Balfour declaration why it was created

In , his son, Edwin, was appointed as an officer of the Zionist Commission in Palestine, a group chaired by Weizmann and created to advise the British government on how to implement the Balfour Declaration.

Samuel was chosen by then Prime Minister David Lloyd George to be high commissioner, the highest source of authority, in Palestine, from to Though he expressed on several occasions his fears that a Jewish state may harm the Palestinian Arab majority in the country, many criticised his actions in creating policies meant to allow Jews to flourish.

For example, he appointed Zionists to the top posts of his administration, while Palestinians were robbed of the right to create their own autonomous para-state structures. While his support for the Zionist project came late, Sykes served as a key channel between Chaim Weizmann and his fellow Zionist activists, and the British government.

He served as an assistant secretary in the War Cabinet to oversee Middle Eastern affairs and was convinced that a Jewish settlement in Palestine would ensure British imperial interests and minimise French influence there. He is credited with directing Nahum Sokolow, a Polish Zionist and diplomat, to convince the French to accept bringing Palestine under British control after the war and arranged for him to meet with the Papal authorities in Rome.

On October 31, , the Cabinet approved the final wording of the Declaration. A Polish writer and diplomat, Nahum Sokolow is a lesser-known key player in the Balfour Declaration, though his behind-the-scenes work had a major impact on the issuing of the statement.

A close aide of Chaim Weizmann, he travelled widely to rally support for the Declaration. Under the Sykes-Picot treaty to divide the Middle East after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the majority of the land of Palestine was meant to become an international zone. But in coordination with Mark Sykes, Sokolow, as a representative of the Zionists, fostered the view that the Jews preferred British over French protection in Palestine.

Most notably, he met with high profile French officials in May and managed to secure French support for the plan, as expressed in the Cambon Letter. Chaim Weizmann, the former president of the World Zionist Organization, and his wife, Vera, are pictured outside of St James's Palace in London, where a conference was being held to discuss the creation of an Israeli state out of British-controlled Palestine.

British soldiers patrol the streets of Jerusalem during a visit by Arthur James Balfour, a British Conservative politician, on April 2, The city's Arab residents were on strike as a protest against the Balfour Declaration, which supported plans for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Balfour, while serving as foreign secretary, authored the Balfour Declaration in Here, he speaks at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in Arab protesters travel to the Jordanian capital Amman for a demonstration against the Balfour Declaration in The banners read: ''Palestine for the Arabs'' and ''Our homeland is our faith and complete freedom is our life''.

Lionel Walter Rothschild, a figurehead of the British Jewish community to whom the Balfour Declaration was addressed, is pictured in July Arthur Balfour The author of the Declaration. Lionel Walter Rothschild Rothschild was the figurehead of the British Jewish community and is the man to whom the Declaration was addressed. Earlier efforts to secure recognition from the Turks had failed.

Balfour mattered because the alliance with Britain allowed them to exercise that right. The League of Nations mandate, five years after Balfour, provided the first international legal framework for Zionist ambitions — ignoring Palestinian objections and setting a pattern that would be repeated in the future. Objections by Jews to Zionism started to fade once the mandate was in place — though it took the horrors of the second world war for them to all but disappear. Arab opposition never weakened.

Balfour showed no regrets. The aftermath was marked out by sombre milestones, each representing further escalation. Arabs attacked Jews in and Arabs shunned him. The worst bloodshed, though, was in Hebron, where Arabs killed 67 defenceless Orthodox Jews who were not part of the Zionist camp — though that old distinction was rapidly disappearing. It shows Jewish immigrants striding energetically towards Tel Aviv, passing a glum-looking Arab peasant family on a camel, evicted from their land and plodding towards the desert.

The scenery is dotted with factories, mechanised agriculture and bustling public works — all Jewish achievements. In the corner stand Arab men in European suits and tarbushes, arguing presumably ineffectively about the transformation they are witnessing. Events elsewhere, however, were soon to mean that it was too late to do very much about it. It proposed partitioning the country into Jewish and Arab states, but retreated from the idea as a new war approached. Only in did Britain change policy, severely restricting Jewish immigration and land sales, and promising Palestinian independence.

Even as the Royal Navy was turning back Jewish refugees trying desperately to reach the shores of Palestine, and Irgun and Stern Gang terrorists were targeting the British, the Jewish population had reached a third of the total. In the US in particular, Zionists were seen as progressives, fighting both British imperialism and its reactionary Arab lackeys. It was rejected by the Palestinians, because they refused to surrender to what they saw as foreign settlers who had transformed the country while ignoring them.

It was another error — though arguably an understandable one. Arab Palestine was erased by Israel and Jordan. Balfour remains a byword for the legitimacy of Zionism, and for the calamity that it brought the Palestinians.

It is hard to imagine that changing. P reparations for the centenary have posed a difficult challenge for the British government. Military victory, though, turned out to be the easy part. The timing created a neat and thought-provoking link between two towering historical landmarks: the first political triumph of Zionism, and the beginning of an occupation that would, over the years, undermine it and threaten to isolate Israel.

Resistance to occupation or terrorist acts such as the Munich Olympics massacre of made headlines. Sympathy for them grew with the Lebanon war of Oslo was killed off — after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin — by settlement expansion, bad faith, suicide bombings and a second, armed intifada that erupted disastrously after the collapse of the Camp David summit in Little has changed since he was succeeded by Mahmoud Abbas , though the Hamas takeover of Gaza in was deeply divisive.

In , when Abbas secured UN observer status for Palestine , the UK refused to follow the other countries which had recognised it, standing loyally by the US. But Britain would not apologise. May was scorned for trying to curry favour with the incoming president. And that remains the current official mantra — albeit muttered sheepishly by embarrassed FCO officials. The official UK response to the demand for a Balfour apology — which had been supported by 13, people who signed a petition to parliament — was released this April.

Brexit also killed off the ongoing investigation by the Commons foreign affairs committee into UK policy towards the conflict. The FAC, as the rules require, was dissolved along with parliament when the election was called. It is regarded as one of the most controversial and contested documents in the modern history of the Arab world and has puzzled historians for decades. It was made during World War I and was included in the terms of the British Mandate for Palestine after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.

The so-called mandate system, set up by the Allied powers, was a thinly veiled form of colonialism and occupation. The system transferred rule from the territories that were previously controlled by the powers defeated in the war — Germany , Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria — to the victors.

The declared aim of the mandate system was to allow the winners of the war to administer the newly emerging states until they could become independent.

The case of Palestine, however, was unique. Upon the start of the mandate, the British began to facilitate the immigration of European Jews to Palestine. Between and , the Jewish population rose from nine percent to nearly 27 percent of the total population.

What the map of Palestine looked like years ago. In essence, the Balfour Declaration promised Jews a land where the natives made up more than 90 percent of the population. When it was released, Britain had already promised the Arabs independence from the Ottoman Empire in the Hussein-McMahon correspondence. The British also promised the French, in a separate treaty known as Sykes-Picot agreement , that the majority of Palestine would be under international administration, while the rest of the region would be split between the two colonial powers after the war.

The declaration, however, meant that Palestine would come under British occupation and that the Palestinian Arabs who lived there would not gain independence. The question of why the Balfour Declaration was issued has been a subject of debate for decades, with historians using different sources to suggest various explanations.