Balfour Declaration

In a short letter dated 2 November 1917, the British foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, told Lord Rothschild, a leading figure in British Jewry, that the government supported the creation in Palestine of a "national home for the Jewish people". Issued in the middle of the First World War, when Palestine was still Ottoman territory with a large Arab majority, it was the first public endorsement of Zionism by a major power. It became the basis of British rule in Palestine and remains one of the most debated documents in the history of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Political Zionism took shape in the late nineteenth century, partly in response to antisemitism in Europe. In 1896 Theodor Herzl argued for a Jewish state, and the Zionist Organization he founded called for a legally secured Jewish home in Palestine. At that time Jews made up a small minority of Palestine's population, about 3 per cent for much of the Ottoman period and around 7 per cent by 1914, with Muslims the largest group and Christians the second.

After Britain went to war with the Ottoman Empire in November 1914, the Zionist cabinet minister Herbert Samuel urged support for Zionist aims. Britain was meanwhile making other wartime commitments: the correspondence with the Sharif of Mecca about Arab independence and the secret Sykes–Picot Agreement with France, which placed much of Palestine under international administration.

When David Lloyd George replaced H. H. Asquith as prime minister in December 1916, the government became more open to partitioning the Ottoman Empire. Formal talks between British officials, including Mark Sykes, and Zionist leaders began on 7 February 1917. In June Balfour invited Rothschild and Chaim Weizmann to submit a draft. The War Cabinet debated successive versions in September and October, hearing from both Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews but not from Palestine's Arab population, and authorised the final text on 31 October 1917.

The declaration stated that the government viewed "with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people" and would work to achieve it, provided that nothing was done to prejudice "the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine", or the rights and status of Jews elsewhere. International law offered no precedent for a "national home", and the phrase deliberately left open whether a state was meant, and no boundaries were given. The safeguarding clauses were added to meet objections from opponents of the policy.

Historians have long debated why Britain acted. Most agree that ministers hoped to win Jewish sympathy for the Allied cause, especially in the United States and Russia, and to forestall French demands for international control of Palestine. Some scholars see this as resting on an exaggerated belief in Jewish influence; others emphasise British strategic interests or the skill of Zionist diplomacy.

The text appeared in the press on 9 November 1917, weeks before British forces took Jerusalem. It greatly boosted Zionism, whose membership in the United States multiplied in the following years. Palestine's Muslim and Christian communities, almost nine-tenths of the population, strongly opposed it, and Arab leaders, including the Sharif of Mecca, saw it as contrary to promises made in exchange for the Arab Revolt. France and Italy endorsed it in 1918.

The declaration was written into the British Mandate for Palestine, and intercommunal violence broke out from 1920 onwards; a 1937 Royal Commission investigating the Arab revolt of 1936–1939 described Britain's obligations as contradictory. The declaration is widely seen as having led indirectly to the founding of Israel and as a principal cause of the enduring conflict. In 1939 the British government acknowledged that local wishes should have been considered, and in 2018 it recognised that the political rights of Palestinian Arabs should have been protected. Assessments of its legacy remain sharply divided.

Our 1914 map shows Ottoman Palestine, and the 1920 and 1930 maps show the British mandate that followed, the territory now shared between Israel and Palestine.