A portrait of Lord Balfour.
“Thus says the Lord God: This is Jerusalem. I have set her in the center of the nations, with countries round-about her.” - Ezekiel 5:5
This is part seven of the FAI Publishing series Center of Nations which examines the history of the modern State of Israel in the midst of an increasingly hostile world.
Foreign Office
November 2nd, 1917
Dear Lord Rothschild,
I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet.
"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."
I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.
Yours sincerely,
Arthur James Balfour
While the all-Jewish 38th Royal Fusiliers Battalion was training with the British Army to engage the Ottomans near Beersheba in the fall of 1917, a short letter was dispatched from Lord Arthur Balfour, Foreign Secretary of the British Government, to Zionist activist and former Parliament member Baron Walter Rothschild in London. Minus the salutations, introduction and closing statement, the declaration itself is a mere 67 words. Most likely, neither its sender nor its recipient had any sense of its magnitude at the time. A century later, the letter has become both famous and infamous as the first official, public government document to endorse the Zionist aspiration of Jewish independence in the Jewish homeland. Whether its impact was merely symbolic, or substantive, or both, the letter known today as the “Balfour Declaration” was a bellwether for the future of the Zionist movement in Eretz Yisrael.
A portrait of British Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann
Support for Zionism had been gaining in British politics and high society throughout the nineteenth century. The Zionist ranks included both true adherents to the moral and ethical tenants of Zionism, as well as those who viewed the movement as a way to garner support amongst British Jews and Evangelical Christians. However, as long as the Promised Land remained within the Ottoman Empire, such support was largely symbolic and ineffectual. In early 1914, less than two percent of the Anglo-Jewish community was part of a Zionist organization, while many Jews still opposed to the struggle for a homeland in Ottoman Palestine. It was in January 1914 that Edmond de Rothschild, the preeminent Jewish banker who financed projects in the Land during the first and second aliyahs, introduced British Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann to his cousin in Britain. Baron Nathan Rothschild had a tepid opinion of the Zionist movement, but his son Walter, a former parliamentarian who had left the family banking business, was intrigued. Chaim Weizmann and Walter Rothschild forged a close friendship that became a central pillar of the British Zionist movement, and cemented Rothschild’s role in receiving Lord Balfour’s letter less than four years later.
The outbreak of the Great War in July, 1914 afforded British Zionists their first opportunity to influence the course of events. Just four days after the British Empire declared war on the Ottomans in November, 1914, the subject of Palestine’s “ultimate destiny” was broached in a cabinet meeting by David Lloyd-George, a British politician who had been involved in pro-Zionist causes for more than a decade. Lloyd-George’s mention would be the first of many in the British government over the course of the next half-century. By the end of 1914, British policy was coalescing around the complete defeat and dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. Britain’s first nominally-observant Jewish cabinet member, Herbert Samuel, met with Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann to discuss his support for the cause. In January, 1915, with the support of pro-Zionist cabinet members such as Lloyd-George, Samuel circulated a memorandum entitled The Future of Palestine in which he argued for British conquest and annexation of Eretz Yisrael in order to consolidate British control of the Suez Canal and to provide a secure homeland for the Jewish people. Although short of arguing for a sovereign Jewish state, Samuel’s memo included both grounded, practical realpolitik as well as grandiose statements of vision for Jewish settlement in the Land.
"Let a Jewish centre be established in Palestine; let it achieve, as I believe it would achieve, a spiritual and intellectual greatness; and insensibly, but inevitably, the character of the individual Jew, wherever he might be, would be ennobled. The sordid associations which have attached to the Jewish name would be sloughed off, and the value of the Jews as an element in the civilisation of the European peoples would be enhanced.”
Although inspiring, Samuel’s treatise achieved nothing at the time. However, the issue of the Land continued to resurface throughout the course of the war. Weizmann tirelessly advocated for the Jewish residents of Ottoman Palestine, just as Joseph Trumpeldor and the Zionist Mule Corps were supporting the British expeditionary force in the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign.
Portraits of Francois Picot (Left) and Sir Mark Sykes (Right).
Then in 1916, the Arab Revolt began. An Arab Hashemite Army moved north from the Arabian Peninsula to expel the Turkish Ottomans from the Middle East, acting on the British promise of a sovereign Arab state that would stretch between Syria and Yemen. But unbeknownst to Arab nationalists, delegations of the British and French governments had already met in secret several times between the Fall of 1915 and Spring, 1916. Their agenda was the partition of the post-Ottoman Middle East between themselves. The British delegation was led by Sir Mark Sykes, while François Georges-Picot led negotiations for the French Republic. Both men were seasoned veterans of the Ottoman territory, and together they divided the Middle East into British and French spheres of influence with a diagonal line through the map that came to be known as the “Sykes-Picot Line.” The secret accord included direct mandates in modern Syria and Lebanon for France, while the British would control Palestine and Iraq. The resulting document would eventually come to be known as the “Sykes-Picot Agreement,” and it had a direct influence on post-war negotiations between the Allied Powers.
