When Britain Gave Palestine Away: The Balfour Declaration, November 2, 1917
Britain's Balfour Declaration set the stage for dispossession in Palestine, prioritizing Zionist settlement and laying the foundations for enduring conflict.
On this day, 107 years ago, a deal was struck that would affect the life of virtually every Palestinian in the intervening century. The only problem was Palestinians were not part of the deal.
The Balfour Declaration, issued in 1917 by British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur J. Balfour, is often remembered as a defining moment for Zionist aspirations in Palestine. However, behind its carefully crafted language lies a legacy of imperial ambitions, systematic support for settler colonialism, and broken promises.
Rather than a benevolent endorsement, the Balfour Declaration was part of Britain’s calculated efforts to secure influence in the Middle East, fundamentally altering the trajectory of Palestine’s fate and paving the way for decades of unspeakable horror and pain.
Strategic Origins of the Balfour Declaration
The issuance of the Balfour Declaration came during a time of great upheaval, as World War I was pushing Britain to seek new allies and secure its strategic interests.
British leaders, including Arthur Balfour and Prime Minister David Lloyd George, were persuaded by Zionist figures like Chaim Weizmann that a Jewish homeland in Palestine could serve as a reliable British ally.
Positioned near the Suez Canal, which incompetent Egyptian Viceroy Isma'il Pasha had squandered away to the British, Palestine was a key piece of land for Britain’s imperial ambitions, particularly as the Ottoman Empire began to crumble.
Britain’s support for Zionist aspirations was rooted in a blend of strategic convenience and imperial interests. It was white colonial rule acting in favor of settler supremacy, prioritizing people of European descent to secure a foothold in the Middle East.
British leaders recognized that aligning with the Zionist movement could consolidate influence among Jewish communities in the United States and Europe—an influence they hoped would serve their war-time and colonial objectives.
Zionist Organizations and the Institutionalization of Settlement
The Balfour Declaration did more than express support for Zionism; it provided Zionist organizations with official backing, enabling them to actively facilitate Jewish migration to Palestine under the British Mandate.
Zionist organizations like the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization (WZO) played a central role in this process. Tasked with coordinating and funding emigration, the Jewish Agency worked in close alignment with the mandate’s policies to make migration to Palestine accessible and structured, while the World Zionist Organization focused on broader advocacy and support for Zionist settlement initiatives.
Incidentally, both entities would be instrumental in the mass influx of European Jewish migration to Palestine, including through the Ha'avara Agreement, a Nazi-brokered deal that facilitated the relocation of approximately 60,000 Jewish immigrants to the region.
The Ha’avara Agreement of 1933 added another layer of moral ambiguity to the Zionist project in Palestine. This agreement between the Jewish Agency and Nazi Germany facilitated the emigration of German Jews to Palestine, transferring their assets as German exports.
Although controversial, the British mandate allowed this arrangement, encouraging Jewish migration to Palestine even as it involved cooperation with the Nazi regime.
This controversial alliance is an example of the pragmatic, and often morally indifferent, alliances that defined the early Zionist project and further alienated the Palestinian population.
The British Mandate’s endorsement of the Jewish Agency and its role in facilitating Zionist settlement not only accelerated migration but also signaled to Jewish communities worldwide that Palestine was a viable destination where they could build a homeland under British protection.
Divide and Rule: Suppression of Palestinian Political Organization
While Britain supported Zionist institutions, it pursued a very different policy toward the Palestinian population, actively working to suppress Palestinian political organization. In contrast to Iraq and Syria, where nationalist movements were relatively cohesive, Palestinian Arabs lacked a unified national movement strong enough to negotiate for self-rule.
This divide-and-conquer approach was compounded by Zionist efforts to exploit the existing divisions among Palestinians.
By fostering alliances with certain factions while sidelining others, Zionist leaders deepened existing divisions, effectively preventing the formation of a unified Palestinian political body strong enough to negotiate for self-rule.
This fragmentation play is a tactic that has been carried forward into contemporary politics.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for instance, has been reported to actively fuel the rift between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, with sources indicating that he allowed Qatari funds to flow into Gaza, effectively strengthening Hamas as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority.
Just as modern Israeli policy is indifferent to Palestinian life, the British mandate era was rife with policies favoring Zionist settlers.
