Balfour Declaration

Impact

For Zionist leaders the Balfour Declaration clearly represented, at long last, a triumph for their hard work. However, celebrations aside, the letter otherwise made very little impact in the short term. In Russia, the significance of the declaration was completely outweighed by the Bolshevik seizure of power. By the end of 1917, the new Bolshevik regime had not only withdrawn Russia from the war but had also proceeded to embarrass the Allies with the publication of secret wartime negotiations such as the Sykes-Picot Agreement. In the United States, there was no discernible change in official policy; in fact, the Zionist movement continued well into the interwar period to attract only a small minority of American Jews. As for the wartime fears that Germany might have preempted the entente with a declaration of its own, it was found that Germany had not been close to making such a decision. “The declaration was simply one more item in a long catalogue of wartime documents,” Malcolm Yapp concludes, “and no sooner was it published than it was virtually forgotten by all except Zionists” (p. 291).

As for the Hashemites, the British initially encouraged Emir Faisal to cooperate with Zionism. Having established himself in Damascus (in modern-day Syria) during the war, Faisal's demands for independence came up against French imperial ambitions once the war ended. He thus had to rely increasingly on British goodwill. Whether or not Faisal had the authority to speak on behalf of the Palestinian Arabs, he did agree to meet with Weizmann, and they struck a deal on January 3, 1919, in which Weizmann committed the Zionists to providing economic assistance to Faisal's state and Faisal endorsed the Balfour Declaration. Faisal made his signature conditional, however, upon the fulfillment of his demand for Arab independence, a condition that was not fulfilled. He later renounced Zionist aspirations for a separate government.

In Palestine, British authorities did everything they could to tone down the effect of the pro-Zionist policy. Much to the chagrin of the Zionist leadership, no practical initiatives were allowed by the military administration, which was trying to restore order and stability to a destroyed landscape. But the rhetoric that had spread across Europe and North America made its way also to Palestine, and an increasingly wary Palestinian Arab population became as convinced as the Zionist leadership of the challenge Zionism posed to Arab patrimony of the country. On the first anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, which coincided with the end of the war and an opening up of political activity, Arab dignitaries and representatives petitioned the British denouncing the Balfour Day parade that was held in Jerusalem. From then on, Zionism became the chief oppositional factor in the articulation of a Palestinian Arab nationalist identity.

The hostility directed toward Zionism in Palestine did not deter the British government, which maintained its regard for Zionism into the immediate postwar period. This was especially important when the Allied Supreme Council awarded Britain the Mandate for Palestine at the 1920 San Remo conference. The genesis of the mandate lay in the wartime promises made by President Wilson to put an end to the secret diplomacy of imperialistically minded European leaders. The World War I slogan most often associated with Wilson—“the war to make the world safe for democracy”—both greatly bolstered the Allied war effort, by endowing it with a noble legacy, and gravely threatened Allied war aims, focused as they were on the expansion of European empire across the globe, especially into former Ottoman lands. The drafting of the mandate document, though it has not attracted as much attention as that of the Balfour Declaration, represented a crucial step: The mandate not only incorporated the entire text of the Balfour Declaration but also included several articles specifying the nature of the obligation of Britain, as mandatory power, to support the establishment of a national Jewish home in Palestine. These obligations included facilitating Jewish immigration and encouraging Jewish settlement on the land. Meanwhile, as was the case with the Balfour Declaration itself, not a single article of the mandate document referred specifically to the Palestinian Arab population. Palestine thus represented a striking anomaly among the League of Nations mandates, with the small Jewish minority, composing about 10 percent of the population, being placed in a uniquely privileged position.

The significance of the Palestinian mandate lay in the force attained by the Balfour Declaration once officially sanctioned by the newly formed League of Nations. In many ways, the mandate system originated as a way for Britain and France to disguise old-fashioned imperial acquisition as enlightened tutelage. In one important aspect, however, the mandate was more than just a fig leaf. Though Palestine in the interwar period walked and talked like a colony, the mandate system differed from prewar imperialism to the extent that Britain remained fettered by an institution that placed features of the administration of Palestine in the court of international public opinion. Once the Balfour Declaration was written into the terms of the League of Nations mandate sanctioning British rule in Palestine, one of several competing wartime promises was turned into a binding contract mediated by the League of Nations. Restrained in this way, British officials found it very difficult to even consider rescinding the promise of support for a Jewish national home, whatever the pressure being felt by British officials in Palestine caught in the simmering conflict between the nationalist demands of the Jewish and Arab communities. These pressures, which in the end Britain proved unable to contain, exploded in the bloody Arab revolt of 1936–1939.

The Arab revolt transformed British plans for Palestine. Facing the prospect of war with Germany, British officials accepted in 1939 that it was not possible to create “a national home” in Palestine if it meant Zionist domination over the Arab majority. Reinterpretations of the “singularly ambiguous” Balfour Declaration lay at the center of official debates at this time (Cohen, p. 40). Some officials stressed the provision for the protection of Arab interests; others argued that the obligation to help build “a national home” for the Jewish people had by 1939 been redeemed by the assistance given during the preceding two decades to the development of Jewish political, cultural, and economic institutions in Palestine. That the vague terms of the Balfour Declaration would in the end prove problematic had been foreseen by Lord Curzon back in 1917 when outlining his opposition to the whole idea: “We ought at least to consider,” he had stressed, “whether we are encouraging a practicable idea, or preparing the way for disappointment and failure” (qtd. in Renton, p. 72).