The Balfour Declaration
In the third year of the great war that consumed the kings of Europe, on the second day of the eleventh month of the year five thousand six hundred and seventy-eight, the foreign secretary of the British Empire,…
Biblical Narrative
In the third year of the great war that consumed the kings of Europe, on the second day of the eleventh month of the year five thousand six hundred and seventy-eight, the foreign secretary of the British Empire, Arthur James Balfour, sat in his office at Whitehall and signed his name to a letter of sixty-seven words. He addressed it to Lord Walter Rothschild, that he might transmit it to the Zionist Federation. Sixty-seven words. The shortest text by which an empire ever bound itself to give a homeland to a people who had not held one for eighteen hundred years.
And the words read thus: His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. Two clauses of promise, two clauses of safeguard, woven together like the warp and weft of a single garment.
Behind the letter stood the chemist Chaim Weizmann, who had given the British navy the acetone with which to make the cordite for their shells, and who had asked in return only the ear of Lloyd George the Prime Minister and of Balfour himself; and Nahum Sokolow, who had walked the corridors of Paris and Rome and the Vatican; and Mark Sykes, the British diplomat who had drawn the secret partition of the Ottoman East with the Frenchman Picot, and who had now lent his pen to the cause. The Zionist movement, which Theodor Herzl had begun twenty years earlier in a hotel ballroom in Basel, had reached the desk of an empire.
And in the cities of the Pale of Settlement, in Warsaw and Vilna and Kiev, Jews danced in the streets when the news came across the wires, and rabbis recited shehecheyanu, and Hebrew teachers in the gymnasia of Tel Aviv read the words aloud to their classes. In Cairo and Damascus and Jerusalem, the Arab leaders received the news in stunned silence. The same letter that had given a national home to one people had set in motion the long quarrel of two peoples over a single land. And the British, in their colonial confidence, had not yet measured the weight of the words they had so casually signed.
His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object.Letter of Arthur James Balfour to Lord Rothschild, 2 November 1917
Archaeology · History · Genetics
The Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917 — formally a letter from Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland — is the founding document of British support for Zionism and one of the most consequential 67 words in modern diplomatic history. The standard scholarly study is Jonathan Schneer's The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Random House, 2010); for the Zionist diplomatic background, Isaiah Friedman's The Question of Palestine, 1914-1918 (Schocken, 1973) remains essential.
The text was drafted through five successive cabinet versions between June and October 1917. The original Zionist draft submitted by Lord Rothschild and Weizmann (12 July 1917) called Palestine 'the National Home of the Jewish People'; the cabinet revised this to 'a national home for the Jewish people' to avoid implying exclusive sovereignty. The decisive cabinet meeting was held on 31 October 1917, where Edwin Montagu, the Jewish Secretary of State for India, opposed the declaration on the grounds that it would compromise the civic status of Jews elsewhere — leading to the inclusion of the second protective clause about Jews 'in any other country.'
British motivations were multiple. Strategically, the cabinet believed (incorrectly) that pro-Zionist sentiment would help bring American entry into the war and keep Russia in the war after the February Revolution. Geopolitically, support for a Jewish homeland was a means of justifying British control over Palestine after the war, against French claims under the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement. Ideologically, several cabinet members — Balfour himself, Lloyd George, Lord Robert Cecil — held philosemitic and millenarian convictions rooted in their Protestant upbringing. Mark Sykes acted as the principal staff officer, mediating between the cabinet and the Zionist Executive.
The Declaration was incorporated into the legal architecture of the British Mandate for Palestine, confirmed by the San Remo conference of April 1920 and ratified by the League of Nations in July 1922. It thereby acquired the status of binding international law for the Mandate period. The contradiction between the 'national home' clause and the protective clause for 'existing non-Jewish communities' would structure the entire Mandate period; Avi Shlaim, Tom Segev (One Palestine, Complete, 2000), and Rashid Khalidi (The Iron Cage, 2006) have documented the resulting strategic and humanitarian dilemmas. The original handwritten Balfour letter is preserved at the British Library; a typed Foreign Office copy is at the Israel State Archives in Jerusalem.
Sixty-seven words that bound an empire to a people, opened the door to a state, and locked the conflict between two peoples into the political grammar of the twentieth century.Jonathan Schneer, The Balfour Declaration (2010)