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A century on, the importance of the Balfour Declaration and the policies that accompanied it cannot be overstated.

POLITICS 1917 Balfour Declaration: A Scrap of Paper that Changed History Published on October 30, 2017 JAAFAR ASHTIYEH ©AFP A Palestinian protester burns a British flag to mark the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration during a demonstration in the West Bank. Photo AFP On 2 November 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour wrote a letter to Walter Rothschild, a leading figure in the British Jewish community, expressing the government’s support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Comprising a single paragraph, the text became known as the Balfour Declaration. ©WIKIMEDIA COMMONS PUBLIC DOMAIN Palestine was, at the time, a remote province in the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, with which Britain had been at war since 1914. Yet despite having no claim to the territory, the British made the declaration without consulting its 650,00 inhabitants, made up of about 92 per cent Arabs (Muslim and Christian) and 8 per cent Jews. With World War I raging, many people in Europe had other things on their minds and paid little attention to this particular bit of political manoeuvring. In fact, the story of the Balfour Declaration began 20 years earlier. In 1897, the Zionist movement held its inaugural congress in Basel, Switzerland, with the aim of establishing a Jewish state. The common nationalist thinking in those days was that every people needed a homeland. Since the Zionists considered Jews a people without a homeland, a homeland had to be found. And the most logical place for it, according to the Zionists, was Palestine. Advertisement To secure such a Jewish homeland ‘by public law’, the movement’s founder, Theodore Herzl, made various advances to different governments in the years preceding WWI. He started with the Ottoman Sultan Abd al-Hamid, but the sultan refused to help. Herzl then approached the German government, which also declined. The British government offered Herzl a location in East Africa. However, the leaders of the Zionist movement insisted that only Palestine would be considered for a ‘Jewish national home’. The Zionists’ cause seemed largely futile, until Britain declared war on the Ottoman Empire on 5 November 1914. By that time, the Zionist movement had attracted supporters and sympathizers in Europe and the United States, and it began to focus its efforts on the British. In December 1914, Herbert Samuel, then president of the United Kingdom’s Local Government Board, later the first High Commissioner in Palestine and a known Zionist sympathizer, wrote a memorandum for Prime Minister Herbert Asquith on the subject of a Jewish state in Palestine. In it, Samuel acknowledged that: ‘The time is not yet ripe for the establishment there of an independent, autonomous Jewish state. (….) The dream of a Jewish state, prosperous, progressive and the home of a brilliant civilization, might vanish in a series of squalid conflicts with the Arab population. I am assured that the solution of the problem of Palestine which would be the most welcome to the leaders and supporters of the Zionist movement throughout the world would be the annexation of the country to the British Empire… It is hoped that under British rule facilities would be given to Jewish organizations to purchase land, to found colonies, to establish educational and religious institutions, and to spend usefully the funds that would be freely contributed for promoting the economic development of the country. It is hoped also that Jewish immigration, carefully regulated, would be given preference, so that in the course of time the Jewish people, grown into majority and settled in the land, may be conceded such degree of self-government as the conditions of that day may justify.’ Around the time that Herzl was lobbying for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, growing Arab nationalism had led to a desire for independence from the Ottoman Empire. At the outbreak of WWI, Britain, which was aware of these desires among both the Arabs and Zionists, decided to use the situation to bolster its own colonial interests. In July 1915, Henry McMahon, Britain’s representative in Cairo, made an approach to the Arabs through Hussein bin Ali, the Sharif of Mecca. In a series of ten letters exchanged in the following six months, Britain agreed to recognize Arab independence after the war in exchange for Arab help in fighting the Ottomans. McMahon’s letter of 24 October 1915 defined the borders of the future independent Arab state, with a reservation regarding the area located to the ‘West of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hamah and Aleppo’. The Arabs took this reservation to mean only the province of Beirut and Mount Lebanon, a view corroborated decades later by declassified British documents. In spite of these agreements, Britain had no intention of giving up conquered territories to the Arabs. During the war, the Allies’ fortunes on the Western Front were not promising, and Britain became concerned about its fate. Two of the country’s most prominent politicians an...