The Balfour Declaration: Its Genesis, Birth and Historical Significance

Jonathan Schneer, in his book The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict2, is struck by the very first sentence – the use of the term ‘reconstituted’, which “implies an unbroken link between Jews and Palestine despite the nearly two-thousand-year separation”. The reference to the Zionist Organisation as the official representative of Jewish interests had several purposes, not least of which was to establish a recognised growth node for a future Jewish state.

On 2 November, Balfour sent a letter to Lord Rothschild stating that: “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.”

Much later when, in 1922, Britain was granted the Mandate for Palestine by the League of Nations, Article 5 formalised a role for a “Zionist organization”. That Organisation evolved into the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency. In 1917, though, it was meant to indicate the (hugely embroidered) impression of worldwide Jewish influence.

Britain’s interest was for Russia to remain in World War I and for the US, which had entered only in April 1917, to assume a major role in the fighting. It was no secret that neither American nor Russian Jews were enthusiastic about the war continuing and that efforts should be pursued to bring about its curtailment. This ran contrary to Britain’s desires. London’s hope was that giving the Zionists a direct stake in the war’s outcome would persuade Jews in Russia and America to urge their governments to support the war.

The idea of a commitment addressed to the Zionist Organisation was also intended to deflate rumours that Germany might yet issue its own statement of support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Balfour himself had used terminology which asked for “any suggestions which the Zionist Organisation may desire to lay before” the Cabinet, according to the Anglo-Jewish historian Leonard Stein.3

This first draft is also modest in its wording. It refrains from using the phrase ‘Jewish state’, which Sacher had argued for, and instead employed the more restrained “national home of the Jewish people”, notes The Encyclopedia of Zionism. In modern parlance, this phrase from the Balfour Declaration is paraphrased as “Jewish National Home”. Although statehood was not explicitly mentioned in any of the drafts, the expression “a national home for the Jewish people” is consistent in four of the five drafts, including the final Balfour Declaration.

This phrase harked back to the 1897 First Zionist Congress in Basel. Some British Zionists were already vaguely thinking of a self-governing Jewish Commonwealth, presumably under British sovereignty. Balfour himself calculated the matter of statehood – if it was to happen – would be the outcome of a gradual political development.4

Chief Protagonists

Against this backdrop, the newly elected Lloyd George government took a decision to publicly support Zionism, a movement led in Britain by Chaim Weizmann, a Russian Jewish chemist who had settled in Manchester. Weizmann was born in Motol, Russia in 1874, receiving his education in biochemistry in Switzerland and Germany. In Geneva, he became active in the Zionist movement, which benefitted from his clarity of thought and insights. In 1905 he moved to England, and was elected to the General Zionist Council. Weizmann’s scientific assistance to the Allied forces in World War I brought him into close contact with British leaders, enabling him to play a key role in the issuing of the Balfour Declaration

Lionel Walter Rothschild, Second Baron Rothschild of Tring, was an eccentric personality, and an outstanding naturalist who contributed significantly to the Darwinian theory of evolution. It is little recognised that the Balfour Declaration promising the Jews a return to their national home in Palestine, described as the “greatest event that has occurred in Jewish history for 2000 years”, took the form of a letter addressed to Rothschild beginning “Dear Lord Rothschild”.5The central role Rothschild played in the steps leading to Great Britain’s support for the return of Jews to Palestine and the formation of the State of Israel resulted from the close relationship and friendship he enjoyed with Arthur Balfour on the one hand and Chaim Weizmann on the other. The key role he assumed has often been downplayed by contemporary writers and commentators. Nevertheless, his letter to Weizmann on 10 April 1917 telling him that he had arranged a meeting with Balfour leaves no doubt about his own sentiments: “I fully realise the great importance of doing everything to further the Zionist cause with the Government in view of the persistent and puerile opposition… Apart from the first and foremost great national aims of our people which are strikingly and consistently being urged now in every country, there is to my mind a very much greater need for establishing the real Jewish nation again in Palestine… .”

In a letter to Balfour dated 18 July 1917, Rothschild wrote: “At last I am able to send you the formula you asked me for. If his Majesty’s Government will send me a message on the lines of the formula, if they and you approve of it, I will hand it on to the Zionist Federation and also announce it at a meeting called for that purpose… ”6

Arthur James Balfour was born into wealth and influence. He succeeded his uncle, Lord Salisbury, who had been his political mentor and champion. However, his initial interests were not political. He enjoyed music and poetry, and was first known as a renowned philosopher, publishing A Defence of Philosophic Doubt, The Foundations of Belief and Theism and Humanism. It was thought that Balfour was merely diverting himself with politics and his colleagues did not take him seriously. Members looked upon him as just a young member of the governing classes who remained in the House because it was the proper thing for a man of high breeding and family to do.

