Balfour Declaration of 1917
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- Not to be confused with the Balfour Declaration of 1926.
The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was made in a letter dated November 2, 1917, from the British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Lord Rothschild (Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild), a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation, a private Zionist organization, on the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the World War I. The letter stated the position, agreed at a British Cabinet meeting on October 31, 1917, that the British government supported Zionist plans for a Jewish "national home" in Palestine, with the condition that nothing should be done which might prejudice the rights of existing communities there. The document is kept at the British Library.
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[edit] Text of the declaration
The "Balfour Declaration," which is reprinted below The Declaration was later incorporated into the Sèvres peace treaty with Turkey and the Mandate for Palestine. The declaration, a typed letter signed in ink by Balfour, reads as follows:
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
[edit] Military and political context
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The neutrality of this section is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page. |
By the standards of international diplomacy, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 is an amazing document, succinctly summarized by Arthur Koestler who wrote that the declaration amounted to "one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third." Beyond the textual content of the Balfour Declaration - it was made up of just three sentences and some 125 words in total - its significance lies in how it came to pass and what impact it had both on the course of World War I and subsequent events culminating in the formation of Israel.
Perhaps the Balfour Declaration can best be appreciated as part of the increasing escalation, both military and political, between the Allies and Central Powers over the course of late-1916 and 1917. By late 1916, the Central Powers, especially Germany, were suffering mightily from the deprivations caused by the Allied blockade. In February of 1917, Germany - in response to this blockade - initiated its own counter-blockade of Britain and attempted to enforce it by a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare.
A month later, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, signaling the eventual withdrawal of Russia as an effective adversary to Germany and Austria-Hungary. From the perspective of the Triple Entente, the potential consequences unfolding in Russia were grave. Beyond the loss of a powerful counterforce on Germany’s eastern flank, a defeated or neutral Russia offered the Central Powers the possibility of evading the Allied blockade by importing foodstuffs and war material directly from Russia.
Although the United States had voted to enter the war in April of 1917, it was not projected to deliver troops in numbers on the continent until Summer of the following year. Additionally the effects on Britain of U-boat sinkings were significant and growing, ramping up to an average of over 500,000 tons per month during the Summer of 1917. After three years of continuous slaughter and with the specter of German troops, freed from assignments in Russia, soon arriving on the Western Front, Britain found herself in a somewhat desperate situation by the Autumn of 1917. A very real question at this time for the Entente leadership was whether the arrival of the Americans would be in time to stave off an Allied defeat.
The war, in a grisly virtual stalemate at this point in time, found both Germany and Britain actively making overtures to the Zionist Movement in order to enlist the resources of this group in assisting their cause. Both sides were well aware of the significant Zionist influence within Bolshevik Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States. Further, Britain recognized that the natural sentiment of many European Jews was, in fact, with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Following the logic that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” European Jews tended to view the Central Powers favorably given their role in defeating the overtly anti-Semitic Tsarist government in Russia. Well aware of this sentiment, Imperial Germany during this same period was actively courting the Zionist movement, both domestically and internationally, but was circumscribed in this effort by the fact that Palestine was then a component of the Ottoman Empire – a key ally of Germany within the Central Powers.
By the Summer of 1917, the world had been at war for three years. All major belligerents were facing the common issues of unbelievable casualty levels, the deprivations of an increasingly effective blockade, dwindling financial resources and the unthinkable specter of actually losing the war. No tactic or strategy was beyond consideration if it offered a reasonable chance to gain advantage over the other side.
At the same time the Zionist movement was very active in all forms of negotiations to convince one or more of the major powers to support the goals of the Zionist movement - namely support for Jewish migration to Palestine. Active negotiations were going on in Constantinople, Berlin, Paris, London, New York and Washington. As events turned out, Zionist efforts first proved successful in London.
In December of 1916, the leaders of the British government, locked in a power struggle, resigned and King George V requested a new government be formed. Both the incoming Prime Minster, David Lloyd George, and the new Foreign Minister, Arthur Balfour, were sympathetic to the Zionist cause. Before the war, Lloyd George had served as legal counsel to the Zionists and was familiar with Chaim Weizmann in his previous role as Minister of Munitions. Immediately, Zionist efforts became focused on London and the British government. Over the course of 1917 there ensued within the British government a protracted and fierce debate involving both Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews over if and how the British government would formally support the Zionist cause.
The anti-Zionists were led by Secretary of State for India Edwin Montagu who viewed support for Zionism, by non-Jews, as a form of antisemitism because it would relocate the center of Jewish life to Palestine and therefore away from the various European and American capitals. There were also fears amongst this group that formal support for Zionism, during the war, could trigger increased anti-semitic activities, specifically within the Ottoman Empire, thereby placing Turkish Jews in harm's way. This debate raged on through the Summer and Autumn of 1917, eventually including members of the American Zionist movement and government, with the pro-Zionists eventually winning the day.
Given this context then, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 can be seen as an effective tool for Britain to serve multiple ends. Seen through British eyes and from the perspective of late 1917, it would serve as a powerful propaganda tool aimed at the world’s Jewish community in hopes of securing additional financial support – cash contributions, loans, grants - to fill the depleted coffers of the Allied governments. Secondly, it would effectively preempt Germany’s ongoing efforts to enlist both informal and formal support from the Zionist movement. In a very real sense, whichever side issued such a declaration first would effectively preclude any positive impact of the other side's efforts.
With Russia less than a month away from signing an armistice with Germany, the Balfour Declaration also delivered a targeted message to the Russian Bolsheviks. At this point in the revolution, the Bolsheviks as a group were, if not predominantly, then by a significant plurality, of Jewish extraction. This phenomenon is witnessed by examining the top echelons of the Bolshevik party during this early period in its history. Starting at the top, Lenin (Vladimir Ulyanov) was one-quarter Jewish. Moving down a level in the party hierarchy, nearly all of the top Bolshevik leadership were in fact Jewish including Leon Trotsky (Lev Bronstein) who was in command of the Red Army as well as, briefly, chief of Soviet foreign affairs; Yakov Sverdlov (Solomon) who held two roles as the Bolshevik party's executive secretary and -- as chairman of the Central Executive Committee -- head of the Soviet government; and Grigori Zinoviev (Radomyslsky) who ran the Communist International (Comintern), the central agency for spreading revolution in foreign countries. Indeed nearly all significant positions within the Soviet leadership structure were held by Jews. Other prominent Jews within the top ranks of Soviet power circles included press commissar Karl Radek (Sobelsohn), foreign affairs commissar Maxim Litvinov (Wallach), Politburo member and chairman of the Moscow Soviet Lev Kamenev (Rosenfeld) and Moisei Uritsky, chairman of the Petrograd Cheka (secret police).
The message of the Balfour Declaration then, to this largely Jewish group, was that support of Germany, post-armistice, would work directly against the goals of the Zionist cause – as outlined in the Balfour Declaration. Through this tactic, David Lloyd George aimed to keep Germany and a newly-Bolshevik Russia at arm’s length in hope of denying Russian trade and resources to Germany and keeping a maximum number of German troops tied down in the East (and therefore not available for deployment on the Western Front). It was a calculated gamble on Britain's part, but one that paid off as the Bolshevik faction within Russia did not overtly cooperate with Germany after the Tsar's abdication. [1]
Finally, the messages within the Balfour Declaration could not help but sow seeds of doubt within the minds of those ruling the Central Powers as to where the loyalty of their own domestic Jewish populations lay. For the Jews of Austria-Hungary, Germany and the Ottoman Empire, the Balfour Declaration put at direct odds their loyalty to state against any Zionist sentiments that they may have harbored. In weighing the actual impact of the Balfour Declaration on the outcome of the war, one must consider both the relative minority of Jews in central Europe who were sympathetic to the Zionist cause with the reality that the Central Powers’ prospects, in terms of winning the war, declined steadily from the point of the declaration's issue to their ultimate defeat ending the war.
