ISRAEL - The Balfour Declaration

Hungarian Jewish writer Arthur Koestler, called the declaration “an act dangerously outside the cautious routine of diplomacy. The whole thing was unorthodox, unpolitic, freakish.”

The guesswork would subside when Britain opened its archives in the 1970s. We now know that, far from being “unpolitic,” the Balfour Declaration was very politic indeed.

By assuming the noble burden of helping the Jews, Britain would extricate itself from its promise to share Palestine with France as stipulated in the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement—a deal that Lloyd George wanted to break for reasons of postwar imperial strategy.

Some historians of the declaration are oblivious of any such problem. Consider, for example, the Oxford historian Avi Shlaim, who has repeatedly made this statement:

“At the time [of the Balfour Declaration], the Jews constituted 10 percent of the population of Palestine: 60,000 Jews and 600,000 Arabs. Yet Britain chose to recognize the right to national self-determination of the tiny minority and to flatly deny it to the undisputed majority.”

Actually, “national self-determination” doesn’t appear in the Balfour Declaration, which promised instead to advance “in Palestine a national home for the Jewish people.”

Lord Curzon, former viceroy of India, once described as “the most traveled man who ever sat in a British cabinet,” [made] the unspoken conclusion: Palestine couldn’t possibly solve the Jewish problem, and for Britain to issue grand unfulfillable promises to the contrary would be an act not of practical politics but of romantic folly.

Over the past century, the people of Israel have diligently built the power needed to forge their own solutions, mastering their fate as never before. In 1917, Lord Balfour and the British government made a promise on behalf of the Allies. In 1939, Britain unilaterally abrogated it. In 1948, Israel finally kept it, as it has done ever since.

-mosaicmagazine.com, 31 October 2019

Commentary: We only publish excerpts from the extended article to show that it’s not what powerful politicians do, as people think, but how God reacts in His ways and in His time.

Volumes of books have been written about the Jews before the Balfour Declaration, during and before the Second World War. Yet no documents, no declarations, no powers on planet earth were able to invalidate the clear prophecy of Holy Scripture from over almost 2,600 years ago:

“And I will bring them out from the people, and gather them from the countries, and will bring them to their own land, and feed them upon the mountains of Israel by the rivers, and in all the inhabited places of the country. I will feed them in a good pasture, and upon the high mountains of Israel shall their fold be: there shall they lie in a good fold, and in a fat pasture shall they feed upon the mountains of Israel. I will feed my flock, and I will cause them to lie down, saith the Lord GOD. I will seek that which was lost, and bring again that which was driven away, and will bind up that which was broken, and will strengthen that which was sick: but I will destroy the fat and the strong; I will feed them with judgment” (Ezekiel 34:13-16).