Sir Mark Sykes may have been aware of Herbert Samuel’s memorandum on the future of Palestine, and he had definitely been in contact with British Zionists before his negotiations with François Georges-Picot. During the course of the talks, Sir Sykes received a telegram from the British Foreign Office which had been sent to the French and Russian ambassadors, reading,
“The scheme [of British mandate in Palestine] might be made far more attractive to the majority of Jews if it held out to them the prospect that when in course of time the Jewish colonists in Palestine grow strong enough to cope with the Arab population they may be allowed to take the management of the internal affairs of Palestine (with the exception of Jerusalem and the holy places) into their own hands.”
A map representing the French (A) and British (B) spheres of occupation in the post-Ottoman Middle East, according to the secretive Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916.
Upon returning from negotiations, Sir Sykes briefed Herbert Samuel, who in turn relayed the news of the negotiations to Weizmann and other British Zionists. The agreement was regarded favorably, on the condition that demands for Jewish immigration and autonomy in Palestine were not fettered by post-war policy. Sykes later wrote privately about the agreement that bore his name: “To my mind, the Zionists are now the key of the situation.”
A major turning point came in December, 1916, when a rough year for Britain in the war led to a change in government. The previous government, leery of Zionism, was replaced by Prime Minister David Lloyd-George and a pro-Zionist cabinet. Lloyd-George wanted a quick and decisive victory against the Ottomans in Palestine. British expeditionary forces had secured the Sinai from the Suez Canal to the edges of Gaza City, and in March,1917, the campaign to wrest control of the Promised Land from 700 years of Muslim rule began. But it did not begin well.
Two failures to secure Gaza in early 1917 ground the British campaign to a halt, and Llloyd-George’s government began searching for ways to break the stalemate. Sir Mark Sykes had been promoted to the War Cabinet with oversight of the Middle Eastern portfolio, and it was during this time that he met Chaim Weizmann and other members of the World Zionist Congress in Britain. Soon afterward, Weizmann met with Britain’s foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, about Zionist support for the British campaign in Palestine, which Weizmann described as, “the first time I had real business talk with him.” Balfour also traveled to the United States in the weeks preceeding American entrance into the war, during which time he met with American Zionist leaders. By the summer of 1917, the sympathies of British leadership and changing dynamics on the battlefield fueled the necessary groundswell of support for a public announcement. The stage was set.
Lord Arthur Balfour in Jerusalem, 1925.
In June,1917, Balfour approached Weizmann and his close friend, Walter Rothschild, to devise the formula for a statement regarding British support for a Jewish homeland in Ottoman Palestine. Several versions of the statement were drafted and passed around among Balfour, the War Cabinet, and the Zionist leaders between June and October, 1917. Considerations included Jewish support, as well as the satisfaction of French, Russian and Arab concerns. After several revisions, the final draft was submitted to the War Cabinet for approval on October 31, 1917. Balfour remarked,
“Everyone was now agreed that, from a purely diplomatic and political point of view, it was desirable that some declaration favourable to the aspirations of the Jewish nationalists should now be made. The vast majority of Jews in Russia and America, as, indeed, all over the world, now appeared to be favourable to Zionism. If we could make a declaration favourable to such an ideal, we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and America.”
The letter of declaration was formally submitted to Walter Rothschild on November 2, 1917, for delivery to the Zionist Union of England and Ireland. Published shortly afterward, it stirred a wide range of responses in the last year of the war. Zionists hailed it as a major victory and a vindication of the feasibility of their cause. Arab Muslims and Christians in Palestine rejected it outright. Arab leaders viewed it as a betrayal of promises made by the British government during the Arab Revolt, which had been largely successful, but which would not see the materialization of a unified and independent Arab state in the Middle East. European reaction was mixed. Support for the Zionist ideals in the Balfour Declaration actually diminished in Britain after the war. The challenges of administration in the British Mandate of Palestine further soured the opinions of the British public, as well as its parliamentarians.
To this day, the long-term impact of the declaration on subsequent policy is still debated by historians. Nonetheless, if nothing else, the Balfour Declaration achieved a major milestone in the Zionist movement, proving that it was possible to garner the official support of Western governments for a Jewish homeland in Eretz Yisrael, and that international policy could be directed in the wake of upheaval caused by a world war.
Gabe Caligiuri is the editor of THE WIRE, as well as an occasional contributor to other FAI digital content on the subjects of history and geopolitics as they relate to the Great Commission. Gabe and his family live in California.