Balfour Declaration
The British foreign secretary promised a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine in a letter of sixty-seven words in November 1917. The letter was addressed to Lord Rothschild for transmission to the Zionist Federation, and its operative clause states that the government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use its best endeavours to facilitate it — with a proviso that nothing shall prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities. That proviso covered about 90 per cent of the population, described by what they were not, and mentions no political rights. Britain did not hold Palestine when the letter was written; Allenby entered Jerusalem five weeks later. The motives were several and mostly instrumental. The war cabinet believed that Jewish opinion in the United States and in revolutionary Russia could be influenced; Chaim Weizmann had spent years cultivating the relationship and was a chemist whose work on acetone production had been useful; and there was a strategic wish for a friendly presence beside the Suez Canal. Some ministers were personally sympathetic to Zionism, and at least one, Edwin Montagu, the only Jewish member of the cabinet, opposed the declaration on the grounds that it would make Jews foreigners everywhere else. Britain had also promised Arab independence in the McMahon correspondence and partitioned the same region with France at Sykes-Picot. The mandate incorporated the declaration in 1922. Arthur Koestler's line is the one usually quoted: that one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third. The document is fifty-one years old in Israeli commemorations and a foundational grievance in Palestinian ones, and Britain has never apologised for it.
- Year: 1917 CE
- Category: Political
