Language:
English
Year of publication:
1997
Titel der Quelle:
Manna; the Forum for Progressive Judaism
Angaben zur Quelle:
57 (1997) 2-6
Keywords:
Balfour Declaration
;
Antisemitism History 1800-2000
Abstract:
Assesses the origins and significance of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, based on confidential minutes and memoranda of senior Foreign Office advisers, diplomats and cabinet ministers of this period found in the Public Record Office. Finds that at the heart of British official concern with the "Jewish question" was a very insidious charge: that Jews, at heart, always put their interests as Jews before all else. Sir Mark Sykes, the chief architect of the Balfour Declaration, believed that Britain had to win the support of "world Jewry" if she wished to win World War I. The Arabs, on the other hand, were not taken into account at all. Chaim Weizmann recognized this window of opportunity for Zionists to achieve the goal of the "Jewish national home"; he convinced the British policy makers that their obsessions about Jews were correct. Concludes that the Declaration did not materialize out of humanitarian concern or Christian guilt, but rather out of antisemitism. The Declaration was flawed because it denied Palestinian Arabs their dignity as human beings and because it was founded on a sickness in the non-Jewish European mind.
Note:
On Great Britain's attitude to the Jews and Zionism during World War I.
URL:
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