Part I

On November 2,1917, British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur James Balfour sent a letter to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, which read:

His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavours 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.

The government addressed the declaration to Rothschild, who held no official position in the English Zionist Federation or in the World Zionist Organization, rather than to the leading Zionist Jewish leaders in Britain, because he had the most “potent name In Jewry,” according to Leonard Stein, a prominent member of the Jewish community.

Response by Lord Rothschild

In his response, Lord Rothschild thanked Lord Balfour on November 4: “I can assure you that the gratitude of ten millions of people will be yours, for the British government has opened up, by their message, a prospect of safety and comfort to large masses of people who are in need of it.” He added, “I dare say that you have been informed that already in many parts of Russia renewed persecution has broken out.”

Long-Term Implications of The Balfour Declaration

This “brief and famous letter,” observed Christopher Sykes, Conservative Member of the British Parliament, “occupying only a hundred and seventeen words, was to complicate British policy in the East from that time to our own, and for many years to come.” The Balfour Declaration, he said, “has been both acclaimed as an act of magnanimity such as rare in the history of Governments, and deplored as the most heinous blunder in the long record of the British Eastern connection.”

English historian Elizabeth Monroe agreed with the negative assessment when she said that though the declaration “created a mere ripple of public interest, that contrasts strangely with the flow of ill-consequences that it generated for Britain. … It brought the British much ill-will, and complications that sapped their power. Measured by British interests alone, it was one of the greatest mistakes in our imperial history.”

Writing in 1946 George Antonius, a Lebanese author and diplomat who lived in Jerusalem, observed: “In those parts of the Arab world which were in direct touch with the Allies, the Balfour Declaration created bewilderment and dismay. … It was taken to imply a denial of Arab political freedom in Palestine.”

Alfred Rosenberg, Nazi theorist and ideologue, claimed, “In Palestine, the Jews were using the old method of exploiting and driving out by legal means the real population which has lived here for thousands of years.”

Adolph Hitler mirrored Rosenberg’s view of Zionism, observed historian Robert Wistrich, when Hitler declared, “For while the Zionists try to make the rest of the world believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian [Jewish] state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim [Gentiles]. It doesn’t even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organization for their international world swindle, endowed with sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states.”

No Illusions

Few people had any illusions about what the Balfour Declaration meant in terms of the need to translate these words into political reality. On January 30, 1921, Chaim Weizmann said, “A state cannot be created by decree but by the forces of a people and in the course of generations. Even if all the governments of the world gave us a country it would only be a gift of words. But if the Jewish people will go and build Palestine, the Jewish State will become a reality—a fact.”

Arthur Ruppin, director of the Palestine Office of the Zionist Organization in Jaffa, where he organized Zionist immigration to Palestine, feared the Jews were relying too much on the Balfour Declaration: “The declaration will not be worth the paper it is written on if we do not infuse it with life and strength by practical accomplishments in Palestine.”

Approximately a year after the Balfour Declaration, David Ben-Gurion declared, “All Jews who express in an organized manner their desire for a Jewish homeland in Erez Israel, are the real founders and makers of the future.”

He was quick to add a caveat: “With the international endorsement of the right of the Jewish people to its land, and with the recognition of the political authority of the Zionist Organization to realize that right, the Zionist Organization does not become the ruler of the country.

“Palestine is not an unpopulated country. Within the territory that may be regarded—historically, politically, ethnographically and economically—as Erez Israel, and which covers 55,000-60,000 square kilometers on both sides of the River Jordan, there is a population of slightly over one million. … By no means and under no circumstances are the rights of these inhabitants to be infringed upon—it is neither desirable nor conceivable that the present inhabitants be ousted from the land. That is not the mission of Zionism.

“The true aim and real capacity of Zionism are not to conquer what has been conquered, but to settle in those places where the inhabitants of the land have not established themselves and are unable to do so. The preponderant part of the country’s land is unoccupied and uncultivated.”

The Significance and Underlying Concept of the Balfour Declaration

The declaration “was never intended to determine the fate and the future of Palestine,” Nathan Feinberg, a Hebrew University law professor, points out. All that it provided, he said, was that “His Majesty’s Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use its best endeavors to facilitate this object. … There was nothing at all wrong in giving such a promise. It was no more an infringement of international law than giving promises to Arabs and other nations during the War. The Balfour Declaration became a binding and unchallengeable international obligation from the moment it was embodied in the Palestine Mandate…”

The underlying concept of the declaration, adds Douglas J. Feith, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, is that Palestine would be where the Jewish people could exercise their own autonomy. The Arabs, who at that point did not have any of their own independent states, would be provided with vast areas that the British and their Allies were liberating from the Ottoman Empire in Syria, Lebanon, Mesopotamia and Arabia, where they could exercise their own self-rule.

This clarifies the “distinction reflected in the Declaration, between civil and religious rights on the one hand and political rights on the other, Douglas said. “While protecting everyone’s civil and religious rights, the Declaration made no reference to any collective political rights for Palestine’s non-Jewish communities.

“As to the meaning of the words ‘national home,’ to which the Zionists attach so much importance, [Balfour] understood it to mean some form of British, American, or other protectorate, under which full facilities would be given to the Jews to work out their own salvation and to build up, by means of education, agriculture, and industry, a real centre of national culture and focus of national life. It did not necessarily involve the early establishment of an independent Jewish State, which was a matter for gradual development in accordance with the ordinary laws of political evolution.”

Dr. Alex Grobman, a Hebrew University-trained historian, is senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society and a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.