In 1874 he was elected the Conservative Member of Parliament for Hertford. Four years later he became private secretary to Lord Salisbury, then Foreign Secretary in Benjamin Disraeli’s government. In 1885 Balfour was a member of Randolph Churchill’s ‘Fourth Party’ group (distinct from the Conservatives, Liberals and Irish Nationalists). Later, he joined the Cabinet as Secretary for Scotland and then for Ireland under Lord Salisbury. Despite widespread doubt that he was up to the demanding job of Irish Secretary, Balfour proved to be a tough incumbent, restoring the rule of law. His land development legislation was considered well-judged and has been credited with calming the Irish conflict for a generation.

In 1891, Balfour became First Lord of the Treasury and Leader of the Commons. He regained the same positions on the Conservatives’ re-election in 1895. When Lord Salisbury retired, Balfour became Prime Minister, but his cabinet split on the free trade issue and his relations with the king were poor. Defeats in the Commons and in by-elections led to his resignation in December 1905. He continued to lead his party until 1911 but, despite stepping down, his career was far from over. He became First Lord of the Admiralty in the wartime coalition and later Foreign Secretary.

Support for a “national home” for the Jews in Palestine from the government of the greatest empire in the world was in part a fulfilment of the efforts of Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), a Sephardic Jew who had published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) in Vienna in l896. It identified the factors which he believed had created a universal Jewish problem, and offered a programme to regulate it through the exodus of unhappy and unwanted Jews to an autonomous territory of their own.

Herzl offered a focus for a Zionist movement founded in Odessa in 1881, which spread rapidly through the Jewish communities of Russia, and for small branches which had sprung up in Germany, England and elsewhere. Though ‘Zion’ referred to a geographical location, it functioned as a lodestone to a people desiring and praying to live in their ancestral land free of subjugation and oppression, architects of their own fate and determinants of their own destiny.

In his diary Herzl describes submitting his draft proposals to the Rothschild Family Council, noting: “I bring to the Rothschilds and the big Jews their historical mission. I shall welcome all men of goodwill – we must be united – and crush all those of bad”.7

He read his manuscript “Addressed to the Rothschilds” to a friend, Meyer-Cohn, who said, “Up till now I have believed that we are not a nation – but more than a nation. I believed that we have the historic mission of being the exponents of universalism among the nations and therefore were more than a people identified with a specific land.”

Herzl replied: “Nothing prevents us from being and remaining the exponents of a united humanity, when we have a country of our own. To fulfil this mission we do not have to remain literally planted among the nations who hate and despite us. If, in our present circumstances, we wanted to bring about the unity of mankind independent of national boundaries, we would have to combat the ideal of patriotism. The latter, however, will prove stronger than we for innumerable years to come…We want to lay the foundation stone of the house which is to shelter the Jewish nation…”’ and “‘Zionism seeks to obtain for the Jewish people a publicly recognised, legally secured homeland in Palestine”.’ That Zionism was “a return to the Jewish fold even before it is a return to the Jewish land” was an expression of his own experience, which was extended into the official platform of Zionism as the aim of “strengthening the Jewish national sentiment and national consciousness”.8

The motives behind the decision to issue what came to be known as the Balfour Declaration were various: aside from a genuine belief in the righteousness of the Zionist cause, held by Lloyd George among others, Britain’s leaders hoped that a formal declaration in favour of Zionism would help gain Jewish support for the Allies in neutral countries, such as the United States and especially in Russia, where the powerfully antisemitic czarist government had just been overthrown with some help from Russia’s significant, repressed Jewish population.

Finally, despite Britain’s earlier agreement with France dividing influence in the region after the anticipated defeat of the Ottoman Empire, Lloyd George had come to see British dominance in Palestine – a land bridge between the crucial territories of India and Egypt – as an essential post-war goal. The establishment of a Zionist state there – under British protection – would accomplish this, while seemingly following the stated Allied aim of self-determination for smaller nations.

“It is essential that it [the Jewish community] should know that it is in Palestine as of right and not on sufferance. That is the reason why it is necessary that the existence of a Jewish National Home in Palestine should be internationally guaranteed, and that it should be formally recognised to rest upon ancient historic connection”. In other words, “the Jews are the only existing indigenous people of the land of Israel – which was for a while called Palestine”.

Britain’s public acknowledgement and support of the Zionist movement emerged from its growing concern surrounding the direction of World War 1. By mid-1917, Britain and France were mired in a virtual stalemate with Germany on the Western Front, while efforts to defeat Turkey on the Gallipoli Peninsula had failed spectacularly. On the Eastern Front, the fate of one ally, Russia, was uncertain. Revolution in March had toppled Czar Nicholas II, and the provisional government was struggling against widespread opposition to maintain the country’s disintegrating war effort against Germany and Austria-Hungary. Although the United States had just entered the war on the Allied side, a sizeable infusion of American troops was not scheduled to arrive on the continent until the following year.

Throughout the entire European continent antisemitism was on the rise, although not for another 22 years would it reach a peak in hatred in parity with what was happening to Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia.

