dec 21, 1916 - Balfour Declaration
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To many Israelis, “It is basically yet another symbol of Albion’s perfidy,” journalist Anshel Pfeffer explained in Haaretz in 2012. To many Palestinians, it is “the single most destructive political document on the Middle East in the twentieth century,” historian Walid Khalidi told a British audience. To Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, it deserves an apology from the British; his foreign minister has deemed it “the crime which they committed against our nation.”
“It” is the Balfour Declaration, a three-sentence letter written on November 2, 1917, while the First World War still raged. Its author, Arthur James Balfour, was at the time foreign secretary and had previously served as prime minister. Balfour was a deeply committed Christian who was steeped in the Old Testament, a scion of the British aristocracy, and an influential member of the Conservative Party. The letter expressed vague “favour” for an equally vague “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. Numerous historians have studied the multiple factors that led to the Declaration, though it’s safe to say that, among the parliament members who approved it, love for the Jewish people was not the primary one.
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