Balfour Declaration, 1917

Balfour Declaration
Balfour and the Declaration
Created	2 Nov 1917
Signatories	Arthur James Balfour
Purpose	Confirming support from the British government for the establishment in Palestine of a "national home" for the Jewish people

The Balfour Declaration was a letter dated 2 November 1917 from the United Kingdom's Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. It read:

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 in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

The text of the letter was published in the press one week later, on 9 November 1917. The "Balfour Declaration" was later incorporated into both the Sèvres peace treaty with the Ottoman Empire, and the Mandate for Palestine. The original document is kept at the British Library.

The Sharif of Mecca Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi and other Arab leaders considered the Declaration a violation of a previous commitment made in the McMahon-Hussein correspondence in exchange for launching the Arab Revolt, also during World War I. Whilst the British Foreign Office's interpretation of the nature of the contradictions evolved over the subsequent decades — from 1916 it considered Palestine to have been included in the area of Arab independence committed to Hussein, whereas the opposite view was held following the 1922 Churchill White Paper — a 1939 committee set up to consider the Correspondence concluded that the British Government had not been "free to dispose of Palestine without regard for the wishes and interests of the inhabitants of Palestine". The issuance of the Declaration had many long lasting consequences, and was a key moment in the lead-up to the Arab–Israeli conflict, often referred to as the world's "most intractable conflict".