![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
The Balfour Declaration was an important statement of intent, but it was only one of several wartime statements by British officials about Britain’s future plans for Palestine. It was the inclusion of the declaration in the text of the mandate for Palestine that gave this pledge the status of international law and set off two decades of argument over its fulfilment. This article tracks the process by which the declaration came to be included in the mandate text and, more than four years after its issuance, to finally win approval from the Council of the League of Nations. It argues for the crucial role played by Arthur Balfour himself in securing American consent and in overcoming French and Italian reservations.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Acknowledgements
This essay was delivered first to a conference on the centenary of the Balfour Declaration organized by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. I thank Professor Billie Melman for that invitation. It was presented again to the international History Workshop at Columbia University; I thank the graduate students and faculty at that workshop, especially Professor Marwa Elshakry, for their comments. I am also indebted to Professor Bernard Wasserstein for his astute comments and corrections and to Professor Rashid Khalidi for ongoing conversations about the Middle East under mandate.
Notes
1 There is a large and ever-growing historiography on the Balfour declaration. James Renton provides a good summary of that historiography and an account of the various interests driving British policy in The Zionist Masquerade: The Birth of the Anglo-Zionist Alliance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), and for a good recent narrative history, Jonathan Schneer, The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (London: Bloomsbury, 2010).
2 For a full account of the League of Nations regime of mandatory oversight, and for the ways it came over time to constrain British policy in Palestine, see my The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
3 Malcolm Yapp, ‘The Making of the Palestine Mandate,’ Middle East Lectures, 1, no. 1 (1995), 10.
4 See the record of Allenby’s refusal in November 1919 to issue a declaration (drafted by Weizmann and his ally Richard Meinertzhagen) to the Palestine population stating that Zionist policy was henceforth, in Weizmann’s favourite phrase, ‘chose jugée,’ Allenby to FO, 7 November 1919, The National Archives [TNA], London, CO 733/10/28799. The warning against the appointment of Herbert Samuel is in Allenby to Curzon, 13 May 1920, in Documents on British Foreign Policy, ser. 1, vol. 13, 257–8.
5 For Curzon, see esp. David Gilmour, ‘The Unregarded Prophet: Lord Curzon and the Palestine Question,’ Journal of Palestine Studies, 25, no. 3 (Spring 1996), 60–8.
6 Sokolow and Weizmann to Zionist Bureau London, 27 April 1920, in The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, vol. 9, ed. Jehuda Reinharz (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1977), 342.
7 Meinertzhagen to Shuckburgh, 21 October 1921, TNA, CO 733/17B/53308.
8 Bernard Wasserstein, Herbert Samuel: A Political Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 256–9, and see Weizmann’s chastising letter, Weizmann to Samuel, 19 July 1921, The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, vol. 10, ed. Bernard Wasserstein (New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Books, 1977), 218–22.
9 John J. McTague, Jr., ‘Zionist-British Negotiations over the Draft Mandate for Palestine, 1920,’ Jewish Social Studies, 42, no. 3–4 (Summer-Autumn 1930), 281–92.
10 For that drafting, Yapp, ‘The Making of the Palestine Mandate,’ 9–27.
11 H.L. Deb., 5th ser., vol. 50, 21 June 1922, cols. 934–1033.
12 Sahar Huneidi, A Broken Trust: Herbert Samuel, Zionism and the Palestinians (London: I.B. Tauris, 2001), and ‘Was Balfour Policy Reversible? The Colonial Office and Palestine, 1921–23,’ Journal of Palestine Studies, 27: 2 (Winter 1998), 23–41.
13 Michael J. Cohen, ‘Was the Balfour Declaration at Risk in 1923? Zionism and British Imperialism,’ Journal of Israeli History, 29, no. 1 (2010), 79–98.
14 TNA, Cab. 23/25, Cabinet 45 (21), 31 May 1921.
15 TNA, Cab. 23/26, Cabinet 73 (21), 18 August 1921.
16 For constrasting assessments of those interests, see Mark Levene, ‘The Balfour Declaration: A Case of Mistaken Identity,’ English Historical Review, 107, no. 422 (January 1992), 54–77, and James Renton, ‘The Historiography of the Balfour Declaration: Towards a Multi-Causal Framework,’ Journal of Israeli History, 19, no. 2 (1998), 109–28, as well as Renton’s book cited note 1 above.
17 Sacher in Haaretz, 1927, quoted in Yehuda Reinharz, ‘The Balfour Declaration and Its Maker: A Reassessment,’ Journal of Modern History, 64 (September 1992), 455.
