The Balfour Declaration
Britain publicly commits to the establishment of a 'national home for the Jewish people' in Palestine, without consulting its overwhelmingly Arab population.
On 2 November 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour sent a letter to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, stating that His Majesty’s Government viewed “with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” The letter added that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” — communities that then constituted roughly ninety percent of the population.
The declaration was issued while Palestine was still under Ottoman rule and contradicted earlier British wartime assurances to Arab leaders. It was later incorporated into the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, which came into effect in 1923, giving Britain’s commitment international legal standing.
For Palestinians, the declaration marks the beginning of a process in which their future was decided by outside powers. Its centenary in 2017 was marked by Palestinian calls for an official British apology.
Cited works
2- britannica.com — Balfour Declaration(opens in a new tab)https://www.britannica.com/event/Balfour-Declaration
- un.org — history(opens in a new tab)https://www.un.org/unispal/history/
Connected in the archive
9 connected records9 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.
names this record — 8 records
One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.
- A land without a people for a people without a land
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: According to the United Nations study The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem, at the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 Arabs comprised over 90 per cent of Palestine's population and owned about 97 per cent of its land.
- Filastin Newspaper Founded
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Isa al-Isa returned to Jaffa in early 1921 and reissued Filastin in March of that year, now three times a week and squarely opposed to the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate that had enshrined it.
- Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: …Across five critical junctures — from the Balfour Declaration and the early Mandate, through the 1967 war and the entrenchment of occupation, to the first intifada, the Oslo process, and the wars on Gaza — she shows how law has been made and remade by politics:…
- Khalil Beidasخليل بيدس
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Four years later the British arrested him after a Jerusalem demonstration at which he spoke against the Balfour Declaration and sentenced him to fifteen years.
- Noura Erakatنورة عريقات
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Her book Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019) reads a century of the conflict — from the Balfour Declaration to the wars on Gaza — through five legal junctures, arguing that law has no force independent of politics yet remains a terrain on which the Palestinian struggle can be waged.
- Settler Colonialism
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: The framework has since become central to Palestinian historiography, most prominently in Rashid Khalidi's The Hundred Years' War on Palestine, which reads the period from the Balfour Declaration onward as a settler-colonial war rather than a communal conflict between two symmetrical nationalisms.
- and 2 more
named in this record — 1 record
One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.
- The Mandate for Palestine
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: It was later incorporated into the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, which came into effect in 1923, giving Britain's commitment international legal standing.
Cite this page
Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.
- Chicago
“The Balfour Declaration.” Timeline, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/timeline/balfour-declaration.- MLA
“The Balfour Declaration.” Timeline, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/timeline/balfour-declaration. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-balfour-declaration, title = {The Balfour Declaration}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/timeline/balfour-declaration}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }