Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017 - Softcover

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Ian Black is visiting senior fellow at the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics. He has been the Middle East editor, diplomatic editor, and European editor for the Guardian. He has also written for the Economist and the Washington Post and is a regular commentator on TV and radio on Middle Eastern and international affairs. He has an MA in history and political science from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in government from LSE. He lives in London.

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The 67 typewritten words of the Balfour Declaration combined considerations of imperial planning, wartime propaganda, biblical resonances, a colonial mindset—as well as evident sympathy for the Zionist idea. With them, as Arthur Koestler was to quip memorably—neatly encapsulating the attendant and continuing controversy—“one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third.” Lloyd George highlighted sympathy for the Jews as his principal motivation. But the decisive calculations were political, primarily the wish to outsmart the French in post-war arrangements in the Levant and the impulse to use Palestine's strategic location—its “fatal geography”—to protect Egypt, the Suez Canal and the route to India. Other judgements have placed greater emphasis on the need to mobilise Jewish public opinion behind the then flagging Allied war effort. As Balfour told the war cabinet at its decisive meeting on October 31: “If we could make a declaration favourable to such an ideal [Zionism], we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and in America.” Historians have spent decades debating the connections and contradictions between Balfour's public pledge to the Zionists, the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement between Britain, France and Russia about post-war spheres of influence in the Middle East, and pledges about Arab independence made by the British in 1915 to encourage Sharif Hussein of Mecca to launch his “revolt in the desert” against the Turks.

The truth, buried in imprecise definitions, misunderstandings and duplicity, remains elusive. The consequences of the declaration are still being played out.