Balfour Declaration Centenary

Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale Excerpts

Wednesday 5th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale (Lab)]

My Lords, in its history, the Balfour Declaration has been, and is, almost as much attacked, dissected and denigrated as it has been revered and respected. In two minutes, it is difficult to do it justice, but some salient points can be made.

The letter that Foreign Minister Balfour wrote to Lord Rothschild to transmit to the Zionist Federation should be seen against the background of the first Zionist Congress in Switzerland in 1897, where it was stated:

“Zionism seeks to establish a home for the Jewish people in Palestine secured under public law”.


So the Balfour Declaration in November 1917 was hailed as,

“the much-awaited opening: narrow, conditional, hedged, but an opening all the same”,

and, for all its vagaries, it constituted a first step towards the Zionist aim.

Abba Eban once said that the Balfour Declaration stands alone,

“as the decisive diplomatic victory of the Jewish people in modern history”.

After the San Remo conference in 1920, which noble Lords have already spoken about, the Balfour Declaration was ratified in the League of Nations, when the Mandate for Palestine was approved in July 1922. If we fast-forward to 1947, when Great Britain relinquished to the UN the power to make decisions relating to the status of the Mandate for Palestine and UNGA Resolution 181 was accepted by the Jewish Agency and rejected by the Arab League, followed by the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel by Ben-Gurion in May 1948, we have a direct line from the Balfour Declaration to the State of Israel.

Britain can rightly be very proud of the Balfour Declaration, which well deserves a happy and dignified celebration of its 100th anniversary, which I hope Her Majesty’s Government will fully participate in and encourage.