Balfour Declaration. The ink that upended the history of the Middle East

"Ministry of Foreign Affairs".

November 1917, <>

Dear Lord Rothschild.

I am pleased to communicate to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following statement expressing sympathy for the aspirations of Zionist Jews that have been presented to the Government and agreed to.

His Majesty's Government view with sympathy the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine and will do their utmost to that end, provided that nothing shall be done which may impair the civil and religious rights of other communities residing in Palestine, or the rights enjoyed by Jews in other countries, or affect their political status. I would be grateful if you would bring this statement to the attention of the Zionist Union.

Sincere:

Arthur Balfour".

This short letter, with its ten lines, upended the history of an entire people, a people whose name Minister Balfour did not even bother, but described them as "other groups residing in Palestine", as if they were strangers or an emergency people on that land.

This letter was not a breakthrough or an idea born of the moment that Balfour wrote, signed, and sent as a diplomatic promise, but rather the result of years of meetings between the Zionist Organization, influential Jewish businessmen in the British state, and representatives of the French and British governments.

Britain and the "Zionist Dream"

Britain desperately wanted to achieve the "Zionist dream" on the land of Palestine, without imagining for a moment that this ink would blame it for the loss of the Palestinian right over the years, and would be the cause of protests by activists in the Palestinian cause all over the world, and its demand for an apology would remain alive every day, despite the fact that more than a hundred years have passed since the letter or promise.

This letter was the green light for the occupation of Palestine and the declaration of occupation of his state in 1948, thus keeping his promise that a Jewish national home would be established, but never committed to ensuring the preservation of the civil and religious rights of other communities as he described them. Thus, Britain, the superpower, became the legitimate façade on which the Zionist movement is based in achieving its plans.

In order to implement this on the ground, Palestine had to fall under the British mandate, as the Zionist groups refused during secret meetings with the British government during 1917 that the trusteeship of Palestine be joint between France and Britain, they do not want France to leave its colonial cultural impact on the Jewish identity as it did in the areas it controlled before and after the Sykes-Picot Agreement.

Herbert Samuel wrote the first official note in 1915 in which he spoke about Palestine

The negotiations of this agreement began secretly since 1915, that is, during the First World War, as it was based on the premise of the defeat of the Ottoman Empire and the distribution of its territory between the British and French coloniaries, and indeed it was signed between the French diplomat "François Georges Picot" and the British "Mark Sykes" in 1916. The British Mandate for Palestine ran from 1920 to 1948, and shortly after its withdrawal the Zionist movement declared its state.

Britain had agreed to these Zionist plans to serve its interests at the political level, as it mobilized the support of many influential Jews from the Zionist movement during its First World War, against Germany, the Ottoman Empire and the Austrian Empire, which began on July 28, 1914 and ended on November 11, 1918.

On the other hand, it turned to the Treaty of "Sykes-Picot", which was not satisfied with its division completely, but angry with France's control over the majority of the territory, and by raising the issue of land for the Jews that guaranteed the French ceding of Palestine, which happened when the Levant and Mesopotamia became under the British mandate at the "San Remo" conference in April 1920 within the framework of "Sykes-Picot".

Samuel.. Britain's Jewish Minister

It was not purely political either, but there was a special dream among some British Jewish ministers in the British government that all this would happen, and they sought to do so even long before Balfour's appointment as foreign minister, most notably Herbert Samuel, who historians believe was the minister of health.

Samuel wrote the first official memorandum in 1915 in which he talked about Palestine, and the possibility of it being a homeland for Zionist Jews, and then passed it on to the members of the British ministry, the memorandum started from the assumption of the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, and he also proposed the establishment of an English protectorate after the war on the land of Palestine, encouraging Jewish settlement in it, giving priority to Jewish immigration, and building settlement institutions that eventually help settle a Jewish community of three million, to become self-sufficient until it forms a sovereign state that is a center. For a new civilization.

The leadership of the Zionist Organization in London continued to organize secret meetings

The memo attracted the attention of David Lloyd George (Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during the latter half of World War I), but British Prime Minister Herbert Esquith at the time was not enthusiastic enough, and when David Lloyd George took over as head of the Balfour cabinet, he decided to embrace the project.

Because of his colonial interests, Samuel was appointed the first British High Commissioner to Palestine in 1920, after the Balfour Declaration. In August of the same year, the immigration law was passed, allowing 16,500 Jews to enter Palestine, but due to the rejectionist Arab reaction, Britain slightly reversed its policy and began to move within the concept of the country's absorptive power.

Samuel aided Zionist settlement activity on many other levels, including the recognition of Zionist political institutions in Palestine and the recognition of Hebrew as a local language, and the number of Zionist settlements during his reign increased from 44 to 100.

