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Typed Foreign Office letter dated November 2nd, 1917, addressed to Lord Rothschild and signed by Arthur James Balfour.

THE BALFOUR DECLARATION, 1917: WHAT THE LETTER SAID, WHY BRITAIN SENT IT, AND THE MYTHS AROUND IT

The Balfour Declaration: Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour's letter to Lord Rothschild, dated November 2, 1917. The original is held by the British Library (Add MS 41178 A, f. 3). Photo: Zoltan Kluger / Government Press Office (Israel), National Photo Collection D403-156, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

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In a one-sentence declaration of November 2, 1917, the British government stated its support for "a national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. Historians still debate why it was issued, and a false story about the Rothschild family still surrounds it.

 

 

First published: October 7, 2026

 

 

Key Facts

  • What it was: A letter of November 2, 1917, from British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Lord Rothschild, containing a 67-word declaration approved by the War Cabinet.

  • What it said: The British government would "view with favour" and "use their best endeavours" to facilitate "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people."

  • What it did not say: It did not promise a state. It did not name Palestine's Arab majority, referring instead to the "civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine."

  • Why Britain issued it: Historians disagree. The Cabinet's own records cite wartime propaganda aimed at Jews in Russia and America; historians also point to imperial strategy, religious sympathy and Allied diplomacy.

  • How it was received: Zionist leaders welcomed it. Palestinian Arab leaders and petitioners opposed it, and some leading British Jews had argued against a Jewish national home before it was issued.

  • What it became: Its text was written into the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, approved in 1922.

  • The myth: That the letter proves the Rothschild family secretly created Israel. This is false. The drafts and Cabinet minutes show a text written and argued over inside the British government for five months.

 

This series opens where our article on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion leaves off. While the forged Protocols spread a myth of secret Jewish power, a real, public British government letter in 1917 supported "a national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. This article starts with the letter itself, so readers can compare the myth with the document.

 

The letter, signed by Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour, became known as the Balfour Declaration, and its meaning is still argued over. The historian Martin Kramer calls it "the beginning of Israel's legitimation by other nations." The historian Rashid Khalidi argues that it "in effect constituted a declaration of war by the British Empire on the indigenous population" of Palestine.

 

This is the first of three articles in our modern history series on the background to the State of Israel. It sets out what the letter said, the wartime setting, the reasons historians give for it, how it was drafted, how Arabs and Jews responded and how it entered international law. Where historians disagree, their views are given with their names attached. The claim that the letter proves the Rothschild family secretly created Israel is a different matter: it is a conspiracy myth, and the article explains why it is false.

 

The Letter: What It Says, and What It Does Not

The letter is typed on Foreign Office paper and dated "November 2nd, 1917." Its full text, as published by the Avalon Project at Yale Law School, reads:

 

Dear Lord Rothschild,

I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet.

"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, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.

Yours sincerely,

Arthur James Balfour

 

The declaration itself is one sentence of 67 words. Read closely, it does four things:

  • It states a policy: British "favour" and "best endeavours" for "a national home for the Jewish people."

  • It sets a place, but not a boundary: the home is to be established "in Palestine," not across all of it, and the text does not use the word "state." At the Cabinet meeting that approved the text, Balfour said "national home" "did not necessarily involve the early establishment of an independent Jewish State, which was a matter for gradual development in accordance with the ordinary laws of political evolution."

  • It adds two safeguards: one for the "civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine," and one for "the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

  • It leaves the majority unnamed: Khalidi notes that "the words 'Palestinian' and 'Arab' do not appear in the text of the Declaration," and that the Arab majority was offered only "civil and religious rights," with "no political or national rights whatsoever."

 

Both supporters and critics have noted how open the wording was. The Rothschild Archive describes its language as "deliberately vague." The historian Leonard Stein, in his 1961 history of the declaration, wrote that "The language of the Declaration was studiously vague" (as quoted by the Balfour 100 project).

 

The Times of London reported the declaration on November 9, 1917, under the headline "Palestine for the Jews. Official sympathy," according to Balfour 100. In 1924 Walter Rothschild presented the original letter to the British Library, the Rothschild Archive records, where it is catalogued as Add MS 41178 A, f. 3.

 

The Wartime Setting: Three Overlapping Commitments

The letter was written in the middle of the First World War. Palestine was then part of the Ottoman Empire, which fought on Germany's side. In 1915 and 1916, as Britain looked for allies against the Ottomans, it made commitments to Arab leaders, to France and, in 1917, to the Zionist movement:

  • To Sharif Hussein of Mecca: In letters of 1915 and 1916, Britain's High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, offered British support for Arab independence within limits. His letter of October 24, 1915 excluded "portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo." The letters were published officially in 1939 (Cmd. 5957).

  • To France: In notes exchanged on May 15 and 16, 1916, known as the Sykes-Picot agreement, Britain and France agreed in secret how to divide Ottoman Arab lands between them. For one zone, the "brown area," the text says "there shall be established an international administration."

  • To the Zionist movement: The Balfour Declaration of November 1917.

 

Whether Palestine fell inside or outside McMahon's promise has been disputed ever since. The British government's reading, set out in the 1922 Churchill White Paper, was that "The whole of Palestine west of the Jordan was thus excluded" from the pledge. Palestinian and other Arab leaders rejected that reading, and a study published by the United Nations argues that, on its face, the excluded area "does not appear to cover Palestine." The historian Jonathan Schneer says "both parties intended for the letters to be ambiguous," and that McMahon told the Foreign Office at the time that he was using "nebulous" terms.

 

The war shaped the timing in other ways too. The United States had entered the war in April 1917, after Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmermann Telegram came to light, according to the U.S. State Department's Office of the Historian and Encyclopaedia Britannica. Russia, where the Tsar had been overthrown in March 1917, was close to leaving the war, and on November 7 the Bolsheviks seized power. In Palestine, British and imperial forces had just captured Beersheba, and Jerusalem surrendered to them on December 9, 1917, five weeks after the letter. Historians still debate how far these overlapping commitments conflicted.

 

Why Britain Issued It: What Historians Argue

Historians agree on the documents but weigh the motives differently. Asked about the factors usually cited, from the Suez Canal to Christian sympathy for Zionism, Jonathan Schneer answered: "All those played a role." The main explanations are these:

  • Wartime propaganda: The War Cabinet minute of October 31, 1917 records Balfour's argument: "The vast majority of Jews in Russia and America, as, indeed, all over the world, now appeared to be favourable to Zionism. If we could make a declaration favourable to such an ideal, we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and America." Martin Kramer calls this "the most documented explanation for the declaration."

  • An exaggerated belief in Jewish influence: Historians who differ on other questions, including Kramer and Schneer, agree that this propaganda aim rested on an overestimate. Kramer writes that it "seems like a vast exaggeration of the power of Jews at the time." The Balfour 100 project calls the impression of worldwide Jewish influence "hugely embroidered." Schneer writes that British leaders "drew primarily on two anti-Semitic canards," and that they "believed that all Jews were Zionists (which they weren't)." He quotes Robert Cecil, then a minister at the Foreign Office: "I do not think it is easy to exaggerate the international power of the Jews."

  • Fear of Germany: Kramer describes a "(misplaced) fear that Germany might steal a march on the Allies by issuing its own pro-Zionist declaration."

  • Strategy and empire: Schneer says Britain's "over-riding aim" was to win the war, and that Lloyd George was at one point ready to let the Ottomans keep their flag flying over Palestine in a separate peace. Khalidi places the declaration in a colonial setting, arguing that "Zionism was both a nascent national movement and a colonial enterprise in search of a metropolitan sponsor," and that Weizmann found that sponsor in the wartime British Cabinet.

  • Religious sympathy: The Rothschild Archive notes that Prime Minister David Lloyd George and Balfour "had grown up on the Bible." Schneer gives this less weight: "Sentiment had only a small part to play."

  • Allied diplomacy: Kramer argues that the declaration "wasn't the isolated act of one nation" but "was approved in advance by the Allied powers." He points to a French letter of June 4, 1917 to the Zionist diplomat Nahum Sokolow, which spoke of "the renaissance of the Jewish nationality in that land from which the people of Israel were exiled so many centuries ago," and to later Italian (May 1918) and Japanese (January 1919) statements of support.

  • Zionist diplomacy: Chaim Weizmann was "the driving force behind the Declaration," Balfour 100 notes, and Schneer calls Sokolow's role "second only to Weizmann."

 

A distinction matters here. A government policy shaped partly by a stereotype about Jewish power is evidence of what officials believed, not evidence that the stereotype was true. Schneer describes the belief that Jews held "an enormous subterranean power" as "a common anti-Semitic canard," and says Weizmann used it to his advantage.

 

How It Was Drafted, June to November 1917

The wording was drafted and redrafted over about five months, inside the British government and in talks with Zionist leaders. The surviving drafts and Cabinet papers are held at the UK National Archives. The main steps, as set out by Balfour 100 and the Cabinet records:

  • June 1917: Balfour invited Lord Rothschild and Weizmann to submit a draft. Rothschild, Balfour 100 notes, had started the process by asking Balfour to "send me a message" on the government's position.

  • July 18, 1917: Rothschild sent the Zionist draft, which said Palestine should be "reconstituted" as the national home of the Jewish people. Schneer notes that the word "implies an unbroken link between Jews and Palestine despite the nearly two-thousand-year separation."

  • August 1917: Balfour sent a revised draft, and Lord Milner, a member of the War Cabinet, wrote another, dated August 4. According to Balfour 100, Milner's version spoke of "a home" for the Jewish people rather than a "national home," a change that "might appeal to anti-Zionist Jews."

  • August 23, 1917: Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India and, in his own words, "the one Jewish Minister in the Government," circulated a memorandum titled "The Anti-Semitism of the Present Government." He wrote that "Zionism has always seemed to me to be a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom," and that the policy would "prove a rallying ground for Anti-Semites in every country in the world."

  • September 3, 1917: The War Cabinet discussed the question with Montagu present and both Lloyd George and Balfour away.

  • October 4, 1917: Lord Curzon made what Balfour 100 calls "a realpolitik case" against a "sentimental" declaration, pointing to Palestine's existing population and to divisions among British Jews. At Milner's instruction, Leo Amery of the War Cabinet Secretariat reworked the draft so that the concerns of anti-Zionist Jews were taken into account. Balfour 100 notes that this version first set out protection for "the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine." It also spoke of the Jewish "race," a term later replaced with "people."

  • October 6, 1917: Sir Maurice Hankey, Secretary to the War Cabinet, wrote to Rothschild inviting his opinion on the proposed text, according to the British Library's catalogue.

  • October 31, 1917: The War Cabinet approved the declaration. Curzon agreed that "some expression of sympathy with Jewish aspirations would be a valuable adjunct to our propaganda," but thought the government "should be guarded in the language used."

  • November 2, 1917: Balfour signed the letter.

 

The record shows the wording was the British government's own, argued over for months, with British Jews pressing on both sides.

 

Why It Was Addressed to Lord Rothschild, and the "Rothschild" Myth

Walter Rothschild (1868–1937), the 2nd Baron Rothschild, was a supporter of Zionism. The Rothschild Archive calls him "the unofficial leader of the British Jewish community." There were practical reasons for writing to him:

  • He had asked for it: Rothschild had requested a statement and submitted the July draft.

  • Protocol: Weizmann was the driving force, but he was not the most senior Zionist official in London. Sokolow was, and he "was not a British citizen," Balfour 100 notes.

  • Standing: According to Stein, addressing the letter to Rothschild resolved protocol questions and "had the decisive advantage of associating the Declaration with the most potent name in Jewry."

 

Rothschild replied by hand on November 4, 1917, thanking Balfour for "a prospect of safety and comfort to large masses of people who are in need of it," and adding that "already in many parts of Russia renewed persecution has broken out."

