Balfour Declaration

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Balfour Declaration is a single sentence of just 67 words, and it helped reshape the modern Middle East. It travelled inside a short letter dated the 2nd of November 1917. Arthur Balfour, Britain's foreign secretary, wrote the letter to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community. Rothschild was asked to pass it on to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. One week later, the text appeared in the press. It announced British support for a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. At that time Palestine was an Ottoman region where Jews were a small minority. Why would a government in the middle of a world war make such a promise? What did the phrase "national home" actually mean, and why was it left so vague? Who drafted the sentence, and who was never asked about it? And what became of the other promises Britain had already made about the same land?

  83997571

• 2. Strategic Calculations

  ›

  Lord Palmerston was already backing a larger Jewish presence in Palestine in the early 1840s. The motive was geopolitics. France had grown into the protector of Catholic communities in the region, and Russia had become the protector of the Eastern Orthodox. Britain had no such clients, so it looked for protégés of its own. Evangelical Christians such as Lord Shaftesbury added sympathy for the idea of restoring the Jews to Palestine. The Foreign Office went so far as to encourage emigration, and Charles Henry Churchill urged Moses Montefiore to act in 1841-1842. Those efforts failed. Only 24,000 Jews lived in Palestine when Zionism emerged in the last two decades of the 19th century.

  The First World War revived the old logic. Britain declared war on the Ottoman Empire in November 1914, and the Cabinet first discussed Palestine on the 9th of November. David Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, spoke of the "ultimate destiny of Palestine". Within two months, Herbert Samuel, a Zionist member of the Cabinet, circulated a memorandum called The Future of Palestine. It suggested annexing the country to the British Empire, and it is the earliest official record to propose winning Jewish support as a war measure. In April 1915, Prime Minister H. H. Asquith set up a committee to settle British policy on the Ottoman Empire. Asquith favoured reforming the empire after the war.

  His resignation in December 1916 changed the direction of policy. Lloyd George became prime minister and Balfour became foreign secretary, and both preferred partition. Two days into the job, Lloyd George told General Robertson he wanted a major victory, preferably the capture of Jerusalem, to impress the British public. British forces took El Arish in December 1916 and Rafah in January 1917. Two failed attempts on Gaza between the 26th of March and the 19th of April then froze the front for six months.

  There was also a darker current in the thinking of officials. The historian Jonathan Schneer argues that stereotypes about Jews shaped the decision. Robert Cecil, Hugh O'Beirne and Sir Mark Sykes all held an unrealistic picture of "world Jewry". Cecil wrote: "I do not think it is possible to exaggerate the international power of the Jews." James Renton says Lloyd George and Balfour shared the belief that Jews held real power that Britain could use. Zionist representatives saw the advantage of encouraging that belief.

  12987550

• 3. The Zionist Road To London

  ›

  In 1896, a Jewish journalist in Austria-Hungary named Theodor Herzl published Der Judenstaat. He argued that the only answer to the "Jewish Question" in Europe was a state for the Jews. A year later he founded the Zionist Organization, whose first congress called for "a home for the Jewish people in Palestine secured under public law". Zionism had grown out of a split in the Jewish world between those who saw Judaism as a religion and those who saw it as a nationality. The anti-Jewish pogroms of 1881-1884 in the Russian Empire strengthened the second view. They produced the Hovevei Zion groups and a first wave of immigration to Palestine, later called the First Aliyah. Herzl died in 1904-44 years before the State of Israel he had proposed came into being.

  Chaim Weizmann moved from Switzerland to the United Kingdom that same year and soon met Arthur Balfour. Balfour had only recently pushed the Aliens Act through Parliament with speeches about limiting Jewish immigration from Russia. He asked why Weizmann's movement had rejected the 1903 Uganda Scheme, which offered part of British East Africa as a Jewish homeland. Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, had proposed it to Herzl. Weizmann replied that the English are to London as the Jews are to Jerusalem.

  The movement's strength in Britain was thin. Before the declaration, about 8,000 of Britain's 300,000 Jews belonged to a Zionist organisation. Worldwide, the share in 1913 was roughly 1%. Weizmann built influence through connections. In January 1914 he met Baron Edmond de Rothschild in Paris about a Hebrew university in Jerusalem. After war began, the baron's son James asked to meet Weizmann on the 25th of November 1914. Through James's wife Dorothy, Weizmann reached Rózsika Rothschild, who introduced him to the English branch of the family. Nathan Rothschild, its head, had been guarded about Zionism, but he died in March 1915. His title passed to his son Walter, the zoologist and former MP who would later receive Balfour's letter.

  9954856335

• 4. Rival Promises

  ›

  In late 1915, Henry McMahon, Britain's High Commissioner in Egypt, exchanged ten letters with Hussein bin Ali, the Sharif of Mecca. McMahon promised to recognise Arab independence "in the limits and boundaries proposed by the Sherif of Mecca", in return for a revolt against the Ottomans. The pledge excluded "portions of Syria" west of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo. Palestine was not named, and for decades afterwards people fought over whether the exclusion covered it. The Arab Revolt began on the 5th of June 1916.