While the Jewish Agency functioned almost as a government-in-waiting, coordinating land purchases, immigration, and community defense, Palestinians were denied similar organizational structures, leaving them politically disenfranchised in their own land.
This disparity in institutional support created a power imbalance that not only reinforced Britain’s imperialist goals but also mirrored a racialized framework where white European settlers were prioritized at the expense of the indigenous population’s political rights.
The Role of Anti-Semitism in British Zionist Policy
British support for Zionism was not purely strategic, nor was it benevolent by any stretch.
While the predominantly Ashkenazi Zionists clearly saw themselves as “white,” Britain was largely motivated by the rising feeling of hostility that was growing against Jews in Europe, hostility that would eventually culminate in the rise of Hitler and the horrific events that unfolded during the Holocaust.
For him and other British officials, supporting a Jewish homeland was a way to encourage Jewish emigration out of Europe, thereby addressing what they saw as an “issue” of Jewish integration within British and European society.
Balfour, who had advocated for restrictive immigration policies limiting Jewish entry into Britain, viewed the establishment of a Jewish homeland as a way to relocate Jewish populations outside of Europe.
This anti-Semitic underpinning reveals that British support for Zionism was as much about controlling Jewish presence in Europe as it was about regional strategy or humanitarian concern, thus solving the so-called “Jewish Question.”
Zionist Settler Colonialism and Competing Claims to Sovereignty
The subsequent influx of Zionist settlers, facilitated by the Jewish Agency and British support, brought with it a distinct governance model based, unsurprisingly, on European structures.
Zionist settlements like kibbutzim (collective farms) and other communal institutions, enabling settlers to create self-sustaining communities that operated semi-independently under the mandate.
This parallel political infrastructure enabled Zionist settlers to govern their newly communities, further solidifying their claims to the land.
For Palestinian Arabs, however, the arrival of well-organized settler communities compounded existing challenges, as it intensified competition over land and resources.
The conflict arising from the competing claims to Palestine—between the Zionist movement and the indigenous Palestinian population—made it exceedingly difficult for Palestinians to build a unified national movement.
Internal divisions over responses to Zionist encroachment and British repression only deepened, as Palestinians were caught between resisting dispossession and navigating a system that systematically favored European-descended settlers under an unabashed structure of white supremacy.
Hindsight: Balfour Declaration’s Role in Institutionalizing Dispossession
The Balfour Declaration set the stage for the dispossession of Palestinians by creating a framework that favored Zionist aspirations. Through the Jewish Agency and other Zionist institutions, Britain’s endorsement effectively institutionalized the settlement process, legitimizing the idea of a Jewish homeland while neglecting Palestinian rights.
The declaration’s vague assurances about protecting the “civil and religious rights” of non-Jewish communities provided little reassurance to Palestinians, who faced rising displacement and socio-economic marginalization as a result of the mandate’s policies.
The British mandate’s endorsement of Zionist institutions was not just an expression of support; it was a structural commitment that transformed Palestine’s political landscape, reflecting Britain’s preference for a racially aligned settler population over the rights of native inhabitants. This institutional imbalance fueled resentment and resistance among Palestinians, whose political fragmentation left them with limited capacity to challenge the changes unfolding around them.
Continuing of Institutionalized Inequality and Racial Bias
The Balfour Declaration and the subsequent British Mandate’s support for Zionist organizations effectively implemented a framework of institutionalized inequality in Palestine.
Britain’s strategic alignment with Zionism and its endorsement of the Jewish Agency amplified this imbalance, solidifying a structure of dispossession underpinned by white supremacist policies that prioritized European settlers over native people.
Far from a neutral document, the Balfour Declaration was the catalyst for a century of contested sovereignty, where the establishment of a “national home” for one people came at the expense of another’s displacement.
This history of racial favoritism and institutionalized support for settler colonialism has become impossible to conceal any longer, as the world witnesses the impunity with which the West has watched Israel carry out a Holocaust of its very own.
Perhaps that’s the great irony of the catastrophe Israel leaves in its wake. As a decidedly “Western” entity, its reward for maintaining the West’s oppression of brown people is, in essence, carte blanche.
It’s worth noting the predictability with which Israel has followed in the footsteps of its European ancestors; settling land through genocide is sort of their thing.