Balfour Declaration

On November 2, 1917, Britain's foreign secretary Arthur Balfour sends a short letter to Lord Rothschild, a leader of Britain's Jewish community, for the Zionist Federation. It states that the British government 'views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people', adding that nothing should be done to harm the 'civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities' there.¹²⁴

The Zionist movement, founded at Basel in 1897, sought a Jewish homeland in Palestine, then an Ottoman province. Chaim Weizmann and others lobbied the British government during World War I. British motives were mixed: officials hoped to win Jewish support in the United States and Russia, to gain a strategic foothold near the Suez Canal, and some leaders, such as Balfour and Lloyd George, sympathized with Zionism. British forces took Jerusalem in December 1917. About 90 percent of Palestine's people were Arab, and the Arabs had been given other wartime pledges by Britain.⁵³⁶

The League of Nations put the declaration into the Mandate for Palestine in 1922, with Britain in charge. Jewish immigration grew, especially in the 1930s as Nazi persecution drove Jews from Europe, and Arab opposition led to violence and the Arab revolt of 1936 to 1939. Britain handed the problem to the United Nations in 1947, which proposed partition, and the State of Israel was proclaimed in 1948. Palestinians and many Arabs remember the declaration as a promise of their land by a power that did not own it, and Jews and Israelis as a milestone in the return to their homeland.¹⁵