Balfour Declaration

# The Balfour Declaration: The Promise That Changed the Middle East

A Letter That Created a Century of Conflict

On November 2, 1917 CE (17 Safar 1336 AH), the British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour wrote a brief letter to Walter Rothschild, a leader of the British Zionist Federation, that has shaped the history of the Middle East, and the lives of millions of people, more profoundly than almost any other single document of the 20th century. The letter read, in its critical passage:

"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."

Sixty-seven words that promised a land to one people while claiming to protect the rights of another — without consulting either the indigenous population or their existing Arab political representatives, and while simultaneously being bound by other, incompatible promises.

The Context: War, Zionism, and British Strategy

To understand why Britain made this declaration in 1917, one must understand the pressures of the First World War. By late 1917, Britain had suffered catastrophic losses on the Western Front. The United States had entered the war in April 1917, but American troops had not yet arrived in Europe in significant numbers. Russia was collapsing into revolution. Germany had resumed unrestricted submarine warfare that threatened Britain's supply lines.

In this context, Chaim Weizmann — a brilliant chemist and the most effective political lobbyist the Zionist movement had ever produced — had been working for several years on the British political establishment. Weizmann had developed a new process for producing acetone, essential for British munitions production, and his scientific contributions had given him direct access to senior officials including David Lloyd George (Prime Minister from 1916) and Arthur Balfour himself.

The Zionist argument to the British was strategic as well as moral: a British commitment to a Jewish homeland in Palestine would secure Jewish support for the Allied cause, particularly among the large Jewish populations of the United States and Russia. There was a fear — arguably exaggerated but real — that Jewish opinion in the US was insufficiently pro-Allied, and that Russian Jews might support a separate German-Russian peace. A British commitment to Zionism would make the case that an Allied victory served Jewish interests.

The strategic calculus also included Palestine itself. Britain had captured Jerusalem in December 1917 (General Allenby's famous entry on foot as a mark of respect). Palestine was strategically important for protecting the Suez Canal, which was the lifeline of the British Empire. A British-sponsored Jewish community in Palestine would create a reliable pro-British presence in a strategically vital region.

The Founders of Zionism

The Zionist movement had been formally launched by Theodor Herzl (1860-1904 CE) at the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1897 CE (1315 AH). Herzl, a Viennese journalist, had covered the Dreyfus Affair — the trial and conviction of French Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus on false treason charges, amid virulent public antisemitism — and concluded that Jewish people would never be accepted in European society regardless of how assimilated they became.

His book Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State, 1896) argued that the only solution was a separate Jewish state. Herzl initially considered various locations — Argentina, Uganda (a British offer in 1903) — but Palestine, the historical land of the Hebrew Bible, had religious and historical resonance that no other location could match. By the time of the First Zionist Congress, Palestine had become the overwhelming choice.

The Zionist movement grew rapidly in Eastern Europe, where Jewish communities lived under Tsarist persecution. Herzl died in 1904 before seeing his dream realized, but the movement he founded had by 1917 developed sophisticated political networks in Britain, France, and the United States.

The Palestinian Arabs: The Absent Party

The Balfour Declaration's second clause — "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine" — was a crucial concession to internal British critics of the declaration. The phrase "existing non-Jewish communities" referred to a population of approximately 600,000-700,000 people who constituted roughly 90% of Palestine's total population. They were not consulted.

The demographics of Palestine in 1917: the total population was approximately 700,000. Of these, approximately 590,000-600,000 were Arab Muslims and Christians who had lived in Palestine for centuries; approximately 85,000-100,000 were Jewish, the majority of them recent immigrants from Eastern Europe who had arrived since the 1880s. Jews owned approximately 2-3% of the land privately.

The phrase "national home" was deliberately vague. It was not the same as a "state," and Zionist leaders understood that the British cabinet could not explicitly promise a Jewish state in an Arab-majority territory. But the Zionist leadership, including Weizmann, understood "national home" as the stepping stone toward a Jewish majority state — which is precisely what occurred over the following three decades.

The Internal British Debate

The Balfour Declaration was not issued without opposition within the British government. The most notable opponent was Edwin Montagu, the Secretary of State for India and the only Jewish member of the Cabinet. Montagu argued in a memorandum titled "The Anti-Semitism of the Present Government" that the declaration would effectively communicate to the world that Jews were not truly citizens of the countries where they lived — that their true home was elsewhere. He also argued that it would inflame Muslim opinion in India and the broader Muslim world, threatening British imperial interests.