 

The myth: Because the letter was addressed to a Rothschild, conspiracy theories cite it as proof that the Rothschild family created Israel. It is part of a wider false claim, documented by the American Jewish Committee, that the family secretly controls the economy and profits from wars. AAP FactCheck, the Australian news agency's fact-checking unit, reported in 2024 that most social media posts claiming the family created Israel "point to the 1917 Balfour Declaration" as evidence. The claim is false. Suzanne Rutland, professor emeritus at the University of Sydney, called it "utter nonsense."

 

What the documents show:

  • A recorded process: The drafts, the War Cabinet minutes and Montagu's memorandum survive in the UK National Archives, open to anyone. They show months of argument inside the government, not a purchase or a secret order.

  • A British motive, based on a British belief: The Cabinet's stated aim was to win Jewish opinion abroad for the war effort. As historians across the spectrum note, that aim rested on an exaggerated picture of Jewish influence. Officials believing a stereotype does not make it true.

  • British Jews were divided: On May 24, 1917, the presidents of the Board of Deputies and the Anglo-Jewish Association, David Alexander and Claude Montefiore, wrote to The Times that British Jews "regard themselves primarily as a religious community," with "no separate national aspirations." Montagu fought the declaration inside the Cabinet. Nor were all Rothschilds Zionists: in 1929 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency named Lionel de Rothschild as president of the League of British Jews, founded in November 1917, a body that "opposed the issuance of the Balfour Declaration when the negotiations for it were under way."

  • A choice of addressee, not of policy: The letter went to Rothschild for reasons of standing and protocol. The text was decided by the War Cabinet.

 

The myth repeats the picture of hidden Jewish power at the heart of the Protocols and the media control myth. Myths about the Rothschilds are also much older than 1917; our Coin Clipping page describes a false 19th-century story about Nathan Rothschild and the Battle of Waterloo. More such myths are explained on our trope pages.

 

How Palestinian Arabs and Zionists Responded, 1917 to 1922

The two communities most affected read the same letter very differently. The declaration "was heartily welcomed by the Zionist leadership," the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) notes. For Palestinian Arabs, who made up the large majority of the country's people, Khalidi writes, "this statement was a gun pointed directly at their heads." Jews made up roughly 8 to 11 percent of the population between 1918 and 1922, according to Justin McCarthy's estimate for 1918 and the British census of 1922. According to a study published by the United Nations, the British authorities did not officially announce the declaration in Palestine until 1920, though its "nature and object" had "quickly become common knowledge."

 

Zionist responses:

  • Relief and hope: Rothschild's reply of November 4, 1917 spoke of "safety and comfort to large masses of people who are in need of it," and mentioned reports of "renewed persecution" in Russia.

  • A first step: In April 1918 a Zionist Commission that included Weizmann, accompanied by British officials, was sent to Palestine, the UN study records.

  • A historic claim recognized: Zionist leaders pressed for the 1922 Mandate to recognize "the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine," and the final text did so (see below).

 

Palestinian Arab and wider Arab responses:

  • First anniversary, 1918: "On 2 November 1918, non-violent protests marked the first anniversary of the Balfour Declaration," the UN study records.

  • A conditional agreement, 1919: On January 3, 1919, in London, Emir Faisal, acting for the Arab Kingdom of the Hejaz, signed an agreement with Weizmann that referred to the declaration and supported Jewish immigration, with protection for Arab farmers. Faisal added a handwritten condition: "Provided the Arabs obtain their independence as demanded in my Memorandum dated the 4th of January, 1919," he would concur; otherwise, "I shall not be bound by a single word of the present Agreement."

  • Palestine Arab Congresses, 1919 and 1920: The First Palestine Arab Congress met in Jerusalem from January 27, 1919 and sent the Paris Peace Conference a memorandum rejecting the declaration, according to the Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (Palquest). The Third Congress, in Haifa on December 13 to 19, 1920, asked Britain for a national government answerable to an elected assembly and elected the Arab Executive Committee, chaired by Musa Kazim al-Husseini.

  • The General Syrian Congress, 1919: Meeting in Damascus on July 2, 1919, with delegates from Palestine, it resolved: "We oppose the pretentions of the Zionists to create a Jewish commonwealth in the southern part of Syria, known as Palestine." The same resolution stated: "Our Jewish compatriots shall enjoy our common rights and assume the common responsibilities."

