The Palestinian Authority has been involved since last year in a campaign to delegitimize the 1917 Balfour Declaration, demanding that Britain apologize for its decision to create “a Jewish national home in Palestine.” According to the current Palestinian narrative, the declaration and its subsequent ratification by the League of Nations betrayed the principle of self-determination it was meant to uphold (by ignoring Palestinian Arabs’ right to a state of their own), unjustly gave Arab land to Jews, and thus led to the Arab-Israeli conflict and a century of Palestinian suffering. Gershon Hacohen seeks to put this narrative, and the Balfour declaration itself, in context:
[After 1917], the Arabs claimed the Balfour Declaration contradicted the principle of self-determination—but even as that claim was made, the leaders of the Arab struggle did not demand Palestinian self-determination. What they demanded instead was the joining of the mandatory land of Israel to the short-lived Kingdom of Syria, which was established by the self-proclaimed King Faisal [and lasted from March to July of 1920]. Their recognition of Palestine as part of a “Greater Syria” remained [in place] long after Faisal was expelled from Damascus by the French. . . .
In view of the League of Nations’ design to end imperial colonialism, the recognition by the world powers—followed by the international community as a whole—of the right of the Jews to a national home in the land of Israel stands prominent. The [official acknowledgment] of the exceptional situation of the Jews, most of whom did not reside at that time within the expanse of Mandate rule, . . . emphasized the significance of the special right of the Jewish people in the land of Israel. It recognized their historical and cultural affinity to the land and affirmed the political significance of this affinity.
The importance of the declaration lies also in its timing—decades before the Holocaust. It recognized the right of the people of Israel to establish a national entity in the land of Israel due to their historical ties to the land rather than due to a disaster that befell them. Israeli Jews, [especially], should seek to return to that understanding of the grounds for Israel’s establishment, which was taken for granted at the time by the international community.
Read more on BESA Center: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/centenary-balfour-declaration/