Origins of antagonism towards Jews

This anti-Jewish pathology had its origins in the defeat and expulsion from Israel of Jews by the Romans in the 1st Ce nt u r y. Titus, the future Roman Emperor, had starved the city for months. At the end of July, his legions broke through the walls and, according to historian Josephus, killed over a million Jews in their conquest. The Second Temple was burned to the ground on the date in the Jewish calendar called Tisha B ’Av ( 9th of Av). The siege ended with the sacking of the city, and the enslavement of the survivors.

Following the Roman destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem on 8 September in the year 70 CE and the dispersal of Jewish survivors from Israel to other lands, Israel was denuded of Jews. The outcome was the destruction of the national entity of the Jewish people. Over the next twenty centuries, despite efforts to assimilate, Jews were never entirely accepted in their adopted countries. The Siege of Jerusalem was the decisive event marking the beginning of the Diaspora and antisemitism.

Anti-Jewish sentiment has long manifested itself among the Christian and Muslim communities in lands stretching from North Africa and the Mediterranean to the Arctic Circle. There were periods of varying degrees of peace, and political and economic assimilation in some of these countries, but it would be no exaggeration to say that separation, distrust, domination and control by means of brute force was the experience of most Jews. Organised massacres (pogroms) of Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe happened frequently enough to be considered commonplace. Nor would it be an exaggeration to say that Jews led a miserable, second-class existence in these countries.

Consequences

In modern times a number of key events gave impetus to antisemitism and at the same time divided support among Jews and governments for Zionism. One that stands out was the Alfred Dreyfus affair from 1894 until its resolution in 1906 that morphed into a cause célèbre in France and split that country down the middle. It involved a case where a Jewish captain in the French army was falsely accused of treason, found guilty by a military tribunal and sentenced to imprisonment on Devil’s Island, a French possession in the Caribbean. This event gave impetus to the Zionist movement that had been chartered at a conference in Berne in 1897 by Theodor Herzl for the purpose of returning the Jewish presence back to the land from which they were expelled, and which at that time had been ruled by the Ottoman Empire for 400 years.

By the time the Balfour Declaration was published in British and international newspapers, one of its major objectives had been rendered obsolete: Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks had gained power in Russia, and one of their first actions was to call for an immediate armistice. Russia was out of the war, and the reality was that no amount of persuasion from Zionist Jews who – despite Britain’s belief to the contrary, had relatively little influence in Russia to begin with – could reverse the outcome.

Nonetheless, the inf luence of the Declaration on the course of post-war events was immediate: According to the ‘mandate’ system created by the Versailles Treaty of 1919, Britain was entrusted with the temporary administration of Palestine, with the understanding that it would work on behalf of both its Jewish and Arab inhabitants. Many Arabs, in Palestine and elsewhere, were angered by their failure to receive the nationhood and self-government they had been led to expect in return for their participation in the war against Turkey.

When the Balfour Declaration was issued, it was decided by Lord Allenby that it should not then be published in Palestine, where his forces were still south of the Gaza-Beersheba line. It was in fact not done until after the establishment of the Civil Administration in 1920. The Declaration was confirmed by the victorious allies at the San Remo Conference in 1920, and passed into international law. When the League of Nations was formed it, too, in 1922 confirmed the Declaration, which became a part of International Law giving the Zionists legal title to the land.

Despite Britain being given the green light to implement the Balfour Declaration, it marked time trying to balance its responsibility to the San Remo Conference and the League of Nations with the upsurge of Arab nationalism and Britain’s need for oil to keep the wheels of 20th Cent u r y mechanisation and technology turning. A policy of procrastination denied access to Palestine for millions of Jews until after World War II and the Holocaust. This low point in human history revealed how mistaken those who fought against the 1917 Declaration by the British government had been, and later succeeding governments to implement its provisions.

After World War II and the re-evaluation of how the world’s countries set about regulating their affairs, this piece of international legislation, which included the Balfour Declaration— unchanged and in its entirety—was taken over by the United Nations, which superseded the League of Nations. It remained the cornerstone of an independent Israel when the United Nations in 1947 voted to incorporate the Balfour Declaration and instructed the mandate power, Britain, to implement it. Thus did Palestine became Israel, thereby bringing to a climax nearly 2000 years of struggle to return Jews to the land from which they had been cruelly ejected and giving impetus to the gathering in of Jews from all over the world.

Rodney Mazinter is a Cape Town-based writer, poet and author, who has for many years been involved in media activism on behalf of Israel. He has held numerous leadership positions within a wide range of educational and Jewish communal bodies in Cape Town.

NOTES

1. Lowenthal, M (ed), The Diaries of Theodor Herzl, Gollancz, 1958, p35.
2. Random House, New York, 2012.
3. Stein, L, The Balfour Declaration, Simon and Schuster, 1961
4. Rothschild, Miriam, Dear Lord Rothschild – Birds Butterflies and History, Balaban: London, 1983. The author was a niece of Lord Rothschild
5. Ibid, p266
6. Ibid, p235
7. Lowenthal, The Diaries of Theodor Herzl, p35
8. Ibid, p215