A few weeks ago, a friend of a dear friend asked me,
“Does the Balfour Declaration prove the state/country for the Jews did not belong to them and was mostly a Palestinian area under British control?”
It’s an interesting question and one I’ve never heard before. Here’s my answer:
First, what is the Balfour Declaration? In short, it was a November 2, 1917 (mid-WWI) letter from UK Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Walter Rothschild, a leader in the British Zionist community. It expressed the Crown’s support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, which was under Ottoman control at the time and had a Jewish population of around 60,000 (out of a total of about 689,000). To give you an idea of how those demographics measured vis-à-vis other Middle Eastern states, at the time, Palestine had fewer Jewish residents than Iraq or Yemen, and a bit more than Lebanon and Syria. (Several Arab nations had centuries-old, thriving Jewish communities at the time, and the fate of those communities is a tragic story for a different post.)
At the time, multiple locations had been considered for a future Jewish state, including Uganda, Guyana, Tasmania, and even the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska. However, the Balfour Declaration helped solidify the location of the ancient kingdom of Israel and source of the Jewish diaspora when the Romans sacked Jerusalem in 70 CE as the eventual location of the modern State of Israel. The full text is very short, but the key portion of the Declaration reads:
“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood 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.”
Legally, the Balfour Declaration was toothless – nothing more than a statement of intent that wasn’t officially binding on anyone. But it expressed an ambition that the British government did eventually work to carry out. It did so through the 1947 UN Partition Plan that called for historic Palestine to be split into two states – one for Palestinians and one for Jews. As we know, only half of that plan ever came to fruition – because today the State of Israel exists and the State of Palestine does not (another tragic story for another different post).
Legally speaking, the Balfour Declaration was not an acknowledgement or denial of anyone’s legal title to any portion of the land, nor was it a recognition or refutation of any particular group or government’s claim to have sovereignty over the area. It was merely a letter.
So technically, the answer to my friend’s question above is: No, the Balfour Declaration doesn’t the prove the land set aside for a Jewish state in the 1947 Partition Plan did not belong to them at that time, but it doesn’t disprove it, either, but that’s because the Declaration wasn’t about who owned the land – it was about what the British government thought should happen to the land. It’s probably a bit reductive to say it this way, but as far as the British government was concerned, it didn’t matter who owned the land because they Britain controlled it.
Concordantly with all this, as you read about the history of the region, one of the key facts to remember is that, at the time of the Declaration, the population of Palestinian was mostly Muslim; it was only 10.2% Christian and 8.5% Jewish. I don’t know the exact amount offhand, but around one-third of Jewish population were Ashkenazi (European, especially eastern European) and Sephardic (Iberian) Jews who had immigrated from Europe over the preceding decades, while the other two-thirds were either Mizrahim (Jews who had always lived in Palestine or in some cases, other Middle Eastern countries) or Sephardic Jews whose families had immigrated to Palestine before the Zionist movement gained steam in the late 19th century. So the percentage of Palestinian Jews in 1917 who had a multi-generational presence in the land was probably closer to 6% than 8.5%, based on the data above. But what is key to remember is that, while there has been a Jewish presence in the land for millennia, that does not equate to the idea of a full-blown Jewish state neatly meshing with the demographics of 1917 Palestine – or, thirty years later, 1947 Palestine.
Beyond this, it is worth noting what I would guess may be the underlying source of the original question above. There is a famous saying that you may have heard – that Palestine was “a land without a people, for a people without a land.” That saying is, to be blunt, wildly fictional. As noted above, near the time of the Balfour Declaration, Palestine had a population of about 689,000. It was most certainly not a land without a people. It was a land with a thriving population. So, if you hear someone say the land was empty before the State of Israel was declared in 1948, they are either uneducated, mis-educated, or dishonest.
Conversely, you may have heard someone say that the Israelis aren’t even from the land of Palestine – that they are from Europe. Well, a lot of them do originate from European families that immigrated in the last 125 years or so. But 36% of Israel’s population is comprised of Mizrahi Jews. That doesn’t mean that 36% of them are from families that were in Palestine 125 years ago when the Zionist movement took off, but rather that 36% of them are from families that were in the Middle East 125 years ago. I don’t know the portion of that 36% that originate from Palestine vs. Yemen, Morocco, Iraq, etc., though I’d presume the vast majority were Palestinian Mizrahim. But my point is here that it is – once again – wildly fictional to deny that Jews have been present in Palestine for millennia, as some pro-Palestinian activists continue to do.
The fact is that in 1917, Palestine was owned by Palestinians – Muslim Palestinians, Jewish Palestinians, and Christian Palestinians (as well as a few other groups, such as the Druze). And they were soon to be out from under the control of the Ottoman Empire but would then immediately be subjected to the rule of the UK under what was known as the British Mandate (hence, the geographic term, “Mandatory Palestine.”) So, while Palestinians continued to own their land, they also still continued to be denied the basic human right of political self-determination – the freedom to choose who would rule them and how.
Three decades later, under the 1947 UN Partition Plan, Western powers – who gave no voice to the Palestinians on this issue – decided to split Mandatory Palestine into two ethnostates. Under international law, it was the passage of the Partition Plan by the UN that established the legal right of the State of Israel to exist.1 It also established a formal legal right for a State of Palestine to exist.
I stress the word formal here because, as a basic matter of human rights, the Palestinian population never needed UN approval to have the right to its own state: Whereas the Zionist project was comprised of non-Palestinian Jews immigrating with the intention of creating their own state on land were others already lived (and therefore had to be bought out or expelled), the Palestinians were already there and they had been there for centuries – Muslim, Christian, and Jewish – they had been born there since time out of mind. And they had a basic human right to determine their own form of government and be whatever kind of nation-state they wanted to be. However, they also suffered the colossal misfortune of being perennially dominated by other foreign/colonial powers. While they were a distinct people group, indigenous to the land and possessing a unique culture, they were never allowed to rule themselves. (Consider a slightly more modern day example of the Kurds.)
But that history does not change the elementary human right of self-determination. This is why when you hear people say “There never was a Palestine” it’s simply untrue. Pick up a history of the Roman Empire and you’ll see the area has been called Palestine for over two thousand years. And a recently as the mid-20th century, Jews around the world also referred to it as Palestine – and in fact even promoted tourism there under that name, as evidenced by the famous poster designed by Austrian Jewish artist Franz Krausz in 1936 for the Tourist Development Association of Palestine.
- Some will vehemently disagree with the notion that Israel has a legal right to exist. Similarly, some will say that because of the Partition Plan, Palestinians who fled what is now within the borders of Israel during the 1948 war have no claim to the land whatsoever. The appropriate method for answering these questions is through an objective application of international law. It is a lens which is not perfect, but it is also the only one that all parties have a legal obligation to comply with – and any other approach yields problematic results on an exponentially greater scale. ↩︎
