By the end of World War I, European armies had occupied Palestine and a large portion of the Arab world. They were faced with the unsettling prospect of alien rule and the rapid decline of Ottoman control, which had been the only known system of government for more than twenty generations. It was during this period of turmoil , as one era finished and another began, against a grim scenery of misery, deterioration, and deprivation, that Palestinians did learn about the Balfour Declaration :
Foreign Office
November 2nd, 1917
Dear Lord Rothschild,
I have much pleasure in conveying to you. on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet
“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a NationalHome 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.”
I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.
Yours,
Arthur James Balfour
If many foresighted Palestinians began to consider the Zionist movement as a threat prior to World War I, the Balfour Declaration added a new and frightening dimension. With its vague phrase endorsing “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,”the declaration successfully committed Britain’s assistance for Theodor Herzl’s goals of Jewish statehood, sovereignty, and immigration control in all of Palestine.
Notably, Balfour made no reference of the vast Arab majority of the populace (approximately 94% at the time), except in a backhanded way as the “existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” They were defined in terms of what they were not, and most definitely not as a nation or a people—the terms “Palestinian” and “Arab” are absent from the declaration’s sixty-seven words. This great majority was promised only “civil and religious rights,”not political or national rights. By contrast, Balfour bestowed national rights to what he referred to as “the Jewish people,” who constituted a tiny minority in 1917, accounting for approximately 6% of the country’s population.
Prior to acquiring British support, the Zionist movement was a colonizing enterprise seeking a great-power benefactor. After failing to find a sponsor in the Ottoman Empire, Wilhelmine Germany, and elsewhere, Theodor Herzl’s successor Chaim Weizmann and his associates did succeed in gaining the support of the wartime British cabinet led by David Lloyd George. The Palestinians now encountered a far more formidable foe than ever before, with British troops advancing northward and occupying their country at the time, and troops serving a government committed to implanting a “national home” through unlimited immigration to cultivate a future Jewish majority.
Over the last century, the British government’s motives and goals have been thoroughly investigated.1 Among its numerous motivations were a romantic, religiously inspired philo-Semitic compulsion to “return” the Hebrews to the land of the Bible, and an anti-Semitic desire to decrease Jewish immigration to Britain, attached to a belief that “world Jewry” possessed the ability to keep newly revolutionary Russia fighting and to draw the United States into the conflict. Apart from those impulses, Britain sought control of Palestine primarily for geopolitical strategic reasons that predated World War I, and were reinforced by wartime events.2 Regardless of the importance of the other intentions, this was the primary one: the British Empire was never driven by benevolence. Britain’s strategic interests were perfectly served by sponsoring the Zionist project, just as they were served by a variety of regional wartime endeavors. Among them were commitments made in 1915 and 1916 promising independence to the Arabs led by Sharif Husayn of Mecca (embodied in the Husayn-McMahon correspondence) and a secret 1916 deal with France: the Sykes-Picot Agreement, in which the two colonial powers decided to partition the eastern Arab countries.3
The Zionist movement’s objectives were transparent: total sovereignty and control over Palestine. With Britain’s unwavering support,these goals became suddenly attainable. Some prominent British politicians expressed support for Zionism in ways that went beyond the declaration’s carefully phrased text. In 1922, at a dinner at Balfour’s residence, three of the era’s most renowned statesmen: Lloyd George, Balfour, and Secretary of State for the Colonies Winston Churchill, assured Weizmann that the concept “Jewish national home” , “always meant an eventual Jewish state.”Lloyd George persuaded the Zionist leader that Britain would never permita representative government in Palestine for this purpose. Neither did it.4
For Zionists, their enterprise was now bolstered by an indispensable “iron wall”of British military might, as Ze’ev Jabotinksy put it. Balfour’s precise, calculated prose was, in effect, a gun aimed directly at their heads, a declaration of war by the British Empire on the indigenous Palestinian population. The majority now faces the threat of being outnumbered by unrestricted Jewish immigration to a country whose population and culture were almost entirely Arab. Whether intentionally or not, the declaration precipitated a full-fledged colonial conflict, a century-long attack on the Palestinian people with the objective of promoting an exclusiveist “national home”at their expense.
