The Balfour Declaration

Israel Prepares to Come Home

"His Majesty's Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people."
A. J. Balfour (1848-1930), British statesman. Letter, 2 Nov. 1917.

"The British government favors 'the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of that 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.'"

Arthur J. Balfour, November 2, 1917¹ Jewish Immigration to Israel

The Balfour Agreement or Document was an agreement in the British Parliament to work towards the development of an Independent Jewish Homeland to be called Israel, in the location where Israel now stands, but which was then called Palestine. This was a controversial move throughout the world: because of much Anti-Semitism worldwide, not everyone agreed on the re-settling of Jews in their Homeland. The British at the time (1917) and up to 1948; had control of the area of Palestine in question: which was very close to the original borders of historical/ biblical Israel.

The Hebrew (Jewish) nation had been ousted from Israel in approximately 70 a.d. about thirty-seven years after the death of Christ and during the earliest period of Christian Church history. Rome had invaded the outpost of Jerusalem and besieged it with utter cruelty, killing thousands: it ended with the attack on Masada, a fortress built on the top of a mountain where @900 zealots had fled during the battle on the City. They held off the Roman soldiers for two years, until the Romans finally built a ramp up the side of the mountain to provide a means for their troops entry into the fortress. The people of Masada, except for 7, committed mass suicide rather than fall to Roman cruelty when it became imminent. It was also just before this time (49 a.d.) that all Jews were expelled from Rome and its territories; scattering the Jewish nation throughout the known world, in one of the most massive dispersions in histories. For the next 2 millenia, the land of Israel (eretz y'israel) changed hands many times: some of the peoples who controlled it were Romans, Arabs, Turks, and others. Before WWII, it was in the hands of the British. The Jews became citizens of almost every nation in the World, and yet still retained their identity as a people: they were unique in this as every other nation sent into dispersion lost its national identity within a generation or two.

By the twentieth century, many Jews had settled in Europe and the US, but they were still without a homeland. Poland had 3 1/2 million Jews as citizens just prior to WWII. They had only @ 26,000⁵ afterwards. Around the turn of the century, Herzl began to work for Jewish Rights in Palestine, and in 1897 proposed formally that a homeland refuge for Israel be established. (Palestine was then ruled by the Turks, in the Ottoman empire)Herzl through a government appointment in the Turkish government, arranged for Turkish national debt to be exchanged for land purchases, which would in turn establish Jewish rights in the region. The Balfour Treaty of 1917 was the first major show of support by a world power for the establishment of this refuge for the Jews; mandated by the Scriptures in the Covenant of the Land. (Genesis 15)

LINKS

The Balfour Declaration 1939 London White Paper

The Passfield Paper Mandate for League of Nations

The British Mandate Israel's Declaration of Independence

The establishment of the rights to a Jewish Homeland in Israel were not with facility. In 1930, Passfield, in the Passfield papers in Parliament argued that Arab employment was threatened by Jewish immigration to the area, and it was halted. This was three years before Hitler took power; and roughly the same time Eichmann made forays into Israel posing as a reporter for 'information gathering'. Tensions mounted during this time and in 1938, as the first Jews were being deported in Eastern Europe to interment in the death and slave camps, trouble mounted also in Israel, with killings among both Jews and Arabs. By 1939, The White Paper appeared, mandating that while in accordance with the Balfour Agreement there be Jewish immigration to Palestine, [25,000 a year was later legislated] the British government in Palestine limited the influx to 50,000 over 5 years; having the effect of both negating the immigration of over 75,000; and negating the chance of saving thousands of lives in the holocaust who could have found refuge in an aliyah (flight to freedom) there.

In 1945, as the war ended, the British determined to complete the Balfour plan, although their re-settlement plans were somewhat schizophrenic: they both opened up the borders of what would become the State of Israel, and at the same time made immigration extremely difficult, even firing on boats of Jewish refuges fleeing war-torn Europe and the Camps. Finally, after much effort, in 1948, on May 4th, the State of Israel was born; the joyful culmination of the Abrahamic covenant, and refuge and relief to the millions of shoah survivors who had no other home in the world. The Return was one of the most magnificent events in History, as a people, disenfranchised, persecuted and displaced, returned after 2000 years of wandering to the Land promised to them from the beginning.

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Footnotes:
¹ The People's Chronology is licensed from Henry Holt and Company, Inc. Copyright © 1994 by James Trager. All rights reserved.
²The Eichmann Interviews Copyright © xxxx by xxxxx.
³Krystallnacht
⁴Microsoft Bookshelf: Encyclopaedia; 1995.
⁵Berenbaum, Michael: The World Must Know 19xx, USHMM...
¹"New York Times": July-January 1968.
© 2002; 1997 Elizabeth Kirkley Best,Ph.D. Shoah Education (Web)Project.