What It Was, Was The Balfour Declaration

and boy, did it ever set off the awfullest fight!

Every week, an average of around 120 Palestinians are killed in and around Gaza as they desperately seek food and relief. Israel’s present day war on Gaza has killed at least 56,331 people and wounded 132,632 per Gaza’s Health Ministry. These statistics are from October of 2023 to present; however, the ethnic cleansing of this region began more than 100 years beforehand.

1915

Harken back to World War I. In July 1915, the Emir of Mecca, Hussein ibn Ali, and the British high Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, engaged in correspondence that effectively traded British support of an independent Arab state for Arab assistance in opposing the Ottoman Empire. Hussein claimed to represent all Arabs and sought independence for the entirety of all Arab-speaking lands to the east of Egypt; McMahon, however, insisted that lands in French and British spheres of influence would not be included. The disagreements continued until no formal resolution could be established.

1916

Secret negotiations came to light between Britain and France in the form of 1916s Sykes-Picot Agreement. On May 19, 1916, these two countries divided up the Arab territories of the former Ottoman Empire (1517-1914), this just after Britain’s secret agreement with Russia to divide control of Mesopotamia and the Dardanelles between them. These pacts allowed for nominal Arab governments under French or British supervision, leaving Palestine under international administration.

1917-The Balfour Declaration

Meanwhile, Jewish leaders in Europe had been working against the harsh antisemitic treatment of Jews in Europe and beyond. One leader in particular, the chemist Chaim Weizmann, lobbied British government officials to publicly commit to building a homeland for Jews in Palestine: the brainchild of political Zionism founder Theodore Herzl. The British, many of whom were religious Christian Zionists themselves, hoped that in exchange for their support in this endeavour, Jews would help to finance the growing expenses of WWI. In addition, the Foreign Office hoped that Jews might be persuaded to convince the United States to join the war. On November 17, 1917, the British government expressed its support for the Jewish Zionist aspirations in the form of a letter from Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lionel Walter, 2nd Lord Rothschild (1868-1937), a leader in the British Jewish community. This letter, now known as the Balfour Declaration, became the diplomatic cornerstone for the state of Israel.

Balfour writes that his declaration will establish “in Palestine…a national home for the Jewish people, and will use.. “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 in Palestine, or the rights and and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

And so, with this, a country was given away without any thought or consideration to the “rights and political status enjoyed by” the people who already lived there. Let us not forget Zionism’s founder, Theodore Herzl, who wrote this regarding the colonization of Palestine in his diary in 1895:

“We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”

1919-1948

From 1919 onwards, Zionist immigration to Palestine greatly increased. From 1922-1935, the Jewish population rose from 9% to 27% of the total population, displacing tens of thousands of Palestinian tenants as Zionists bought land from absentee landlords. 30,000 to 60,000 European Jews would arrive between 1933-1936 due to the unfortunate seizure of Nazi power in Germany.

The 1936-1939 Arab Revolt, an uprising against the British and their support for Zionist settler colonialism, saw 9,000 Palestinians forced into concentration camps, 200 deported, and at least 10% of the male population killed, wounded, exiled, or imprisoned by wars end.

The British government became concerned about future clashes between Zionists and Palestinians, and tried to limit the immigration of European Jews to the country at several points. Zionist lobbyists in London, however, quashed their efforts; for example, the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel (the British administrative headquarters offices) by a Zionist paramilitary organization. The attack killed 91 people.

In 1947, Britain ended its failed colonial project and handed authority over Palestine to the United Nations. The UN, in turn, adopted resolution 181 on November 29, 1947, recommending Palestine be partitioned into Jewish and Arab states. The Jews constituted one third of the population and owned less than 6% of the total land area, but the UN resolution allocated 55% of the land area. This land included many of the main cities with Palestinian Arab majorities, as well as the important coastline from Haifa to Jaffa. This, coupled with the loss of key agricultural land, caused the Palestinians to reject the resolution. War then broke out between the Palestinian Arabs and Zionist paramilitary groups, who began a process of attacks aimed at mass expulsion of Arabs from their towns and villages. Thus began the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs from land that, since May 15, 1948, has been created Israel.

1950 onward

By the mid-1950s, approximately 30,000 (15%) of the population of Palestinians inside Israel were expelled outside Israel’s borders. Israel occupied the remaining Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip in 1967 and remains to this day, now in control of more than 85% of historic Palestine. Over three million Palestinians scramble daily for survival in these occupied cities in 2025 while facing home demolitions, arbitrary arrests, and displacement if not, in fact, shot while seeking food.

All because of some vague words on a piece of paper.

Sources:

27 May 2025, History.com Editors incl. Amanda Onion, Missy Sullivan, Matt Mullen, Christian Zapata, and Christiana Lombardo, “Britain and France conclude Sykes-Picot agreement”, https//www.history.com/this-day-in-history/may-16/britain-and-france-conclude-sykes-picot-agreement

The Rothschild Archive, “Walter Rothschild and the Balfour Declaration”, https://www,rothschildarchive.org/family/family_interests/walter_rothschild_and_the_balfour_declaration

2020, Rashid Ismail Khalidi, “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017”

14 November 1953, Deacon Andy Griffith, “What It Was, Was Football”, Capitol Records

Britannica, “Hussein-McMahon Correspondence” and “Balfour Declaration”, https://brittanica.com/topic/Husayn/McMahon-correspondence

23 May 2017, Al Jazeera English, “The Nakba did not start or end in 1948”, https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2017/5/23/the-nakba-did-not-start-or-end-in-1948