  Less than three weeks before that, Britain, France and Russia had secretly agreed the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Sir Mark Sykes, a British MP, and the French diplomat François Georges-Picot had negotiated it. Balfour later called it a "wholly new method" of dividing the region, after the earlier arrangement "seems to have been forgotten". For Palestine, the agreement proposed internationalisation, with the final form of administration to follow consultation with Russia and Hussein.

  Zionist hopes were already being discussed. On the 3rd of March 1916, Lucien Wolf of the Foreign Conjoint Committee sent the Foreign Office a draft assurance for Jewish aspirations. Sykes briefed Herbert Samuel on a plan for a British and French condominium, and Samuel passed it to Weizmann and others. Moses Gaster wrote in his diary on the 16th of April 1916 that it came close to "a complete realisation of our Zionist programme". Sykes himself wrote privately that month that "the Zionists are now the key of the situation". France and Russia were unenthusiastic, and on the 4th of July Wolf was told the moment was "inopportune".

  Historians still read these wartime papers side by side. Albert Hourani, founder of the Middle East Centre at St Antony's College, Oxford, said the argument can never end because the documents "were intended to bear more than one interpretation". The secret was blown open when the Bolshevik papers Izvestia and Pravda published Sykes-Picot on the 23rd of November 1917. The Manchester Guardian followed three days later. In one summary, the British were embarrassed, the Arabs dismayed and the Turks delighted.

  3094508875

• 5. Drafting The Sentence

  ›

  On the 7th of February 1917, Sir Mark Sykes sat down with the Zionist leadership. He claimed to be acting privately. His notes, as recorded by Nahum Sokolow, show him suggesting that the Arabs "could be managed, particularly if they received Jewish support in other matters". By then Sykes saw Zionism as a way to support Britain's claim to Palestine in arguments with France.

  That spring, Sokolow went abroad to line up the other Allies. He was received by Pope Benedict XV on the 6th of May 1917, and his notes record general sympathy. In Italy he met the foreign minister Sidney Sonnino. In Paris he secured a letter dated the 4th of June from Jules Cambon of the French foreign ministry, which was kept at the British Foreign Office. Meanwhile, Balfour spent a month in the United States and discussed Zionism at length with Louis Brandeis, a leading Zionist and a close ally of President Woodrow Wilson.

  On the 19th of June, Balfour asked Lord Rothschild and Weizmann to submit a formula for a declaration. The Zionist team produced a 143-word draft, which Sykes, Ronald Graham and Rothschild thought too specific. The Foreign Office wrote something very different, which Harold Nicolson later described as offering a "sanctuary for Jewish victims of persecution". The Zionists rejected it, and no copy survives in the archives. Weizmann had already told his drafters that the text must be "a Zionist declaration" and must not mention the suzerain power, to avoid trouble with France. A much shorter draft of just 46 words went from Rothschild to Balfour in July.

  Two later hands did the heaviest editing. In late August, Lord Milner changed the wording to "in Palestine", so that the whole country was no longer the national home. In early October, Milner and Leo Amery added the two safeguard clauses. Scholars still argue about the true author. Carroll Quigley pointed to Milner, William Rubinstein to Amery, and a report by Ormsby-Gore claimed credit for himself and Amery.

  The War Cabinet debated the matter at four meetings over two months. President Wilson was asked twice. On the 3rd of September he said the time was not ripe, and on the 6th of October he agreed to a release. Balfour told ministers that backing Zionism would win "earnestness and enthusiasm" for the Allies, and that the German government was courting the movement too. At the final meeting he argued that a declaration would permit "extremely useful propaganda" in Russia and America. Approval came on the 31st of October, the very day the Battle of Beersheba broke the deadlock in southern Palestine.

  9754579983

• 6. Home Or State

  ›

  The phrase "national home" had no precedent in international law, and that was the point. Ministers who expected a Jewish state eventually, and ministers who did not, could both live with it. The Palestine Royal Commission later called the wording the product of a compromise between those two camps. Curzon, in a memorandum of the 26th of October 1917, noted that opinions on its meaning ranged from a fully fledged state to a merely spiritual centre.

  The press did not wait for clarification. American papers used "Jewish National Home", "Jewish State" and "Jewish Commonwealth" as if they meant the same thing. On the 2nd of December 1917, Robert Cecil told a Zionist gathering that "Judaea for the Jews" was the aim. Churchill, speaking a few months after the second anniversary of the declaration, imagined a Jewish State by the Jordan holding three or four million Jews. General Jan Smuts predicted that a "great Jewish state would ultimately rise".

  Private statements were more cautious. In January 1919, Balfour wrote that a claim for Jewish government of Palestine was "clearly inadmissible". Yet on the 21st of July 1921, Lloyd George and Balfour told Weizmann, according to his minutes, that they had always meant an eventual Jewish State. Lloyd George said in 1937 that this would happen if Jews became a definite majority. At the Imperial Cabinet on the 22nd of June 1921, Churchill told the Canadian prime minister Arthur Meighen that a majority could "take it over", with an equal pledge not to push the Arab off the land.

