IRL 20, May 7, 2010.

URL; http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ssfc0005/The%20Balfour%20Declaration%20and%20its%20consequences.html


This is an article written by Avi Shlaim, explaining the ambiguity of the Balfour Declaration and how it was interpreted differently by the Jews and the Arabs. The Arabs believed, after the Balfour Declaration was written in 1917, that the interests of the Jews and the British goal to help them establish a national home would not conflict with Arab independence in Palestine. King Hussein was not opposed to Jewish settlement in Palestine, as he saw them as "People of the Book", meaning the Bible, but he was opposed to a Zionist takeover of Palestine. He did not want to see a Zionist agenda there.

The Jewish perspective is that they interpreted the Balfour Declaration as a sign that the British would be willing to support them in achieving their long-standing goal of re-establishing themselves in what they perceived to be their homeland once again, and eventually the Arabs there did see conflicting issues, and both sides eventually turned against the British, realizing that they could not depend on the British to achieve their goals.

The importance of this source to me is that it gives me some further background on one of the points I have made in my IA. In my IA, I analyzed the impact of the Balfour Declaration on the creation of an independent Israel, and like I discovered in my own research, this source backs up my point that although Israel was not established as a direct result of British actions, the issuing of the Balfour Declaration definitely contributed to Jewish immigration to Palestine, and allowed them to reestablish themselves there in larger numbers, feeling comfortable about doing so.

This is a sentence from the source above that demonstrates how the Balfour Declaration's impact on Jewish immigration angered the Arabs;

"The consequences of the Balfour Declaration were not confined to Palestine. The Declaration engendered anger towards Britain throughout the Arab world and at all levels of Arab society from the intellectual elites to the masses. "

The limitation of this source is primarily that it focuses more on the Arab perspective than the Jewish perspective, and apart from the fact that the Balfour Declaration inspired Jewish immigration, there is no explicit reference or quote to give the Jewish perspective in a more detailed manner than the generic one that I expressed above; Balfour Declaration gave the Jews the idea that Britain would support their endeavors.