The Balfour Declaration: A Jewish Homeland in Palestine

What you see above is the Balfour Declaration in its entirety, alongside the man whose signature sits at the bottom.

Arthur James Balfour held the office of Foreign Secretary in the government of David Lloyd-George. Its recipient was Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild, the leader of the British Jewish community.  The declaration was the conclusion of many years of talks between the British government and the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland.

Sent on November 2nd 1917, the letter laid the foundations for making a Zionist dream a reality. It was effectively the green light on creating the modern state of Israel. 

Of course, such considerations weren't up to the British at all.  The international Zionist Federation could have negotiated to create a Jewish nation anywhere in the world.  The fact that they were dealing with Balfour meant that they had made their choice.

They wanted the ancient land of Israel back.  Unfortunately that was now Palestine, and that country was part of the British Empire.

Westminster was not known for giving colonies away, not without an almighty conflict forcing it to; and losing bits of Empire was not a vote winner amongst the Edwardian electorate.  Nor was the Zionist cause particularly popular in the country at the time.

If anyone knew about it or cared at all, it was to say 'no' - except, of course, from its small pocket of supporters. Even the vast majority of the British Jewish community didn't subscribe to the notion of their own homeland.  Of 300,000 Jews living in Britain, only 8,000 had signed up to the Zionist Federation by 1913.

But in being so seemingly generous, the British government saw a way in which to win the First World War; and that is why Balfour was instructed to do it.

In history, it's a bit arbitrary to choose any moment and call it the beginning.

But that meeting between Dr Chaim Azriel Weizmann and Lord Balfour, in 1906, is as good a place as any.  After all, one signed the declaration and the other became Israel's first president.

Dr Weizmann (pictured) was a useful man to have in Britain. Born in Belarus, he studied in Germany and Switzerland, before moving to Britain as a chemistry lecturer. If he had played no part in politics, he would have been known only in the scientific world as the Father of Industrial Fermentation.

Or, even better from the point of view of Britain, as someone who'd worked out an efficient way of producing acetone.  As this is the main ingredient in cordite, this was later a tremendous contribution to the Allied war effort.

Back in 1906, Dr Weizmann was conducting his experiments and lecturing chemistry students at the University of Manchester.  Lord Balfour was the local Member of Parliament, as well as the Prime Minister, hence it was to him that the chemist turned with his dreams for the future.

Nobody could deny that the Jews had suffered centuries of anti-Semitic persecution, throughout the world and particularly in Europe.  Balfour didn't even try.  Dr Weizmann's point was that this was possible because there was no Jewish state to defend them.  As a community marginalized in every country on Earth, it was easy to become scapegoats for each nation's ills.

Lord Balfour listened politely.  He was on a campaign trail for re-election. Just like any politician, he'd listen to anyone and anything, as long as it would gain him a vote.

Yet Balfour did have a suggestion.  Britain also owned Uganda and this wasn't the first time that a Zionist had tried to make a case for a homeland. In 1903, the Ugandan Colony Secretary Joseph Chamberlain had already offered a substantial area of it to be used as a Jewish state. 

The Zionists had turned him down; as Dr Weizmann did with Balfour mentioning the same now. They wanted the promised land of Israel and nowhere else would do.

"Mr. Balfour, supposing I was to offer you Paris instead of London, would you take it?" Dr Weizmann recalled the conversation in his memoirs. 

He said that Lord Balfour sat a little straighter in his chair, as he pointed out, quite reasonably, "But Dr. Weizmann, we have London."

"That is true, but we had Jerusalem when London was a marsh."

Britons are used to being the ones with all of the history, so this obviously struck a chord. Lord Balfour asked, "Are there many Jews who think like you?"

"I believe I speak the mind of millions of Jews," Dr Weizmann spoke earnestly, "whom you will never see and who cannot speak for themselves."

With a politician's eternal assessment, Lord Balfour concluded, "If that is so you will one day be a force."

Then promptly did nothing about it at all.  If promises were made, then they were vague enough to ignore. Especially since Balfour's Conservative party promptly lost that general election.

By the time Arthur James Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, returned to power, Britain was at war. 

No longer leader of the Conservative Party, he was nevertheless awarded Cabinet positions in two successive coalition governments. It was as Foreign Secretary in the latter, under the leadership of Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd-George, that the Zionist proposal surfaced again.

It didn't come out of the blue. Even with a war raging, there had been occasional discussions, meetings and even Parliamentary debates touching upon it.  In 1914, a Cabinet minister named Herbert Samuel had even distributed a memorandum urging that Palestine be offered to the Zionist Federation.

But the British High Commissioner in Egypt Sir Henry McMahon was also reassuring the Arab Ottomans that they had his country's support.  While the British and French were simultaneously signing the Sykes-Picot Agreement to divvy up the Arabic lands of the Ottoman Empire between them.

In short, everyone was playing everyone else off against each other.  This was the Great War after all.

Back in Europe, the sheer scale and carnage of the war was unprecedented. Never before had hostilities been fought on an industrial level, with weapons that could devastate in quite this way. It was also at stalemate.  Thousands would die to gain a tiny stretch of land; only to lose it again in the returning offensive the next day.

Dr Weizmann's acetone discovery was proving to be very handy.

By 1917, what Britain really wanted was for Russia to stay in the war, despite Germany arranging for Lenin to return to his homeland with enough funding and support to spark a revolution.  He had already promised the Germans that, if successful, he would pull Russia out of external hostilities.

The second game breaker would be the entrance, onto the Allied side in the Great War, of the United States of America.  President Woodrow Wilson did not appear willing.  He talked of persuading the nations involved to negotiate for 'peace without victory', which didn't sound promising at all.

But Lord Balfour had a plan.

Lord Balfour had taken seriously the impression left, by that 1906 conversation with Dr Weizmann, that there was a Jewish force out in the world, just waiting to acquire allies.  If there was one thing that Britain needed in 1917, it was allies.

Fresh in his mind was a warning, given by Dr Weizmann, that the Germans had started 'courting' the Jews. That was to persuade the 'Great Jewry' to fight for them instead.

Balfour had also noted something else about the majority of British Zionists.  They tended to be immigrants, or second generation; and it was popular amongst those who'd fled the anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia during the late 19th century.  Home-grown Jews were more likely to consider themselves British. They had no interest in an Israeli nation state.

During a War Cabinet meeting, on October 31st 1917, the conversation turned to the Zionist dream of Israel.   Lord Balfour shared his opinion, "If we could make a declaration favorable to such an ideal we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and America."

The largest Jewish population in the world was in Russia.  Amongst its prominent and most influential figures was Leon Trotsky.  Over 450,000 Jews were already fighting, in the Russian military, in the Great War.  Winning their hearts and minds was key.  So much so that Vladimir Lenin gave speeches himself, notably in March 1919, designed to gain even more Jewish support for the Bolshevik cause.  His party already boasted a large percentage of them.

If Britain could signal to the Jews in Russia that Israel was the prize, then they might be inclined to ensure that the Allies won the war.  There would have been much domestic pressure brought to bear upon Lenin - who had just risen to power at the head of the October Revolution - to keep Russia fighting in the Great War.

Moreover, it had not gone unnoticed amongst the higher echelons of British policy-makers that two of President Woodrow Wilson's advisers were Zionists.

Felix Frankfurter was special assistant to the US Secretary of War, as well as Judge Advocate General.  Louis Dembitz Brandeis had formed the central issues, upon which the 1912 presidential election had been fought.  When Woodrow Wilson was duly elected, he returned the favor by nominating Brandeis to the Supreme Court.

As expected, both men eventually put pressure upon President Wilson to support the Balfour Declaration.  It might not have been what brought the United States into the Great War, but it certainly provided that incentive to two very influential American politicians.