Palestinian reaction to Balfour’s declaration was late and relatively muted. The British pronouncement quickly spread throughout the rest of the world. Local newspapers, on the other hand, were closed in Palestine since the war began, due to both government censorship and a shortage of newsprint caused by an Allied naval blockade of Ottoman ports. Following the occupation of Jerusalem by British troops in December 1917, the military regime prohibited publication of news of the declaration.5 Indeed, for nearly two years, British authorities prohibited newspapers from reappearing in Palestine. When news of the Balfour Declaration finally reached Palestine, it did so slowly, first through word of mouth and then via prints of Egyptian newspapers carried by travelers from Cairo.
In December 1918, 33 exiled Palestinians (including al-Isa) who had recently arrived in Damascus from Anatolia (where their access to news was unrestricted) sent an advance protest letter to the Versailles peace conference and the British Foreign Office. They emphasized that “this country is our country” and expressed horror at the Zionist claim that “Palestine would be turned into a national home for them.”6
Such possibilities may have seemed improbable to many Palestinians when the Balfour Declaration was authorised, at a time when Jews were a minuscule minority of the population. Nonetheless, some foresighted individuals, including Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, recognized Zionism’s threat early on. In 1914 ‘Isa al-‘Isa wrote, in an astute editorial in Filastin, of “a nation threatened with disappearance by the Zionist tide in this Palestinian land,… a nation which is threatened in its very being with expulsion from its homeland.”7 Those who expressed concern about the Zionist movement’s incursion were alarmed by the movement’s ability to acquire large tracts of fertile land from which indigenous peasants were removed, as well as by its success in increasing Jewish immigration.
Indeed, between 1909 and 1914, approximately 40,000 Jewish immigrants arrived (although some departed shortly afterwards), and the Zionist movement established eighteen new colonies (of a total of fifty-two in 1914) on land acquired primarily from absentee landlords. The recent concentration of private land ownership enabled these land purchases significantly. The impact on Palestinians was particularly severe in agricultural communities located in areas of intense Zionist colonization, including the coastal plain and the fertile Marj Ibn’Amer and Huleh valleys in the north. Numerous peasants living in villages adjacent to the new colonies have lost their land as a consequence of the land sales. Some had also been wounded in armed encounters with the European Jewish settlers’ first paramilitary units. 8 Their trepidation was shared by Arab city dwellers in Haifa, Jaffa, and Jerusalem, the primary centers of the Jewish population at the time and now, who watched with growing alarm the stream of Jewish immigrants in the years preceding the war. Following the Balfour Declaration’s publication, the catastrophic implications for Palestine’s future became increasingly clear to all.
Footnotes:
For British goals and ambitions, see Jonathan Schneer, The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (London: Bloomsbury, 2010); Henry Laurens, La question de Palestine, vol. 1, 1799–1922: L’invention de la Terre sainte (Paris: Fayard, 1999); and James Renton, The Zionist Masquerade: The Birth of the Anglo-Zionist Alliance, 1914–1918 (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007). See also A. L. Tibawi, Anglo-Arab Relations and the Question of Palestine, 1914–1921 (London: Luzac, 1977), 196-239; Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration (London: Valentine, Mitchell, 1961); and Mayir Vereté, “The Balfour Declaration and Its Makers,” Middle Eastern Studies 6 (1970): 416–42.
British Policy Towards Syria and Palestine, 1906–1914: A Study of the Antecedents of the Husayn-McMahon Correspondence, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and the Balfour Declaration, St.Antony’s College Middle East Monographs (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 1980).
The statement of Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik commissar for Foreign Affairs, after he had opened up the Tsarist diplomatic archives and revealed these secret wartime Anglo-French-Russian arrangements on this occasion, is reproduced in Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, 1917–1924, ed. Jane Degras, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951).
Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Statesman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 356–57.
Ronald Storrs, Orientations (London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1937). The memoirs of Ronald Storrs, the first British military governor of Jerusalem, mention the strict control the British exercised over the press and over all forms of Arab political activity in Palestine: 327ff. Storrs had previously worked as Oriental secretary to the British high commissioner in Egypt, where he served as censor of the local press.
Al-Kayyali, Watha’iq al-muqawama al-filistiniyya al-‘arabiyya did al-ihtilal al-britani wal-sihyuniyya 1918-1939 [Documents of the Palestinian Arab resistance to the British occupation and to Zionism, 1918-1939] (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1968), 1–3.
Special issue of Filastin, May 19, 1914, 1.
For details of these land purchases and the resulting armed clashes, see R. Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 89–117. See also Shafir, Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.