November 2, 1917

Balfour Declaration

Balfour sends the British government's Palestine declaration to Lord Rothschild

One of the century's most consequential policy statements went out as a letter to a single aristocrat, with instructions to pass it along to the Zionist Federation.

2 November 1917: a letter, not a law

British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour sent Lionel Walter Rothschild a letter on 2 November 1917 conveying, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, its support for establishing “in Palestine a national home for the Jewish people.” The War Cabinet had approved the final wording on 31 October.

This was a short diplomatic letter transmitting a Cabinet decision — not an act of Parliament, a treaty, a royal proclamation or a grant of sovereignty. Balfour asked Rothschild to bring it to the attention of the Zionist Federation.

What the wording promised, and what it left out

The text favoured a national home “in Palestine.” It did not explicitly promise a Jewish state, and it did not define the home's borders.

It promised British efforts to facilitate that objective while protecting the civil and religious rights of Palestine's existing non-Jewish communities, and the rights and political status of Jews in other countries. That safeguard covered civil and religious rights only — it did not mention political or national rights, and it did not call those inhabitants Palestinians or Arabs.

Seven days before press publication

Nothing changed legally or territorially in Palestine that day. Rothschild and the Zionist Federation held an official statement of British policy, but the letter was not made public that day.

Its text appeared in The Times on 9 November. The original survives in the British Library as a single typed folio, alongside its envelope.

Sources

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