Balfour Declaration

Context

The outbreak of World War I in 1914 forced profound changes in Britain's Middle East policies. During the next three years the nation signed a number of controversial treaties and agreements with different partners. Prior to the war, Britain's long-standing concern in this strategic region was to protect the sea routes to India. Britain had been able to satisfy its own interests in the late nineteenth century by securing control over Egypt and the Suez Canal. Beyond that, the main aim of British diplomacy was to preserve the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire as a way to guard against Russian expansionism. However, with the Ottoman entry into the war as an ally of Germany, new policies had to be adopted. Often hesitant and ambiguous, British wartime policies resulted in a confusing array of declarations. Despite the best efforts of British diplomats in the postwar years to square the contradictions, the promises concerning that part of the Ottoman Empire known as Palestine—the future disposition of which Britain pledged to no fewer than three different allies—have remained the source of much controversy.

Prior to being presented in November 1917 to Zionist leaders, the fate of Palestine was the subject of two separate British agreements concluded with Arab and French negotiators. Britain was greatly concerned over the potential impact of war with the Ottoman sultan-caliph and so quickly directed its attention to establishing an alliance with Sharif Husayn ibn ‘Ali, the Arab emir of the Muslim holy city of Mecca and head of the Hashemite family. In return for the launching of an Arab rebellion against the Ottomans by Husayn's son, Faisal, the British high commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, promised Husayn money, munitions, and the right to establish an independent Arab state. The negotiation was worked out in an exchange of letters between July 1915 and March 1916, in what later became known as the McMahon-Husayn correspondence. The ambiguity of territorial boundaries set out in this correspondence resulted in great confusion over whether Palestine was in fact promised to the Arabs, as part of Husayn's Arab state, or was deliberately excluded by Britain in order to accommodate the interests of France.

Even while negotiating with Husayn, the British were secretly carving up the Middle East into spoils of war to be shared with European allies. Through the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Ottoman provinces of the Hashemite's hoped-for Arab kingdom were divided into a number of successor states, each of them under some degree of control by Britain or France. The repercussions of this calculated yet arbitrary drawing of new state boundaries resonate to this day. As for Palestine specifically, Britain resisted the attempts of French negotiators to secure for themselves control over the whole of Syria down to the Egyptian border, and in the end the agreement placed Palestine under the control of an international administration.

By the end of the following year, however, Britain had recalculated its own strategic interests in Palestine. The region had become the site of important military operations, and government officials concluded that Palestine's value as a buffer to Egypt was too high to make tolerable any sort of foreign presence there after the war. These new calculations were emerging just as British forces were amassing on the Sinai Peninsula to push back the Ottoman forces and break through to Palestine. Most significantly, the new calculations were developed in tandem with efforts of the British Jewish community to persuade the country's leaders that Zionist interests in developing Palestine for themselves complemented British interests. In November 1917, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, thus concluding in less than three years a third round of negotiations over the promised land. The following month, British imperial forces occupied Jerusalem, ending over four hundred years of Ottoman rule and initiating over thirty years of British rule.