The
Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the
British Government in 1917 during the
First World War announcing its support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in
Palestine, then an
Ottoman region with a small minority
Jewish population. The declaration was contained in a letter dated 2 November 1917 from
Arthur Balfour, the British
foreign secretary, to
Lord Rothschild, a leader of the
British Jewish community, for transmission to the
Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. The text of the declaration was published in the press on 9 November 1917.
Following Britain's declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire in November 1914, it began to consider the future of Palestine. Within two months
a memorandum was circulated to the
War Cabinet by a Zionist member,
Herbert Samuel, proposing the support of Zionist ambitions to enlist the support of Jews in the wider war.
A committee was established in April 1915 by
British prime minister H. H. Asquith to determine their policy towards the Ottoman Empire including Palestine. Asquith, who had favoured post-war reform of the Ottoman Empire, resigned in December 1916; his replacement
David Lloyd George favoured partition of the Empire. The first negotiations between the British and the
Zionists took place at a conference on 7 February 1917 that included
Sir Mark Sykes and the Zionist leadership. Subsequent discussions led to Balfour's request, on 19 June, that Rothschild and
Chaim Weizmann draft a public declaration. Further drafts were discussed by the British Cabinet during September and October, with input from Zionist and
anti-Zionist Jews but with no representation from the local population in Palestine.
By late 1917, the wider war had reached a stalemate, with two of
Britain's allies not fully engaged: the United States had yet to suffer a casualty, and the Russians were in the midst of a
revolution. A
stalemate in southern Palestine was broken by the
Battle of Beersheba on 31 October 1917. The release of the final declaration was authorised on 31 October; the preceding Cabinet discussion had referenced perceived propaganda benefits amongst the worldwide Jewish community for the Allied war effort.
The opening words of the declaration represented the first public expression of support for Zionism by a major political power. The term "national home" had no precedent in international law, and was intentionally vague as to whether a
Jewish state was contemplated. The intended boundaries of Palestine were not specified, and the British government later confirmed that the words "in Palestine" meant that the Jewish national home was not intended to cover all of Palestine. The second half of the declaration was added to satisfy opponents of the policy, who had claimed that it would otherwise prejudice the position of the local population of Palestine and encourage
antisemitism worldwide by "stamping the Jews as strangers in their native lands". The declaration called for safeguarding the civil and religious rights for the
Palestinian Arabs, who composed the
vast majority of the local population, and also the rights and political status of the Jewish communities in countries outside of Palestine. The British government acknowledged in 1939 that the local population's wishes and interests should have been taken into account, and recognised in 2017 that the declaration should have called for the protection of the Palestinian Arabs' political rights.
The declaration greatly increased popular support for Zionism within
Jewish communities worldwide, and became a core component of the
British Mandate for Palestine, the founding document of
Mandatory Palestine. It indirectly led to the emergence of the
State of Israel and is considered a principal cause of the ongoing
Israeli–Palestinian conflict – often described as the most intractable in the world. Controversy remains over a number of areas, such as whether the declaration contradicted earlier promises the British made to
the Sharif of Mecca in the
McMahon–Hussein correspondence.
Background
Early British support
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