  The two prepositions mattered as well. Rothschild's draft said Palestine should be "reconstituted" as the national home. Milner's change to "in Palestine" spared Britain from committing the whole territory. Revisionist Zionists later claimed all of Mandatory Palestine and Transjordan regardless. Churchill's 1922 White Paper confirmed that the declaration did not mean converting Palestine as a whole. The text gave no boundaries for Palestine at all.

  Other voices tried to settle the question by agreement. On the 3rd of January 1919, Emir Faisal and Weizmann signed an agreement on Arab-Jewish cooperation, drafted by T. E. Lawrence. It was never implemented. Later, a letter in Lawrence's English carrying Faisal's signature spoke warmly of the Jews. When it surfaced in 1929, Faisal reportedly had no recollection of writing it. A March interview in Le Matin quoted him warning of "very serious dangers" if Jews claimed sovereign rights.

  8392808814

• 7. The Safeguard Clauses

  ›

  Ronald Storrs, Britain's military governor of Jerusalem from 1917 to 1920, complained that the Arabs were "lumped together under the negative and humiliating definition of 'Non-Jewish Communities'". They made up around 90% of Palestine's population. The first safeguard clause, written by Leo Amery with Lord Milner, promised to protect their civil and religious rights. The intent was to meet objectors, both Jewish and pro-Arab, "without impairing the substance of the proposed declaration". It said nothing about political rights, though the second clause did protect the political status of Jews in other countries.

  Balfour was blunt about the omission. In February 1919 he said that in Palestine Britain "deliberately and rightly" declined to accept self-determination for the local population, though he thought Jews received it. Avi Shlaim calls this the declaration's greatest contradiction. Wilson's Fourteen Points in January 1918 and the League of Nations Covenant in June 1919 had championed the principle elsewhere. In an August 1919 memo, Balfour admitted the inconsistency and said Britain had no intention of consulting the existing population. The American King-Crane Commission did ask, but Britain withdrew from it, and its findings were suppressed until a leak in 1922.

  Later British governments conceded the gap. A 1939 committee led by the Lord Chancellor, Frederic Maugham, concluded that Britain had not been free to dispose of Palestine without regard for its inhabitants. In April 2017, Baroness Anelay said the declaration should have called for protecting the political rights of non-Jewish communities, "particularly their right to self-determination".

  The second clause grew from opposition inside the Jewish community. On the 24th of May 1917, The Times printed a letter from David Lindo Alexander and Claude Montefiore, presidents of two Jewish bodies. They warned that a Jewish nationality in Palestine would stamp the Jews "as strangers in their native lands". In late August, Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India and the only Jewish member of the Cabinet, wrote that the policy was "anti-Semitic in result". Lord Rothschild himself objected to the proviso, insisting there was no danger to non-Zionists.

  12579792

• 8. Celebration And Protest

  ›

  Leaflets carrying the news were airdropped over Jewish communities in Germany and Austria, and over the Pale of Settlement, which had passed to the Central Powers after Russia withdrew. Weizmann had predicted three effects: Russia would keep pressure on Germany, American Jews would push for more war funding, and German Jewish loyalty to Kaiser Wilhelm II would weaken. The declaration was the first public support for Zionism from a major political power, and it galvanized the movement. American Zionism grew from 200 societies with 7,500 members in 1914 to 600 societies with 30,000 members in 1918. By 1919 the total was 149,000.

  Exactly one month after the letter, a large celebration was held at the Royal Opera House, with speeches by Zionists, Sykes and Cecil. Jews in Mandatory Palestine marked Balfour Day on the 2nd of November each year from 1918 until the Second World War. In August 1919, Balfour approved Weizmann's request to name the first post-war settlement Balfouria. The British military administration gave way in 1920. On the 24th of April, Lloyd George asked Herbert Samuel, the author of the 1915 memorandum, to become first civil governor. At the Hurva Synagogue in Jerusalem, Samuel read the haftarah from Isaiah 40, and older settlers felt that ancient prophecy might be near fulfilment.

  The Christians and Muslims who made up almost 90% of Palestine's people saw it differently. Edward Said later described the declaration as a promise by a European power, about a non-European territory, ignoring its native majority, and given to another foreign group. The King-Crane Commission reported in 1919 that no British officer it consulted believed the Zionist programme could be carried out except by force of arms.

  On the 3rd of November 1918, a Muslim-Christian Association delegation led by Musa al-Husayni handed Storrs a petition signed by more than 100 notables. It protested the previous day's Zionist Commission parade, with crowds carrying banners through the streets. The petition insisted that Arabs had always sympathised with persecuted Jews, but there was a wide difference between sympathy and accepting a nation "ruling over us". It also objected to the new white and blue banners with two inverted triangles. Whether the conflict would have arisen without the declaration, historians cannot say.

  8488898329