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Jerusalem, 1925: British General Edmund Allenby, former British prime minister Arthur Balfour and First High Commissioner of Palestine, Herbert Samuel
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“It’s a boy”, Sir Mark Sykes, the government’s negotiator on the Middle East, told the Zionist leader, Chaim Weizmann, eventually to be the first president of Israel, on October 31, 1917. Two days later, on November 2, the British commitment to Zionism was born, with the Balfour Declaration that the “Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”.But the Declaration had no legal effect. It was a politician’s promise by Arthur Balfour, foreign secretary in Lloyd George’s wartime government. And, as we know, it is not unknown for such promises to be broken. So it did not wholly satisfy Zionists who had always sought “a home in Palestine guaranteed by public law”.
That was achieved in 1922 when the League of Nations awarded the Mandate for Palestine, including the Declaration, to Britain. And in 1922, the Lloyd George government issued a White Paper confirming that Jews were in Palestine as of right and would eventually constitute the majority.
Why was the Balfour Declaration made? Many claim that the motives were strategic – to secure the support of American and Russian Jews for the war effort and pre-empt German support for Zionism.
But that would not explain why the Declaration became more than a promise in 1922 after the war had ended.
Yet Israel did not come into existence until 1948, over 30 years after the Declaration. Guilt over the Holocaust, some say, was the prime motive for its creation. That is absurd. There was precious little sympathy for Zionism on the part of Attlee and Bevin in the late 1940s nor from the American State Department.
It is more accurate to say that had Israel been created in 1938 rather than 1948, the Holocaust would not have occurred.
Before 1948, Jews, in the words of the historian, Lewis Namier, suffered from too much history but not enough geography. But in 1948, Jews became subjects of history rather than objects, able to determine their own future.
That is why, as Winston Churchill told the Commons in January 1949, the creation of Israel was “an event in world history to be viewed in the perspective, not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand or even three thousand years”.
Lacking a state, Jews were helpless in the face of Nazism. But after the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023, which the then German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, compared to those of the Nazis, Jews could hit back at their enemies.
Balfour himself was far from being a sentimental philo-Semite. Indeed, he told Chaim Weizmann that visiting Bayreuth years before, he had met Cosima Wagner, the composer’s widow. and had “shared many of her anti-Semitic postulates”.
It is not that Balfour was himself anti-Semitic. But he believed that anti-Semitism was endemic wherever Jews lived in considerable numbers and, according to Weizmann, “he was thinking more of the West European Jews than those of Eastern Europe”.
Until recently, Balfour’s fears would have appeared absurd. In the years between the wars, Britain remained untainted by the anti-Semitic movements ravaging the Continent. When Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, took up anti-Semitism in the 1930s, he became a political pariah.
But hostility to Israel has now morphed into anti-Semitism in countries hitherto relatively free of it; Britain, Australia, Canada and the United States.
In Britain it re-appeared, not amongst ill-educated inadequates of the sort who supported Mosley, but first in the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, and then in our top universities, amongst our future political leaders. In Andrew Neil’s words, the more prestigious the university, the stupider the students!
The revival of anti-Semitism has shown in a way no Zionist arguments ever could, the need for a state with a Jewish majority where Jews can live without fear.
The Balfour Declaration contained an important proviso – “that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. It did not mention the national rights of Arabs, since at that time many believed that such rights were reserved for those of European origin.
All the same, “the civil and religious rights” of Arabs are better protected in Israel than in the murderous regimes and failed states which constitute much of the rest of today’s Middle East.
The early Zionists hoped for Arab acceptance. But a brief period of amity soon gave rise, inevitably no doubt, to a persistent and often violent conflict between two national claims, each backed by religion.
Balfour would not have been surprised. As chief secretary for Ireland in the 1880s, he had been accused of being unjust to Irish nationalists. “Justice” he mused, “there is not enough to go round”. And indeed in the Middle East there isn’t.
Nevertheless, Israel has become an insurance mechanism for Jews against anti-Semitism; and sadly no one can predict when or where that mechanism will be needed.
And that is why, as the diplomatic historian, Tom Otte, has argued, the Balfour Declaration stands as “one of the few monuments to humanity in the 20th century”.
Sir Vernon Bogdanor is Professor of Government, King’s College, London and a member of the International Advisory Council of the Israel Democracy Institute
