Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

The problem with Britain’s guilt about Balfour

Britain’s unease about the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, our imperial pronouncement that we ‘view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use [our] best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object’, is not hard to spot. Boris Johnson lauds Balfour as ‘indispensable to the creation of a great nation’ before rueing that its ‘vital caveat…to safeguard other communities – has not been fully realised’. His shadow number, Emily Thornberry, said: ‘I don’t think we celebrate the Balfour declaration. But I think we have to mark it because it was a turning point in the history of that area and the most important way of marking it is to recognise Palestine.’ Jeremy Corbyn has been sharply rebuked for snubbing a Balfour centennial dinner, as if this reluctance to break bread was the first sign that he might have a problem with Jews.

Something is wrong in all of this. One hundred years on and Britain still thinks of Israel as a filial disappointment, the prodigal son who never came home. Whether we rejoice in the Balfour Declaration or decry it, we are likewise fixated by our role as state-maker, carving up the map for good or for ill. We lost the Empire but kept the guilt and so the sins of Israel and the dispossession of the Palestinians are on us.

If we cannot celebrate Balfour, we certainly shouldn’t deplore it, because it was not our land to begin with and not our declaration to give. In realist terms, of course, it was the catalyst for the Zionist provisions in the San Remo Conference resolution and the Sèvres Treaty. Building on this, the Palestine Mandate of 1922 recognised ‘the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and…the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country’ and provided for ‘close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes’.

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