Montagu's arguments were heard but not accepted. The declaration was issued, though it went through several drafts that progressively weakened the language from the Zionist perspective — an earlier draft had called Palestine "the national home" rather than "a national home for the Jewish people," and a phrase explicitly promising a Jewish state was removed.

The Legal Question: Can Britain Give What It Does Not Own?

A crucial legal question has been raised by scholars of international law: by what right did Britain make this promise in November 1917? At the time the Declaration was issued, Britain did not control Palestine. The Ottoman forces were still fighting in the region; Jerusalem did not fall until December 1917, a month after the Declaration. Britain conquered Palestine under a League of Nations Mandate granted in 1920 — a Mandate whose text explicitly incorporated the Balfour Declaration.

The traditional answer from those who supported the declaration was that Britain, as the projected mandatory power, had the authority to determine the political framework of the territory it was about to administer. Critics argued that a mandatory power is supposed to administer territory in trust for its inhabitants — not to alter its demographic character to serve the interests of a population that did not yet live there.

The legal debate has continued ever since. The UN Partition Plan of 1947 and subsequent resolutions rest on the premise that the Palestine question is an international matter requiring international resolution. Palestinian and Arab critics have consistently argued that the foundational act — the Balfour Declaration — was illegitimate, and that the entire structure built on it is therefore invalid.

Muslim and Islamic Responses

The Muslim world's reaction to the Balfour Declaration was immediate and alarmed. The Guardian of the Holy Mosques, Sharif Hussein of Mecca, was already in the middle of the Arab Revolt with British support. When he confronted the British about the Declaration, which directly contradicted their promises to him, the British Foreign Office's response was evasive — assuring him that Arab independence would be protected and that the Declaration's scope was limited.

Muslim scholars across the world recognized the implications. Palestine contained al-Masjid al-Aqsa (the Farthest Mosque), the third holiest site in Islam, the site of the Prophet's ﷺ Night Journey described in the opening verse of Surah al-Isra' (17:1): "Glory be to the One who took His servant by night from al-Masjid al-Haram to al-Masjid al-Aqsa, whose surroundings We have blessed, so that We might show him some of Our signs."

Al-Aqsa held a unique place in Islamic consciousness — the first qibla (direction of prayer) of the Muslims, the location of the Prophet's ﷺ leading all previous prophets in prayer on the Night of the Isra', and a site whose care the Muslim community regarded as a religious obligation. The prospect of it falling under non-Muslim control — even the conditional and qualified promise of the Balfour Declaration — was experienced as an assault on the Muslim community's religious rights.

The Long Consequences

The consequences of the Balfour Declaration unfolded over decades. Jewish immigration to Palestine increased under the British Mandate — from approximately 85,000 in 1917 to over 600,000 by 1947 as Jews fleeing European persecution, and then the Nazi Holocaust, sought refuge. Arab resistance to this immigration intensified — the 1920 and 1929 riots, the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939.

The British, caught between incompatible commitments, oscillated between favoring Jewish immigration (the 1917 Balfour Declaration and early Mandate period) and restricting it (the 1939 White Paper, which sharply limited immigration precisely when European Jews most desperately needed a refuge). Both communities felt betrayed.

The Holocaust of 1939-1945 — in which six million Jews were systematically murdered by Nazi Germany — transformed the political calculus. International sympathy for a Jewish state became overwhelming in the immediate post-war period. The UN Partition Plan of 1947 and the subsequent 1948 war established the State of Israel on terms that the Arab population had not accepted.

The Palestinian Nakba — the displacement of approximately 700,000 Palestinians in 1948 — was the direct consequence of the chain of events that began with the Balfour Declaration. Today, approximately 5.9 million Palestinians registered with UNRWA as refugees represent the descendants of those displaced in 1948.

Arthur Balfour himself, in an illuminating memorandum written in 1919, stated: "In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country... Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-old traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land." This sentence, from the man who wrote the Declaration, is perhaps the most honest statement of what it actually meant.

Sources:

• Balfour, Arthur James. Letter to Lord Rothschild, November 2, 1917. British National Archives, FO 371/3083.
• Balfour, Arthur James. Memorandum to Lord Curzon, August 11, 1919. British National Archives.
• Weizmann, Chaim. Trial and Error: The Autobiography of Chaim Weizmann. Harper, 1949.
• Khalidi, Rashid. The Hundred Years' War on Palestine. Metropolitan Books, 2020.
• Segev, Tom. One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate. Metropolitan Books, 2000.
• Schneer, Jonathan. The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Random House, 2010.
• Herzl, Theodor. Der Judenstaat. Vienna, 1896.
• Montagu, Edwin. Memorandum, "The Anti-Semitism of the Present Government," August 23, 1917. British National Archives.