The Balfour Declaration Is Issued

A Short Letter With a Long Afterlife

On November 2, 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour sent a letter to Lord Rothschild communicating a policy approved by the British government. It expressed support for establishing in Palestine a national home for the Jewish people. The letter also said that nothing should prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status of Jews in other countries. Those clauses belong together in a historical account. The document announced a British position during World War I; it did not settle what form the national home would take or give Britain the power to implement it immediately.

The War Was Still in Progress

Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire when the declaration was issued. British forces were campaigning in the region, and wartime diplomacy involved commitments and expectations about how former Ottoman territories might be governed. Zionist advocates had pressed for public support for a Jewish national home, and some British officials saw reasons of their own to support the policy. The people living in Palestine had no equivalent opportunity to negotiate the wording of Balfour's letter. It was a decision made by a government at war about a territory over which it did not yet have the later mandate.

What the Wording Left Unresolved

The document did not define borders or prescribe a constitutional arrangement. It referred to the majority population through the category of existing non-Jewish communities and described their protections in civil and religious terms. It did not set out corresponding national political rights for Palestinian Arabs. That difference was consequential, especially as more concrete questions arose about immigration, land and representative institutions. Readers cannot recover a complete plan by expanding one phrase in isolation. The declaration's influence came partly from the way later authorities and political movements used its words to support different expectations about what Britain was obliged to do.

From Letter to Mandate

After the war, the League of Nations mandate for Palestine incorporated the policy of a Jewish national home. British administration gave it a framework that the 1917 letter had lacked. The subsequent years brought political organization, protest and conflict, with no lasting agreement about how to reconcile the different national claims. The declaration should not be treated as if it had already created the State of Israel or predetermined everything that followed. Its importance was more specific: Britain put its name to a policy that later entered the mandate, while leaving vital questions about political rights and implementation unanswered. The original document is especially useful for checking what the government did and did not promise before those later obligations were negotiated.