# Balfour Declaration A sixty-seven-word letter dated **2 November 1917** from British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, stating that His Majesty's Government "view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people," and would use its best endeavours to facilitate it — provided that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country." It is the founding document of the international legal case for [[Zionism]], and the ambiguity of its drafting has never been resolved. ## The ambiguities, which were deliberate - **"A national home"** is not a term of art in any legal system. It was chosen precisely because "state" would have been unacceptable to the Cabinet and to the Arab world. - **"In Palestine"** rather than "as Palestine" — a home *within* the territory, not the whole of it. - **"Existing non-Jewish communities"** described roughly 90% of the population without naming them, protected their *civil and religious* rights, and conspicuously omitted their political ones. - It was issued by a government that did not yet control the territory, promising it to a people who did not live there, while separately negotiating its partition with France in the [[Sykes-Picot Agreement]] and separately encouraging Arab revolt against the Ottomans. ## Why Britain issued it The motives were mixed and have been argued over ever since: a belief that world Jewish opinion could be moved to keep Russia in the war and bring America further into it; a strategic wish to establish a friendly presence near the Suez Canal; genuine sympathy in a Cabinet several of whose members, Balfour and Lloyd George among them, had been raised in a Protestant restorationist tradition that read Jewish return as scriptural. That last strand connects the Declaration directly to the American movement filed at [[Christian Zionism]] — the same nineteenth-century current, one government earlier. The Declaration was incorporated into the **League of Nations Mandate for Palestine** in 1922, giving it force in international law until the Mandate ended in 1948. > [!important] ⭐ The finding: a promise vague enough to obtain agreement is a promise that guarantees a later fight > Every party to the Declaration read it as consistent with their maximal position, which is why it was signable. **The ambiguity did not defer the conflict; it structured it**, by giving each side a documentary basis for believing the other was in breach. Compare [[Sykes-Picot Agreement]] and the [[Treaty of Wuchale]], where a translation discrepancy did the same work in Ethiopia. When a foundational text is celebrated by opposed parties, the vault's default assumption is that it is doing this. ## See Also - [[Israeli History Hub]] · [[Zionism]] · [[Revisionist Zionism]] · [[Christian Zionism]] - [[Sykes-Picot Agreement]] · [[Ottoman Empire]] · [[Lebanese History Hub]] - [[World War I]] · [[League of Nations]] · [[British History Hub]] - [[Six-Day War]] · [[Oslo Accords]] · [[Israel]]