The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer: The pogroms against the Jews that were conducted by the Russians in the Pale of Settlement in southwest Asia in the late 1880s led to antisemitism’s continued rise in Europe and the rest of the world. With single-language nationalism starting to replace polyglot Empires, it was recognized that post-Great War countries would be created, especially in the areas of the Ottoman Empire including the Middle East. The key for Jews was the Balfour Declaration of 1917, dated November 2, 1917, which started the recognition from a powerful country, in this case Great Britain, for support for a Palestinian homeland for the Jews.
Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour, the writer of the letter to Lionel Walter Rothschild, was not a supporter of the Jews. The letter, which later became known as the Balfour Declaration, was Balfour’s way of finding a place anywhere but in Europe for the Jewish people. By promising to support the Jewish desire for a homeland, Balfour felt he could take care of the European “Jewish” problem. The Declaration, he believed, would also consolidate more support for the British in its horrifying struggles during World War I.
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For decades other locations were suggested. A part of Uganda was also suggested by the British in 1903. Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, suggested the Sinai Peninsula town of Arish, a few miles from Gaza. In 1928 the Soviet Union offered a Far East near the state of Manchuria on the Chinese border under Soviet rule. Another idea floated was in Japan in the 1930s, but there would be no independence. The Nazis in 1940 suggested the Madagascar Islands since the French surrendered and their colonies, including Madagascar, would be under SS control. Even Mussolini once suggested parts of Ethiopia he conquered in 1935. The United States in 1939 suggested Sitka Island in Alaska, across a bay from Juneau, Alaska.
The Balfour Declaration was opposed by the only Jewish member and British Minister, Edwin Montagu. While the Balfour Declaration was officially dated November 2, 2017, Montagu did write a letter to the British Parliament in August 23, 1917, against the concept of a Jewish state in Palestine for reasons that still resonate today. Jews were not really a “nation” but were a religion and Montagu’s own Jewish family had assimilated into the British system generations before. Montagu believed that a proposed Jewish state in Palestine would promote antisemitism around the world and lead other countries to expel their Jews to the small new Jewish state. He was concerned that the British government would be seen as supporting the Zionist belief that excludes all others who are not Jewish. He finally was concerned that a Jewish Palestinian state would drive out the Muslims and Christians who had just as much a religious right to Palestine as Jews. He also warned earlier in his letter that by establishing a “nation,” “Perhaps also citizenship must be granted only as a result of a religious test.” (The Israeli Citizenship laws today make it nearly impossible for non-Jews to become citizens, but very easy for out-of-country Jews of the Diaspora to become citizens. There is no non-Jew citizenship by birth in Israel, in contrast to the citizenship laws of the United States). It is almost impossible for the millions of Palestinians whose families have lived for thousands of years in Palestine to gain Israeli citizenship.
There was in the Balfour Declaration the wording “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”, but when it comes to political power, some words are ignored in favor of those words that are more politically supported, just like the fanatical Biblical interpretations promulgated by right-wing American Republican politicians today.
The simplistic, short-term political gain by the British over 100 years ago has led to the complex, seemingly intractable situation of today.
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Matt Somers is a 1983 graduate of the University of Arizona with a major in writing and a split minor in philosophy and history.
