Balfour Declaration
Britain's 1917 promise to favor a Jewish national home in Palestine; a founding charter to Israelis and a dispossession to Palestinians.
It was a single sentence, 67 words long, in a letter dated November 2, 1917. Britain's foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, wrote to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, to convey that His Majesty's Government viewed with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. More than a century later, those 67 words still sit near the root of the world's most contested conflict, claimed by one side as a founding charter and by the other as the moment their dispossession was set in ink.
The words themselves
The declaration made two promises in a single breath, and the tension between them has never been resolved. It backed a Jewish national home, then added that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. Those existing non-Jewish communities were, in 1917, roughly 90 percent of Palestine's population: several hundred thousand Arab Muslims and Christians who lived on the land and were named in the document only by what they were not. The word national was fixed to the Jewish home; the Arab majority was promised civil and religious rights, but not political ones. Whether a national home meant a state, and whose claim would prevail if the two collided, the sentence carefully declined to say.
Why Britain wrote it
Britain's motives were a tangle, and none of them were pure charity. The war was going badly in 1917, and London hoped a gesture toward Zionism might rally Jewish opinion in the United States, newly an ally, and in a Russia sliding into revolution. There were hard imperial calculations too: a friendly presence in Palestine would guard the approaches to the Suez Canal and the route to India. And there was sincere conviction. Prime Minister David Lloyd George and Balfour himself were steeped in the Bible and were genuinely drawn to the idea of a Jewish return to the land of scripture. Idealism and empire, for once, pointed the same way.
The web of broken promises
The declaration did not stand alone. It was Britain's third overlapping promise about the same corner of the collapsing Ottoman Empire. In the McMahon-Hussein correspondence of 1915 and 1916, British officials had urged Sharif Hussein of Mecca to raise an Arab revolt against the Ottomans in exchange for support for Arab independence, in terms many Arabs understood to include Palestine. In 1916, in the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, Britain and France had quietly carved the same region between themselves. Three commitments, to the Arabs, to each other, and to the Zionists, could not all be honored. When the secret deals surfaced after the war, many Arabs felt betrayed, a grievance that has never faded.
One sentence, a century of consequences
The promise gained legal force when the League of Nations handed Britain the Mandate for Palestine, which incorporated the declaration, in 1922. Over the following decades Jewish immigration rose, Arab opposition hardened, and the two national movements the letter had set on a collision course fought their way toward the founding of Israel in 1948 and the Palestinian catastrophe, the Nakba, that Palestinians mark from the same events. Israelis remember Balfour as the first recognition of their national claim by a great power. Palestinians remember it as the day a foreign empire promised their homeland to someone else. Both are describing the same 67 words. That is why, more than a hundred years on, a short and careful letter from a British aristocrat is still argued over as though the ink were wet.