Balfour Declaration

The Balfour Declaration is a short public letter dated 2 November 1917 from the British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, a leading figure in Britain's Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation, stating that His Majesty's Government "view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people" and would "use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object," while adding that nothing should be done to prejudice the civil and religious rights of Palestine's existing non-Jewish communities or the rights of Jews in other countries. Issued during the First World War while Ottoman Palestine remained under Ottoman control and Britain was seeking wartime support and later formalized in Britain's League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, the declaration became a foundational document for the Zionist movement and one of the most consequential and contested texts in the modern history of the Middle East, cited ever since in debates over the legitimacy and course of Jewish settlement in Palestine and the unresolved status of the Palestinian Arab population it addressed only in a subordinate clause.