The Balfour Declaration and British Mandate
How a 67-word letter from 1917 and three decades of British colonial rule set the stage for one of the world's most enduring conflicts.
The Letter That Changed Everything
On November 2, 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour sent a letter to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community. The letter — just 67 words in its operative clause — declared that the British government viewed 'with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.' This became known as the Balfour Declaration.
The declaration was remarkable for several reasons. First, Britain was promising a homeland in a territory it did not yet control — Ottoman Palestine was still being fought over in World War I. Second, the wording was deliberately ambiguous: 'a national home' is not the same as 'a state,' and the declaration also stipulated that 'nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.' At the time, those 'existing non-Jewish communities' — overwhelmingly Arab — constituted roughly 90% of the population.
The motivations behind the declaration were complex. Some British officials were genuine Zionist sympathizers who believed the Jewish people deserved a homeland after centuries of persecution. Others were motivated by wartime strategy: they hoped to win support from Jewish communities in the United States and Russia at a critical moment in the war. There was also an imperial calculation — a British-allied entity in Palestine would protect the Suez Canal and the land route to India.
For the Zionist movement, which had been building since Theodor Herzl's First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, the Balfour Declaration was a diplomatic triumph. For the Arab population of Palestine, it was a betrayal. The British had also made promises to Sharif Hussein of Mecca in the 1915-1916 Hussein-McMahon Correspondence, suggesting Arab sovereignty over much of the former Ottoman territory — though the exact boundaries remained disputed. And in the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, Britain and France had already carved up the region between themselves.