The Legacy of the Balfour Declaration 106 Years Later

Introduction

It was 106 years ago today that Great Britain issued its infamous “Balfour Declaration”, which took the form of a private letter from Lord Arthur James Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, a prominent Jewish banker and representative of the Zionist Organization.

While this document is frequently mentioned in media reports referencing the period of the so-called Palestine Mandate, its true significance is never explained because Western media in essence parrot the Zionist propaganda version of history, which is because Western governments, and most prominently Great Britain and the United States, determined from the outset to support the Zionist project to reconstitute Arab Palestine into a “Jewish state”.

The true significance of the Balfour Declaration is that it set Britain on a policy course that ultimately facilitated the ethnic cleansing of most of the Arab population from their homes in Palestine.

Instructively, this is a legacy that the British government remains proud of today. This prejudicial attitude toward the Palestinians among Western governments helps to explain why Western media propagate ahistorical Zionist narratives about the conflict’s origins and hence also about the reasons for the conflict’s persistence.

The Drafting of the Balfour Declaration

In July 1917, during the First World War, Lord Balfour asked Lord Rothschild to draft a letter expressing what the Zionists would like from the British government with respect to their desire to remake the territory of Palestine—which was then under the rule of Germany’s ally the Ottoman Empire—into a “Jewish state”.

Consequently, Rothschild himself wrote the first draft of the document, in which draft the Zionists asked for the British government to support the idea “that Palestine should be reconstituted as the national home of the Jewish people.”

While using a diplomatic euphemism for “Jewish state”, that wording was still problematic for the British government, however, because Palestine was already inhabited. Jews at the time were a minority in Palestine, representing a little more than a tenth of the population, with a majority population of about 700,000 Arabs. About four-fifths of Palestine’s inhabitants were Muslims, and about one-tenth were Christians.

The Zionists’ own solution to this demographic problem, in the privately written words of Theodor Herzl, the father of modern political Zionism and author of the 1896 booklet The Jewish State, “We shall have to spirit the penniless population across the border, by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country.”

The problem for the British was that it also needed to maintain support for its war effort from the Arabs. To that end, Britain had already promised to support the Arabs in their desire for independence from Turkish rule.

Therefore, after going through several revisions in back-and-forth drafts between Rothschild and Balfour, the final wording of the “Balfour Declaration” was that the British government favored “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” (emphasis added), but without prejudice for “the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”.

That wording was intended to placate the Arabs despite the British government recognizing perfectly well that the aim of the Zionist Organization was to subject the Arab population to the rule of a Jewish majority, which aim would ultimately require the expulsion of most Arabs from their homes.

Britain’s Belligerent Occupation of Palestine

When the British army invaded Palestine in the autumn of 1917, they were joined by Arab forces. A subsequent British document known as the Peel Commission Report of 1937 acknowledged that Arab support “was unquestionably a factor in the success of the campaign which culminated in the capture of Jerusalem on the 9th December, 1917, and in the final expulsion of the Turkish forces from Palestine in the following autumn.”

But Britain had no intention of keeping its promise to the Arab inhabitants of Palestine to support their independence. Instead, after the war, Britain maintained a belligerent occupation of Palestine for the specific purpose of preventing its inhabitants from being able to exercise their right to self-determination.

The political cover lent to this belligerent occupation came in the form of the League of Nations’ “Palestine Mandate”, which was drafted specifically to advance the agenda of the Zionist project to “reconstitute” the territory into a demographically “Jewish state”.

While the Covenant of the League of Nations expressly stated that the aim of its Mandate system was to assist the inhabitants of the territories that fell under the control of Western countries in exercising self-determination, when it came to Palestine, the League betrayed its own founding principles by lending its support for the Zionist project aimed at reconstituting Palestine into a “Jewish state” by dispossessing the Arabs of their land.

The UN would later follow the League of Nations’ example by betraying its own founding principles and acting with extraordinary prejudice against the rights of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine.

Anti-Zionism Is Not Anti-Semitism

Apologists for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians, including its war crimes in the Gaza Strip, argue that the root cause of the conflict is inherent Arab hatred of Jews.

However, that claim is just another aspect of the ahistorical Zionist propaganda narrative. The truth is that Palestine served as a refuge for Jews relative to the rampant anti-Semitism in Europe, as acknowledged by the British government itself.

In 1920, 1921, and 1929, major outbreaks of violence occurred in Palestine in which Jews were murdered during Arab riots. The British government conducted inquiries into the causes of the violence and determined that it was not due to any kind of inherent Arab hatred of Jews but due to the increasing recognition among the Arab Palestinians that the Zionists aimed to subject and ultimately expel them from their land.

Indeed, as Britain’s commissions of inquiry pointed out, Arabs and Jews in Palestine had amicable relations prior to the Zionist movement. Arabs readily acknowledged how they benefited from pre-Mandate Jewish immigration and the accompanying influx of wealth, which resulted in employment opportunities for Arab laborers, among other economic benefits.

The Zionist Organization’s policy, by contrast, was to exploit feudalistic Ottoman land laws to deprive Arabs of their homesteaded lands by purchasing it from absentee landlords, in many cases expelling the Arab inhabitants from their villages, and then denying Arabs employment in its Jewish settlements.