18 Shuckburgh minute, 11 January 1922, TNA, CO 733/18/444.
19 See, e.g., TNA, CO 733/16/41795.
20 Weizmann to CO, 31 August 1921, and Churchill to Weizmann, 8 September 1921, TNA, CO 733/17B/43805.
21 CO to Tufton, 11 January 1922, TNA, CO 733/33/1250.
22 For that early competitive mobilization around Palestine in Geneva, see Pedersen, Guardians, 95–103.
23 Winifred Coombe Tennant, ‘Journal kept at Whittingehame, Prestonkirk, Scotland’ (1923), in Tennant Papers, West Glamorgan Record Office, D/D T 3596/1.
24 For which, see David R. C. Hudson, The Ireland That We Made: Arthur and Gerald Balfour’s Contribution to the Origins of Modern Ireland (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 2003).
25 Blanche E. C. Dugdale, Arthur James Balfour (London: Hutchinson & Co. 1936), vol. 1: 432–6; vol 2: 213–8.
26 Jason Tomes, Balfour and Foreign Policy: The International Thought of a Conservative Statesman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 199.
27 John Morley to Betty Balfour, 2 April 1905, National Records of Scotland, Balfour papers, GD433/2/125.
28 For this episode, see Carroll Quigley, ‘Lord Balfour’s Personal Position on the Balfour Declaration,’ Middle East Journal, 22, no. 3 (Summer 1968), 340–5, and A.J. Balfour, ‘Preface’, in Nahum Sokolow (ed), History of Zionism, 1600–1918 (London: Longman’s Green, 1919), xxix–xxxiv.
29 For this meeting, and Weizmann’s response to it, see editor’s note p. 227, and Weizmann to Deedes, 31 July 1921, in The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, vol. 10, 234–9.
30 Journal of the First Assembly of the League of Nations, no. 36 (19 December 1920), 291–5.
31 League of Nations, Procès-Verbal of the 11th Session of the Council, 7th Meeting, 29 Nov. 1920, 15.
32 League of Nations, Minutes of the 12th Session of the Council, 4th Meeting, 22 February 1921, pp. 10–11 and correspondence annexed at 70–76.
33 League of Nations, Minutes of the 13th Session of the Council, 1st Meeting, 17 June 1921, 2, and correspondence annexed at 71–2, in which the League Council agreed that negotiations with the U.S. must be conducted by the Principal Allied Powers. This position was reiterated three months later; see League of Nations, Minutes of the 14th session of the Council, 4th Meeting, 3 September 1921, 16–17.
34 Churchill to Balfour, 29 December 1921, TNA, CO 733/11/64335.
35 Balfour to Hughes, 13 January 1922, TNA, CO 733/30/5300.
36 Balfour to Churchill, 31 January 1922, TNA, CO 733/37/7555.
37 Hughes to Balfour, 27 January 1922, TNA, CO 733/37/7555.
38 For the best account of Balfour’s assessment of the situation and the behind-the-scenes diplomacy, see the memo by E. Mills, ‘Observations on Palestine Affairs in their relation to the Council of the League of Nations at Geneva, May 1922’ (22 May 1922), TNA, CO 733/34/24820.
39 Vansittart to Young, 21 June 1920, TNA, FO 608/278.
40 ‘French Influences in Palestine,’ circularized 27 August 1921, TNA, FO 141/480/3.
41 Milner to Balfour, 8 August 1919, TNA, FO 608/152/17580.
42 Vansittart to Young, 29 June 1920, TNA, FO 608/278.
43 Balfour to Hankey, 20 May 1922, TNA, CO 733/34/24678.
44 De Salis to Curzon, 3 July 1920, TNA, FO 141/667/6.
45 Note by Clausen, 21 June 1921 and cypher telegram from Count de Salis, 14 June 1921, TNA, CO 733/10/30402; Storrs to Young, 29 August 1921, TNA, CO 733/17B/44793.
46 Dormer to Curzon, 17 September 1921, TNA, FO 141/667/6.
47 De Salis to Graham, 6 March 1922, TNA, CO 733/30/18629.
48 League Council document C.332.1922VI, containing Gasparri to the League of Nations, 15 May 1922, TNA, CO 733/34/26433.
49 Balfour to Hankey, 20 May 1922, TNA, CO 733/34/24678.
50 Ibid.
51 Typescript text of Balfour’s speech in Geneva, TNA, CO 733/30/24384.
52 H.L. Debs., vol. 50, 21 June 1922, cols. 1008–19.
53 This correspondence contained in TNA, CO 733/31/36603.
54 Minute by Young, n.d, TNA, CO 733/23/34884.
55 Minute by Shuckburgh, 19 July 1922, TNA, CO 733/35/35522.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Susan Pedersen
Susan Pedersen is Gouverneur Morris Professor of British History at Columbia University. She has written widely on British, European and international history, including, most recently, “The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire” (Oxford, 2015).