Why the Balfour Declaration Matters Today

The Palestinian Authority has been involved since last year in a campaign to delegitimize the 1917 Balfour Declaration, demanding that Britain apologize for its decision to create “a Jewish national home in Palestine.” According to the current Palestinian narrative, the declaration and its subsequent ratification by the League of Nations betrayed the principle of self-determination it was meant to uphold (by ignoring Palestinian Arabs’ right to a state of their own), unjustly gave Arab land to Jews, and thus led to the Arab-Israeli conflict and a century of Palestinian suffering. Gershon Hacohen seeks to put this narrative, and the Balfour declaration itself, in context: