On this day exactly 106 years ago, the Balfour Declaration was signed
The
Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British government during the First World War announcing its support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population. The declaration was contained in a letter from the United Kingdom's Foreign Secretary
Arthur Balfour to
Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland.
In the following years, France, Italy and the USA declared their agreement with the Declaration; at the San Remo conference, the Balfour Declaration was approved by the Allies as the basis for the post-war settlement in Palestine, and then it was included in the text of the
British mandate for the administration of Palestine, approved by the League of Nations. After the end of the Second World War, when the League of Nations was replaced by the United Nations Organisation, its charter introduced an article on the preservation in force of all League of Nations mandates, a principle confirmed by the Hague International Court of Justice. Thus, the "Balfour Declaration" continued in force even after the formation of the UN, becoming the official beginning of the process of establishing the State of Israel in Palestine.
The adoption of the declaration led to a significant increase in Jewish immigration.
Over the next few years, several tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants arrived in Palestine. As a result, riots broke out in Jerusalem and Arabs intervened in clashes between Jewish Communists and Zionists
during May demonstrations in Jaffa. The riots spread to other parts of the country, killing dozens of Jews and Arabs and injuring hundreds. These events exposed the sharp contradictions generated by the Balfour Declaration, which promised the creation of a "national hearth" for the Jewish people without "violating the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine."
Before the adoption of the Declaration, Zionists considered various options for the localisation of the future Israel, among which Palestine was only one of the options, which as a result was actively supported by the
revisionist Zionists, based on the ideas of
Vladimir Jabotinsky. There were American projects, such as the one
voiced by Theodor Herzl in his book "Der Judenstaat" about an independent
Jewish state in Argentina, or the slogans "
America is our Zion" and "
America is our Promised Land" voiced at the Congress of the American Jewish Committee; there were also a number of projects in the Old World, such as the creation of a
Jewish homeland in the Crimea. The Balfour Declaration finally secured the priority for a future Jewish state for the territory of Palestine for Zionists all over the world.
Most of the Jewish emigration to Palestine was made up of natives of the Russian Empire (from the so-called "
Pale of Settlement") and
Germany. In this aspect, it is worth noting that the State of Israel was founded shortly after the end of World War II, and immediately after the signing of the Balfour Declaration, exactly 5 days later, the
Great October Revolution took place in Russia, establishing Soviet rule. The Declaration was published in the same issue of the Times newspaper that reported on the Russian Revolution.
The modern version of the religious writings of Judaism, on which the current ideas about the ancient history of Judea and Israel are based, was discovered less than 200 years ago in Odessa or Crimea by the Karaite
Abraham Firkovich, who was repeatedly accused of forgeries during his lifetime. This so-called "
Leningrad Codex" is the oldest fully preserved manuscript of the Tanakh, from which the Christian versions of the Old Testament have been translated, and from which most modern Jews pray. There are Judeo-Christian texts found even before Firkovic's discovery, but they are scrappy and often contradict the modern version of the text, and
this is also true of the New Testament texts. Some scholars are revising the modern Judeo-Christian version of history, noting that perhaps ancient Judea and Jerusalem were not located in modern Palestine at all. Thus, for example, a number of ancient images and texts have been discovered, testifying that about 300-400 years ago
Europeans called the ancient capital of Siam the Judea, and some researchers localise ancient Jerusalem on the Bosphorus in Anatolia, on the site of ancient
Hierapolis or
Constantinople itself.
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