The Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate for Palestine

The most striking thing about the Balfour Declaration is not that it promised a Jewish national home in Palestine, but that no one in the British cabinet in November 1917 expected the document’s promises to be honoured in the form they were later read. As the Israeli historian Avi Shlaim has put it, the letter to Lord Rothschild was “a classic piece of British duplicity” only if you assume that its authors cared about its precise wording; in practice, Arthur Balfour and his colleagues were writing a war measure to court Jewish opinion in Russia and the United States, and they expected the post-war settlement to dilute the commitment. The result, as we shall see, was a generation of British rule over a country that the mandatory power could neither govern nor relinquish.

The Wartime Bargain

Three wartime commitments collided. The first was the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence of 1915–1916, in which Sir Henry McMahon, the high commissioner in Cairo, had promised Sharif Hussein of Mecca an independent Arab state in exchange for an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire. The second was the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of May 1916, negotiated by Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, which divided the Levant into British and French spheres of influence. The third was the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917, in which Balfour wrote to Lord Walter Rothschild that “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours 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.”

These three promises were not just contradictory in substance; they were contradictory by design. The Foreign Office had treated the Middle East as a strategic theatre to be balanced, not a political order to be constructed. By the time the war ended in November 1918, Britain was committed to a French presence in Syria and Lebanon, to a vague Arab kingdom under the Hashemites, and to a Zionist programme that implied Jewish demographic ascendancy in Palestine.

The Making of the Declaration

Zionist diplomacy did the work that British interests only ratified. Chaim Weizmann, a Manchester chemist who would become the first president of Israel in 1949, had begun lobbying Lloyd George and Balfour in 1914. He was helped, as the historian Leonard Stein argued in The Balfour Declaration (1961), by a network of Christian Zionists led by Lord Shaftesbury and by the conviction in Whitehall that Jewish goodwill mattered more than Arab goodwill. The cabinet, meeting on 31 October 1917, included an explicit reference to “the sympathy of Jewish Zionists” in Russian and American public opinion. The decision to issue the declaration was, in that sense, a war-winning calculation before it was a policy about Palestine.

The British, for their part, also wanted a long-term presence in Palestine, partly for imperial communications (the country sat on the route to India via the Suez Canal) and partly because the Foreign Office had begun to think of Palestine as a buffer state under British tutelage. The mandatory system, when it arrived, was meant to make this arrangement permanent.

The Mandate, 1920–1939

The League of Nations confirmed the British Mandate for Palestine at the San Remo Conference in April 1920 and codified it in the Treaty of Sèvres in August 1920. The mandate came into formal effect in September 1923. Article 2 made Britain responsible for “placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish national home.” Article 6 required the mandatory power to “facilitate Jewish immigration” while “ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced.” These two obligations were, as the historian Bernard Wasserstein has written, “intrinsically incompatible.”

The high commissioners, beginning with Herbert Samuel in 1920, attempted to balance them. The 1929 riots, in which Jews were massacred at Hebron and the Western Wall became a focus of Muslim protest, demonstrated that the balance could not hold. The Peel Commission of 1937, chaired by Lord Peel, proposed partition; both sides rejected it. The White Paper of May 1939, which restricted Jewish immigration to 75,000 over five years and limited land transfers, satisfied no one: it enraged the Zionists, who now looked to the United States, while doing nothing to conciliate the Arab nationalist movement led by Haj Amin al-Husseini.

The End of the Mandate

By 1947, Britain had neither the resources nor the will to continue. The Labour government of Clement Attlee referred the question to the United Nations, which voted on 29 November 1947 for the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. The last high commissioner, Sir Alan Cunningham, left Palestine on 14 May 1948; the state of Israel was declared the same day. The 1948 war produced some 700,000 Palestinian refugees and the Arab-Israeli conflict that has shaped the region ever since.

What had been intended as a temporary expedient had become, in thirty years, an open wound. Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary, complained in Cabinet that the Americans had pushed Britain into a “hostile corner” — the standard complaint of a power that had made commitments faster than it could honour them.

Historiographical Note

The literature on the mandate is unusually polemical. The “traditional” Zionist view, represented by the work of Walter Laqueur and Bernard Lewis, treats the Balfour Declaration as the legitimate expression of a Jewish national right that Britain was right to support. The revisionist school, in the work of Avi Shlaim (The Iron Wall, 2000) and Rashid Khalidi (The Iron Cage, 2006), emphasises British cynicism and the early emergence of an Arab national movement that Britain refused to recognise. Elizabeth Monroe’s brief British Conquest of Palestine (1939) and Albert Hourani’s Syria and Lebanon (1946) remain indispensable older accounts. More recent work by James Barr (A Line in the Sand, 2011) has shown how thoroughly the British misled both sides.

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