The Balfour Declaration: the Legal Right to a Jewish State

The Balfour Declaration: the Legal Right to a Jewish State

The Jews have biblical rights, historical rights and legal rights to the land of Israel.

Lenny Ben-David

The government of Great Britain issued the Balfour Declaration 95 years ago.  The document in effect served as the birth certificate for a Jewish national home.

British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour's declaration was in the form of a letter to a leader of the British Jewish community.  It stated: 

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. 

Balfour speaking at the founding of Hebrew University.Behind him sit Chaim Weizmann and Chief Rabbi Avraham Kook

The British Army had just captured Be’er Sheva  after months of trying to break through the Ottoman army’s Gaza-Be’er Sheva defense line. The British goal was to push north and capture Jerusalem by Christmas.  

In April 1925, Lord Balfour arrived in Palestine to lay the cornerstone for Hebrew University on Mt. Scopus.  He was received as a hero in Tel Aviv and Rishon LeZion. 

Balfour about to lay the Hebrew University cornerstone

The three British giants of Palestine attending the 1925 opening of Hebrew University, from left to right: Lord Allenby (commander of British forces in Palestine 1917), Lord Balfour, and Sir Herbert Samuel, first British High Commissioner of the Mandate


Balfour visiting "Jewish Colony" 1925

Balfour welcomed by the Rishon LeZion Jewish community and here

In the Arab community his visit was marked with black flags and a commercial strike.


 

Arab commercial strike in reaction to Balfour's visit (1925)

Black flags flying on Arab house



Would the State of Israel have come into being without the Balfour Declaration in 1917?  Perhaps. The Jews' return to Zion was well under way -- well before 1917 and certainly well before the Holocaust. The Jewish building of an infrastructure for a state had begun. 

But, the Balfour Declaration laid the legal and political foundation for the state's acceptance by the world community. The League of Nations, when it approved the Mandate for Palestine in 1922, re-ratified the Balfour Declaration:

"The Principal Allied Powers have also agreed that the Mandatory should be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917, by the Government of His Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers, in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." 

The Mandate also mentioned "the historical connections of the Jewish people with Palestine." It was ratified by 50 nations.
Note: Unfortunately, some of the pictures presented here were already in stages of disintegration when they were digitalized by the Library of Congress. They are presented without cropping the damaged sections.

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