Summary
Prime Minister at the time of the Balfour Declaration, whose evidence to the Palestine Royal Commission is the Report’s principal authority for the Declaration’s wartime purpose and for its meaning as contemplating an eventual Jewish Commonwealth (Report of the Palestine Royal Commission, PDF p.36-37 / printed p.23-24).
Details
- In his evidence, as the Report presents it, the Zionist cause had been widely supported in Britain and America before November 1917, but the launching of the Balfour Declaration at that time was due to propagandist reasons, Jewish sympathy being believed to make a substantial difference to the Allied cause in the critical situation of late 1917 (PDF p.36 / printed p.23).
- The Report presents his evidence that the Zionist leaders gave a definite promise that, if the Allies committed themselves to giving facilities for the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine, “they would do their best to rally Jewish sentiment and support throughout the world to the Allied cause” (PDF p.36 / printed p.23), and that they kept their word.
- On the Declaration’s meaning his evidence, as quoted, was that a Jewish State was not to be set up immediately by the Peace Treaty without reference to the wishes of the majority of the inhabitants, but that if the Jews had become a definite majority by the time representative institutions were accorded, Palestine would thus become a Jewish Commonwealth (PDF p.37 / printed p.24, reassembled).
Related pages
Balfour Declaration, Peel Commission, Report of the Palestine Royal Commission