The Balfour Declaration’s wording framed Palestinians as a non-people

Evidence

In the Christian Orientalist mind, the Palestinian Arabs were a non-people, simply ‘non-Jewish communities’, as per the words of the Balfour Declaration and, in turn, the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 692

Categorization

• QUESTION: The phrasing ‘non-Jewish communities’ weaponized a bureaucratic euphemism into an ontological erasure — worth tracing how this specific locution entered the Mandate text.