Behind the scenes of the Balfour Declaration

The leaders of the Zionist Organization in London – Chaim Weizmann, Nahum Sokolov and Moses Guster – continued to organize secret meetings, and created pressure groups since the beginning of 1917, and most of these meetings took place in the presence of some British government officials, most notably Mark Sykes and Herbert Samuel, and the organization's leaders were sure that Sykes needed them to reopen the Sykes-Picot agreement that he concluded with the French.

These three men began to convince France and Italy of the importance of Jewish influence, albeit by spreading exaggerations and rumors that Zionism was the key to winning the war by the Allies and that all Jews wanted a homeland on the land of Palestine.

Gaster was soon excluded from the organization's leadership meetings in exchange for Weizmann's wisdom and intelligence, because the French government delegate Picot did not like Gaster, as the latter was fierce in his desire for a Jewish homeland immediately after the end of the war without concern for the interests of the major powers.

These meetings paved the way for subsequent developments from the emergence of the Balfour Declaration, and before it a timid French declaration that did not gain the fame of the Balfour Message, in which France clarified its approval of the Jewish settlement of the land of Palestine. Then the organization's leaders formed a committee to write the first draft of the letter at the request of Balfour himself, to present it to his government, and this committee planned to declare the demands of the Zionist movement in June 1917, and for the first time in this declaration the term "national home for the Jews" appears, so that this declaration is the same message as the Balfour Declaration later.

National or Jewish homeland?

Many Zionists protested the use of the term "national home" instead of "Jewish state" and even considered it a betrayal. Nahum Sokolov (described by historians as polite and elegant) convinced them that we should not go too far, and now accept what the British government has.

In September of the same year, the British government discussed the Balfour Message before its announcement, but the surprise was that the Jewish minister in the British government at the time, "Edward Montguire," strongly rejected it, and considered Judaism a religion and not a nationality, adding, "I reject that Palestine is associated with the Jews or a suitable place for them to live." Therefore, the draft letter was drafted several times, hence the paragraph "Nothing shall be done that may lead to the derogation of the civil and religious rights of other groups residing in Palestine."

Britain did not feel the enormity of what it had done, especially since it included in 1922 the "Balfour Declaration" in the League of Nations Mandate.

When the letter was drafted, Chaim Weizmann (the most famous Zionist figure in the Zionist heritage after Theodor Herzl) sent it to the leaders of his movement in America asking them for opinion, and then the famous letter of the "Balfour Declaration" came on the second of November 1917 by British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, who was known for his famous admiration for the figure of Weizmann, and his sympathy for the project of establishing a state for the Jews. This was the beginning of the realization of the Zionist dream of establishing a homeland for them at the expense of another homeland and another people.

A historical mistake. and refused to apologize

Britain did not feel the enormity of what it had done, especially since in 1922 it included the Balfour Declaration in the Mandate of the League of Nations (later the United Nations), which legitimized it.

Palestinian protests escalated by Christians and Muslims against the British Mandate and Zionist groups throughout the twenties, and complaints by Christian churches to Britain against Zionist gangs increased, after describing them as attempts to control the holy places.

From the outset, what was happening was caused by stoking sectarianism and nationalism through biased mandate policies, only for Britain to realize that it had tampered with the hornet's nest. But it is too late, as the Great Palestinian Revolt of 1936 broke out against Britain and the Zionists together on the land of Palestine, the martyrs fell, and the Palestinian cause began to take on moral and human rights resonance worldwide.

Britain soon tried to avoid its historical mistake but without apologizing, publishing the so-called White Paper in 1939, known as the "McDonald Paper" (named after Malcolm MacDonald, the British Colonial Secretary at the time), a political document issued by the latter under the authority of the British government in which the idea of dividing Palestine into two states, one Jewish and the other Palestinian, was abandoned, and the pledge to create a national home for the Jews in an independent Palestinian state governed by Palestinian Arabs and Jews, based on the proportion of each He also pledged to limit the number of Jews allowed to immigrate to Palestine in the next five years.

This document was rejected by the Arabs as well as by the Jews, and it was not implemented, due to the opposition of Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of Britain from 1940 to 1945, and the outbreak of World War II as well.

Because of what has happened in Palestine since the Balfour Declaration in 1917 in terms of martyrs, destruction and settlement, control over land, water and energy sources, in addition to the violation of the holy places, and the fact that Palestine is the only country in the world that is still under occupation, Britain is required every day to apologize to the Palestinians. But until this moment, on the 102nd anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, Britain ignores the matter, as if the suffering of the peoples who are still trying to escape the injustice of the occupation does not concern it.

On November 1917, Britain's permanent representative to the United Nations, Karen Pierce, confirmed the UK's satisfaction with the Balfour Declaration, in which the British government sought in <> the establishment of a Jewish nation-state in the Palestinian territories.