On Nov. 2, 1917, Arthur Balfour, Britain’s then-Foreign Secretary, sent a letter to Lionel Walter Rothschild, who was a figurehead of the Jewish community in Britain, declaring support for the establishment of “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.

After World War I, before the British Mandate for Palestine, Jews made up three percent of the total population. By 1947, after the Mandate facilitated Jewish immigration to Palestine, the Jewish community in Palestine increased to 33 percent.

This pledge is considered a main catalyst for the events that led to the Nakba --Arabic for ‘catastrophe’-- in 1948 when Palestinians were ethnically cleansed by the Zionist armed gangs who were previously trained by British troops to fight by them in World War II.

During the Nakba, over 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homeland.

The letter was intentionally written with vague terms so that it was left open to interpretation, and the word “state” was intentionally left out because of opposition to the Zionist program within the British Cabinet, according to James L. Gelvin, an American scholar of Middle Eastern history.

Gelvin wrote that “the words of the Balfour Declaration were carefully chosen. It was no accident that the declaration contains the phrase “in Palestine” rather than “of Palestine,” nor was it an accident that the foreign office would use the words “national home” rather than the more precise “state” – in spite of the fact that “national home” has no precedent or standing in international law. And what exactly do “view with favour” and “use their best endeavours” mean? The seeming ambiguities of the declaration reflect debates not only within the British government but within the British Zionist and Jewish communities as well.”

When Churchill was asked by the Canadian Prime Minister about the meaning of a ‘national home’ he said that “If in the course of many years they become a majority in the country, they naturally would take it over ... pro rata with the Arab. We made an equal pledge that we would not turn the Arab off his land or invade his political and social rights.”

Though the declaration did in fact mention that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” the Israeli Occupation was created with complete disregard for Palestinian rights.

Multiple drafts were discovered:

After many documents were de-classified in the United Kingdom, scholars were able to obtain more than several drafts of the publication before it was published in its final form, which consisted of one sentence of 67 words.

According to zionist scholars, the declaration’s objectives were conveyed to the Zionist drafting team by Weizmann in a letter dated 20 June 1917, one day following his meeting with Rothschild and Balfour.

He proposed that the British government’s declaration should state: “its conviction, its desire or its intention to support Zionist aims for the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine; no reference must be made I think to the question of the Suzerain Power because that would land the British into difficulties with the French; it must be a Zionist declaration.”

Before the final version of the declaration was written, five drafts were going back and forth starting with the preliminary one in July 1917 and the fifth draft in October 1917.

Earlier drafts of the document used the phrase “the reconstitution of Palestine as a Jewish State,” but that was later changed.

The addition of “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” in the final versions of the declaration showed that “non-Jewish communities” who were the majority of residents in Palestine were merely regarded as an afterthought.

The United Nations published a study about Palestine, in the first part which offers historical background going as far back as 1915.

The following is an excerpt from the first part of the study.

“One of Weizmann’s concerns was over a “safeguard” clause concerning the interests of the Palestinian people. Its wording is remarkable, particularly when the careful drafting of the Declaration’s language is recalled. This clause does not mention the Palestinian or Arab people, whether Christian or Muslim, who compromised over 90 per cent of the population of Palestine, and who owned about 97 per cent of its land. Instead, the Declaration refers to them as the “existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”, a formulation which has been likened to calling “the multitude the non-few” or the British people “the non-Continental communities in Great Britain”.

Further, at a time when the principle of self-determination was being accorded recognition it was being denied to the people of Palestine. The Declaration’s language seeks to prevent actions “which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”, but is singularly silent on their more fundamental political rights.

This is of particular interest because the concept of political rights is present in the very next phrase, providing “… that nothing shall be done which may prejudice … the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country”. This second “safeguard” had not been proposed by the Zionist Organization, and is believed to have been the outcome of Sir Edwin Montagu’s apprehensions over the repercussions of the Declaration on Jews who chose to remain in their own countries.”

Why was the document so controversial?

The document itself conflicted with two other promises made by the UK, the first one made to the Arabs in the 1915 Hussein-McMahon correspondence, when the Arabs were promised independence in exchange for their rebellion against the Ottoman Empire.

The British had also promised the French that after the war, the majority of Palestine would be under international administration while the rest of the region would be split between the two colonial powers, in a separate secret treaty signed in 1916 known as the Sykes-Picot agreement.

The Sykes-Picot agreement was made in secret because it denied Arabs the right for independence as they were promised a year earlier in the Hussein-McMahon correspondence.

The final reason for controversy was because this pledge promised Jews a land where there was already a majority of people, the natives of this land, who made up more than 90 percent of the population.

In the words of the late Palestinian academic Edward Said, the declaration was “made by a European power … about a non-European territory … in a flat disregard of both the presence and wishes of the native majority resident in that territory.