Balfour Declaration

About the Author

The Balfour Declaration underwent successive drafts between July and October 1917. The main responsibility for the phrasing and rephrasing of the declaration was shared by Arthur Balfour, Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Lord Alfred Milner, and Leopold Amery. Balfour, a former prime minister (1902–1905), had graduated from Cambridge University in 1869 and became a Conservative member of Parliament in 1874. In what is sometimes referred to as “the first Balfour declaration,” he had, as prime minister in 1903, supported a proposal to build a Jewish national presence in Uganda.

David Lloyd George, a Liberal member of Parliament since 1890, was appointed secretary of state for war in mid-1916 and became prime minister by the end of the year. The succession was controversial, largely owing to the nature of his authority; describing the concentration of war strategy in the hands of Lloyd George and his streamlined war cabinet, D. K. Fieldhouse notes that “never in modern times had the decision-making process in Britain been concentrated in so few hands” (p. 132). For Lloyd George, support for Zionism was deeply rooted in his Christian faith, and he would refer to Palestine by its ancient name of Canaan. Like Balfour, Lloyd George viewed Jews as a separate race whose global influence could so benefit Britain that, as he wrote later, Britain had no real choice other than to “make a contract with Jewry” (Segev, p. 38).

Such racial perceptions of identity were also readily apparent in the thought of Lord Milner, who was brought into the war cabinet as a minister without portfolio in December 1916, largely because of his administrative capabilities. But Milner, who had graduated from Oxford University in 1877 imbued with notions of imperial service and had been appointed governor of the Cape Colony and high commissioner of southern Africa in 1897, also believed firmly in the primordial nature of racial bonds. Significantly, his protégé from the colonial administration of South Africa, Leopold Amery—a lifelong imperialist and Zionist, appointed in 1917 as assistant secretary to the war cabinet secretariat—proposed in one draft of the declaration that the term “the Jewish people” be replaced with “the Jewish race.”