This year is the centennial of the Balfour Declaration, the decision of the British government announced on November 2, 1917, in favor of a Jewish “national home” in Palestine. The Balfour Declaration is the beginning of the international legitimation of the Zionist project and, ultimately, the State of Israel. That’s why British prime minister Theresa May has invited Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to London in November to mark the centennial. That’s also why the declaration is the target of Israel’s opponents, who cast it as a self-dealing grab by a perfidious empire. To the Arabs, it occupies the same circle of hell as the Sykes-Picot agreement.

Is this an accurate representation of the Balfour Declaration? If you deemed it an exclusively British project, you might think so. But what if it wasn’t? What if it represented the considered consensus of all the Allied powers at the time? What if Britain had insisted that the Zionists secure the buy-in of France, Italy, the United States, and even the Vatican before it issued the declaration? What if the Balfour Declaration was in fact an Allied declaration, the equivalent to a U.N. Security Council resolution today?

In the June monthly essay in the on-line Mosaic Magazine, I consider just that possibility, by a shift of focus. This isn’t the well-known story of Chaim Weizmann’s charm offensive among British decision-makers. It’s a lesser-known story, revolving around a forgotten Zionist leader (hint: he’s in the postcard below), and exploring many other assurances made in Paris, Rome and Washington, without which Britain wouldn’t have issued any declaration at all.

“The Forgotten Truth about the Balfour Declaration,” in Mosaic Magazine, at this link. It’s the monthly essay, so it will be followed each week by a response from another authority on the subject, and then by my own final word.

Seated right to left, Nahum Sokolow, Lord Balfour, Chaim and Vera Weizmann, in Rishon LeZion, 1925.