has pointed out, “the seeds were sown in 1917, reaped in 1947 and poisoned the country ever since. It is time to adopt a fresh moral and political view on this history for the sake of a better future”. Mrs May would do well do ponder such words as she sits down to her celebratory dinner.