This was the cause of increasing Arab hostility toward Jews. The British observed, for example, the contrast between colonies of the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association (PICA) and the colonies of the Zionist Organization. In the PICA colonies, Jews had friendly relations with their Arab neighbors, who benefited from employment by Jewish business owners, whereas the situation was entirely different in the Zionist colonies.

As this went on, the Arabs became increasingly aware of the Zionists’ intention to dispossess them of their land and deny them their own right to self-determination, which was the explanation for the Arab riots occurring during the Mandate period.

The Myth of the UN Creation of Israel

Following the Second World War, with the dissolution of the League of Nations, responsibility for the Mandate system was transferred to the newly established organization of the United Nations (UN).

The British government, seeking to extricate itself from the conflict it had created with its policy of denying self-determination to the Palestinians, requested that “the question of Palestine” be brought before the UN. To that end, the General Assembly established the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), which put forth a majority recommendation that Palestine be partitioned into separate Arab and Jewish states.

At the time, Jews remained a minority and owned less than 7 percent of the land in Palestine. Arabs owned more land in every single district in Palestine, including Jaffa, which included the main Jewish population center of Tel Aviv.

The partition plan nevertheless called for the Arab state to be comprised of just 45 percent while the Zionists would get about 55 percent for their Jewish state. Moreover, even within the area of the proposed Jewish state, Arabs owned more land, and when not excluding the Bedouin population, Arabs were still a majority.

The UNSCOP report readily acknowledged that inequity of the partition plan and that it constituted a rejection of Palestinians’ right to self-determination. The “principle of self-determination”, the report explained, although expressly recognized as an inherent right of all peoples under the UN Charter, “was not applied to Palestine, obviously because of the intention to make possible the creation of the Jewish National Home there.”

On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly proceeded to adopt Resolution 181, which endorsed the partition plan and recommended that it be considered by the Security Council, whose resolutions are legally binding on UN member states. It did go to the Security Council, where it died because, as the US representative Warren Austin rightfully pointed out, the UN had no authority to partition Palestine against the will of most of its inhabitants.

Encouraged by the General Assembly’s endorsement of the partition plan, ethnic cleansing operations by Zionist forces got underway. By the expiration of the Mandate on May 14, 1948, a quarter million Arabs had already been expelled from their homes.

The same day the Mandate expired, the Zionist leadership unilaterally declared the existence of the “Jewish state” of Israel, citing Resolution 181 for legal authority. Contrary to the popular myth that the UN created Israel, Resolution 181 neither partitioned Palestine nor conferred any legal authority to the Zionist leadership for their unilateral declaration.

Neighboring Arab states then intervened militarily in Palestine in a mostly failed effort to stop the ethnic cleansing. By the time armistice agreements were reached, most Palestinians were confined to an area comprising just 22 percent of historic Palestine: the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Apologists for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians like to try to deny that ethnic cleansing occurred by pointing out that 20 percent of Israel’s population today are Arab citizens of Israel. But it is precisely because ethnic cleansing occurred that only 20 percent of Israeli citizens are Arab. Over 400 Arab villages were literally wiped off the map in order for the demographically “Jewish state” to come into existence.

As then Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan acknowledged in a 1969 interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “There is not one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.”

One of the requirements of statehood under international law is legally recognized borders, which Israel did not then have and to this day still does not have. This fact is also overlooked in the Zionist propaganda narrative, which maintains that the Arab Palestinians lost their chance to have their own state in 1947 by rejecting the partition plan and that the neighboring Arab states then launched a genocidal war against Israel for no other reason than inherent Arab hatred of Jews.

Ironically, November 29 is commemorated by the UN General Assembly each year as the “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People”. While the annual expression of support for Palestinians’ right to self-determination is appropriate, it is not without hypocrisy given the UN’s own role in helping to create the conflict that persists today.

Adding insult to injury, the UN additionally admitted Israel as a “peace-loving” member state despite its absence of legally recognized borders and despite the Zionist leadership’s proclaimed rejection of the internationally recognized right, emphasized under UN General Assembly Resolution 194, which was adopted while ethnic cleansing operations were still underway, of Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland upon the cessation of hostilities.

The Violent Legacy of the Balfour Declaration

This, then, is the true legacy of the 1917 “Balfour Declaration”: it set Great Britain on a policy course that ultimately facilitated the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. This rejection of Palestinian’s right to self-determination is the root cause of the conflict, and the continued rejection of this right is the reason for the conflict’s persistence today.

This historical reality is critical context to keep in mind in light of the Hamas atrocities against civilians in Israel on October 7, 2023, dubbed “Operation Al Aqsa Flood”, and Israel’s ongoing response, dubbed “Operation Swords of Iron”, which has consisted of escalating its 16-year illegal blockade of Gaza, a policy aimed at collectively punishing the civilian population, and using deliberately disproportionate military force constituting war crimes under international law—and arguably, in this instance, the crime of genocide.

Simply stated, the existence of Hamas is a consequence and not the cause of the conflict between the Israeli government and the people of Palestine.

For extensive documentation of the period of history discussed here, see my article published on the hundredth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, “What Was the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and Why Is It Significant?”, as well as my book Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.