On November 2, 1917—a hundred years ago this week—the British government sent a letter to Lord Walter Rothschild, declaring its “sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations” and promising Britain’s support in “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”
The letter, popularly named for its signatory, foreign secretary Arthur Balfour, is one of a quartet of controversial communications from that lost age when people wrote sentences on paper instead of abbreviations by text. The others are the Zimmermann Telegram of January 1917, the German offer of a military alliance with Mexico, which accelerated America’s entry into World War One; the Zinoviev Letter of 1924, which suggested Russian meddling in Britain’s general election; and the Anglo-German “understanding” of 1938, which Neville Chamberlain made the mistake of waving upon his return from Munich.
The Zimmermann Telegram was real. The Zinoviev Letter was a fake, probably contrived by White Russian exiles. The Munich “understanding” was a fiction: Hitler deliberately lied to Chamberlain, and Chamberlain credulously repeated the lie to the British public. The Balfour Declaration was an imperial gambit dressed as a friendly gesture, a propaganda ploy based on a false premise and a hypothesis about the future map of the Middle East. But it came true.
By November 1917, the British and French armies in Flanders were exhausted by three years of trench warfare. The summer offensive at Ypres had run into the mud, with a butcher’s bill greater than that of the Somme offensive of 1916. And the Bolshevik Revolution that autumn made clear that Britain and France could no longer rely on their eastern ally, czarist Russia.
The British government believed that the declaration would encourage American Jews to support an expanded American role in the European war, swing German Jews against Germany, and secure the support of the Jews among the Russian revolutionaries. So, for that matter, did Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist negotiator who later became Israel’s first president. All of these assumptions were baseless; many of them rested on fantasies about Jewish power that blurred philo-Semitism with anti-Semitism. As a Christian, Balfour had no doubt about the Jewish claim to a national home. As a Conservative politician, however, he had inveighed against Jewish immigration into Britain and supported the Aliens Act of 1905, which was designed to keep Jews out.
Meanwhile, two days before Balfour put pen to paper, Australian troops had attacked the Ottoman forces in Gaza. The British and French had made promises to all and any potential allies in the war against the Ottoman Empire. The Balfour Declaration was just one more sweet nothing. The idea of a “national home” was legally vague; the need to buffer the Suez Canal strategically obvious.
Ideas and events have a power of their own. By the end of 1917, the British were in Jerusalem. The American Expeditionary Forces were on their way to Europe, the Russians were on their way out of the war, and the Germans had made a Balfour-type declaration of their own. The number of American Jews who belonged to Zionist organizations rose from 7,500 in 1913 to 149,000 in 1919. After World War I, Balfour’s note became a cornerstone of international law. The newly created League of Nations entrusted the “Palestine Mandate” to Britain. After World War II, the league’s heir, the United Nations, mandated Palestine’s partition into Jewish and Arab states. The Zionists, as much despite as because of British patronage, created the state of Israel. The official residence of the Israeli prime minister is on Balfour Street, Jerusalem.
You can imagine how the Balfour centenary is going in Britain. The Christian Zionists, as ever more assertive than the Jewish ones, have booked the Albert Hall for their party. But the official public celebration, a dinner for Theresa May, Benjamin Netanyahu, and 150 admirers of the Zionist Entity, is semiofficial and secretive, hosted not by Balfour’s successors in the Foreign Office, but by the current Lords Balfour and Rothschild, and to be held in an undisclosed location.
The Balfour Declaration’s offer of political rights to the Jews was premised upon “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” In 1917, Jews constituted only 10 percent of the population west of the River Jordan. The territories that would become the Palestine Mandate were divided into three Ottoman vilayets, and the identity and economy of the “non-Jewish communities” were directed more towards Damascus than Jerusalem. The people who became Palestinians and Jordanians had no political identity and no national history.
By inviting the Jews to reconstitute their polity in modern form, the British forced the “non-Jewish communities” along the same path. But the Zionists were already steps ahead. The Jews were a people with a national identity, already settling the land, already organized diplomatically, and already acting like a nation. The Arabs entered the game late. By the time they realized they were Palestinians, not inhabitants of Greater Syria or members of this clan or that, it was too late. They have compounded their initial disadvantage by a belligerence and violence which is now lodged at the heart of their political identity.
“We are proud of our role in creating the State of Israel,” reads the official statement from the Foreign Office. “Establishing a homeland for the Jewish people in the land to which they had such strong historical and religious ties was the right and moral thing to do.”
Britain may have lost its empire, but its representatives have not lost the art of speaking out of both sides of their mouths. A “homeland” is no more of a state than a “national home.” Unofficially and anonymously, a “well-placed politician” told the Guardian of the need to find “a line” between “bells and whistles to support Israel” and “sackcloth and ashes . . . for those who would recover Palestine.” Alistair Burt, the minister for the Middle East, has spoken of “pride and sadness.”
For those who prefer shouting, the Balfour Apology Campaign has raised a digital mob to demand that Britain make amends for its “colonial crimes.” The Balfour Project, founded by two underemployed groups, Anglican clergymen and academics, demands the same, but more politely. Sir Vincent Fean, the ex-consul at the non-embassy in East Jerusalem and now a prominent Balfour Projector, has revealed its real purpose—not an apology, but a promise to recognize a Palestinian state at the U.N., presumably regardless of whether Hamas is leading it or not.
Meanwhile, the Stop the War coalition, a “red-green” alliance between the hard left and Islamism whose rallies have been graced by Labour’s leader Jeremy Corbyn, will march to Hyde Park under the slogan “Justice Now: Make It Right for Palestine.” The march’s organizers include the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which seeks to undo the State of Israel by boycott, divestment, and sanctions (better known as BDS); the Muslim Association of Britain, a local front of the Muslim Brotherhood; and the Friends of Al-Aqsa, at whose previous events Hamas and Hezbollah have been publicly celebrated. Speakers include Palestinian activists, trade unionists, geriatric New Leftists, Labour MPs, and a senator from Sinn Fein.
Israel is the only postcolonial state to have developed into a liberal democracy with the same living standards as its erstwhile colonial power. The Balfour Declaration is one of the roots of that success. It is also one of the roots of the Palestinians’ defeat. But it is not the only root of the success and the defeat. In the last century, the Jews and the “non-Jewish communities” have taken charge of their fates, for good and bad.
Britain’s diplomats and politicians can talk of “finding a line,” but actions, as the Zionists demonstrated after the Balfour Declaration, speak louder than words. Queen Elizabeth II has made state visits to 11 Arab states, none of them democracies and most of them despotisms. She has yet to visit Israel, apparently because the Foreign Office advises against it. The centenary of the Balfour Declaration would have been the perfect time. But the Foreign Office, though it exploited the opportunities of 1917, has missed its opportunity to take an opportunity in 2017.
Dominic Green, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, is a frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
