The Balfour Declaration

The letter ran to three paragraphs. On 2 November 1917 the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, sent a letter to Lord Walter Rothschild—a leading figure of British Jewry and head of the Zionist Federation—for transmission to the Federation. It stated that 'His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object', with the proviso that nothing be done to prejudice the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish communities there.

Years of work lay behind those lines. Chaim Weizmann, a chemist from Pinsk teaching in Manchester, had devised an industrial process for producing acetone needed for smokeless powder, and that opened government doors. Britain had its own reasons: the war was going badly and the Ottoman Empire was collapsing.

Five weeks later, on 11 December 1917, General Allenby entered Jerusalem on foot out of respect for the city, ending four centuries of Ottoman rule. In 1922 the League of Nations wrote the declaration into the Mandate for Palestine, giving it force in international law.

It was the first time in eighteen centuries that a great power had formally recognised the Jewish people's link to their land. What followed proved harder—British policy shifted and White Papers restricted immigration—but the starting point was set here.