[edit] Text development and differing views
The record of discussions that led up to the final text of the Balfour Declaration clarifies some details of its wording. The phrase "national home" was intentionally used instead of "state", and the British devoted some effort over the following decades to denying that a state was the intention, including the Churchill White Paper, 1922. However, in private, many British officials agreed with the interpretation of the Zionists that a state would be the eventual outcome.[citation needed]
An early draft used the word that in referring to Palestine as a Jewish homeland, which was changed to in Palestine to avoid committing to it being the whole of Palestine. Similarly, an early draft did not include the commitment to not prejudicing the rights of the non-Jewish communities. These changes came about partly as the result of the urgings of Edwin Samuel Montagu, an influential anti-Zionist Jew and Secretary of State for India, who, among others, was concerned that the declaration without those changes could result in increased anti-Semitic persecution.
At that time the British were busy making promises. Henry McMahon had exchanged letters with Hussein ibn Ali, Sheriff of Mecca in 1915, in which he had promised the Arabs control of the Arab lands, exclusive of the Mediterranean coast. The extent of the coastal exclusion is not clear. Hussein protested that the Arabs of Beirut would greatly oppose isolation from the Arab state or states, but did not, it seems, bring up the matter of the area Jerusalem, which included a good part of Palestine. This suggests either that the area of Jerusalem and Palestine was not part of the inclusion and was promised to the Arabs, as shown in some maps, and is believed by pro-Arab historians, or that Palestine was included, but that Hussein did not protest. The latter version is supported by Dr. Haim Weizmann in his autobiographical book Trial and Error, and that interpretation was convenient to the British also, and supported explicitly by the British government in the White Paper of 1922.
[edit] Negotiation
One of the main Jewish figures who negotiated the granting of the declaration was Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the leading spokesman for organized Zionism in Britain. During the first meeting between Chaim Weizmann and Balfour, in 1906, the Unionist leader was impressed by Weizmann's personality. Balfour asked Weizmann why Palestine—and Palestine alone—could be the basis for Zionism. "Anything else would be idolatry", Weizmann protested, adding: "Mr. Balfour, supposing I were to offer you Paris instead of London, would you take it?" "But Dr. Weizmann", Balfour retorted, "we have London", to which Weizmann rejoined, "That is true, but we had Jerusalem when London was a marsh."[1]
Weizmann was a chemist who managed to synthesize acetone via fermentation. Acetone is needed in the production of cordite, a powerful propellant explosive needed to fire ammunition without generating tell-tale smoke. Germany had cornered supplies of a major source of acetone, calcium acetate and other pre-war processes in Britain were inadequate to meet the increased demand in the Great War. A shortage of cordite would have severely hampered Britain's war effort. The Minister for Munitions David Lloyd-George, who became Prime Minister shortly after, was grateful to Weizmann and also supported him. Balfour asked what payment he would accept in return for the use of his process, Weizmann responded, "There is only one thing I want. A national home for my people." He eventually received both payment for his discovery and a role in the history of the origins of the state of Israel.
It has been claimed--without evidence--that the Zionists promised to embroil the United States in the war in favor of the Allies. This was a widely spread belief in the postwar Germany and was a major cause of anti-Semitism leading to the holocaust.
[edit] Contradictory assurances
In his November, 2002 interview with the New Statesman magazine, the UK Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, has blamed Britain's imperial past for many of the modern political problems, including the Arab-Israeli conflict. [2]
"The Balfour declaration and the contradictory assurances which were being given to Palestinians in private at the same time as they were being given to the Israelis—again, an interesting history for us, but not an honourable one," he said. In 1917 Arthur died of a heart attack
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ B. Dugdale (1939): "Arthur James Balfour", Vol I, p. 326 & 327
- ^ British Empire blamed for modern conflicts Jack Straw said serious mistakes had been made (BBC) 5 November, 2002
[edit] See also
- Napoleon and the Jews#Napoleon and a Jewish state in Palestine
- Faisal-Weizmann Agreement
- 1922 Text: League of Nations Palestine Mandate
- 1947 UN Partition Plan
- Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, May 14, 1948
- Madagascar Plan
- British Uganda Program
[edit] External links
- text of the 1922 White Paper from the Avalon Project
- Donald Macintyre, The Independent, 26 May 2005, "The birth of modern Israel: A scrap of paper that changed history"
