How the Balfour Declaration Became Part of International Law

Martin Kramer deserves our thanks: in “The Forgotten Truth about the Balfour Declaration,” he has illuminated the important role played by Nahum Sokolow in the diplomacy that led to the 1917 endorsement by the wartime allies and associated powers of the idea of a Jewish national home in Palestine under British protection. He has thereby enlarged our understanding, not only of how the Balfour Declaration came about but also of how it became part of international law.

In the case of each party to the endorsement, the politics of honor, interest, and fear (to paraphrase Thucydides) were as important in 1917 as they always are. France endorsed the Zionist project partly in order to secure its interests in Lebanon and Syria against British encroachment. But neither France nor Britain wanted to create a problem for their wartime alliance itself, and both were apprehensive lest Germany, their common enemy, would reignite, with worldwide Jewish support, its own Near Eastern ambitions, represented by the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway and the German alliance with the Ottoman empire.

If these were among the factors encouraging the Western allies to support Zionism, the Jews and the Vatican, for their part, also preferred that Britain be given the responsibility for implementing and protecting the Zionist project. Jews, looking toward self-government, thought the British imperial way far more flexible than the French way. The Vatican also preferred Protestant Britain, among European empires the most experienced in colonial administration, to anti-clerical France. (The United States, neutral in the war until it joined the allies in April 1917, would later consider but reject a formal role in governing Palestine.)