  • The King-Crane Commission, 1919: This American commission reported on August 28, 1919 that "222 (85.3 per cent) of the 260 petitions" it received in Palestine "declared against the Zionist program." It recommended "serious modification of the extreme Zionist Program." The UN study notes that its views "were ignored."

  • Violence, 1920 and 1921: In April 1920, while the Allies were meeting at San Remo, "anti-Jewish riots broke out," the UN study records, and there was further violence in 1921. A British military inquiry, as quoted in the UN study, found that underlying causes included "The Arabs' belief that the Balfour Declaration implied a denial of the right of self-determination."

  • Diplomacy in London: In 1921 and 1922 a delegation from the Moslem-Christian Association of Palestine traveled to London to present the Palestinian case, the UN study notes.

 

From a Letter to International Law: The 1922 Mandate

On its own, the declaration was a statement of British policy. It gained legal force through the peace settlement after the war. At the San Remo Conference on April 25, 1920, the Allies assigned the mandate for Palestine to Britain. The League of Nations approved the Mandate for Palestine on July 24, 1922, and it came into formal effect in September 1923.

 

The Mandate repeated the declaration in its preamble and went further:

  • The preamble: It recorded that "recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country."

  • Article 2: Britain was to "secure the establishment of the Jewish national home" and "the development of self-governing institutions," and to safeguard "the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion."

  • Article 4: "An appropriate Jewish agency" was to advise the government, and "The Zionist organization" was to be recognized as that agency.

  • Article 6: The administration, "while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced," was to "facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions" and encourage "close settlement by Jews on the land."

  • Article 25: For the territories "between the Jordan and the eastern boundary of Palestine," Britain could "postpone or withhold application" of these provisions.

 

Weeks earlier, on June 3, 1922, the British government's statement of policy known as the Churchill White Paper had set out its own reading of the declaration. It said the national home meant "not the imposition of a Jewish nationality upon the inhabitants of Palestine as a whole," and that the terms "do not contemplate that Palestine as a whole should be converted into a Jewish National Home, but that such a Home should be founded 'in Palestine.'" It also said the Jewish community should know "it is in Palestine as of right and not on the sufferance."

 

The legal and moral meaning of the Mandate is still debated:

  • Kramer's view: When the declaration entered the Mandate's preamble, Kramer writes, "it acquired full legal standing in international law," and the national home "had become a legal commitment of the international community."

  • Khalidi's view: The other Arab mandates were treated under the League's Covenant as provisionally "independent nations," Khalidi notes, but Palestine "was denied such treatment." He argues that the Mandate "substantially amplified and expanded on" the declaration.

  • The UN study's view: Palestinians were never "consulted in the choice of the mandatory," it argues, as the League's Covenant required.

 

Over the following years, Jewish immigration to Palestine grew under the Mandate, and so did Arab opposition to it, as the UN study records. Those decades, and the events of 1947 to 1949, are the subject of the third article in this series. The Balfour Declaration was a short, public letter whose drafting is documented in the British government's own records, and historians still argue over why Britain wrote it and what it led to. Those debates are real. The claim that the letter proves a secret Rothschild plot is not. Reading the document itself is the first step toward recognizing that myth when it appears again.

 

By 1933 the national home existed on paper and, increasingly, on the ground. That year, Hitler came to power in Germany. Within months, German authorities and Zionist bodies reached a controversial agreement that let some German Jews reach Mandate Palestine with part of their property. That agreement, the Haavara, is one of the most misused episodes in modern Jewish history, and it is the subject of the next article.

 

A note on dates: Sources differ on some dates. Balfour 100 gives June 13 and June 19, 1917 for Balfour's invitation to submit a draft, so we say "June 1917." The War Cabinet minute approving the declaration is dated October 31, 1917, although some accounts say November 1. The Mandate came into formal effect in September 1923; we give the month only.

 

Sources

Primary documents

Historians, reference works and reporting

Last updated: October 7, 2026

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