Balfour Declaration Centenary

Lord Kestenbaum Excerpts

Wednesday 5th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kestenbaum (Lab)]

My Lords, standing as we do the day after another great anniversary, it is fitting to reflect on President Woodrow Wilson’s words of 4 July 1920, when he famously said that the anniversary of an independence should be seen as a beginning, not a conclusion. So what might the centenary anniversary of this document be a beginning of? To what does it aspire? For Britain that day, 2 November 1917, recognised the strong historic Jewish links to a land while also setting out a vision for the kind of society that could be built there.

It was Churchill just three years later, when reflecting on the declaration on his first visit to Jerusalem, who said:

“It is manifestly right that the Jews… should have … a national home”,


in a land,

“which for more than 3,000 years they have been intimately … associated”.

Yet even Churchill could not have imagined that less than 25 years later two out of every three Jews in Europe had been murdered—6 million killings in total. It would be right to consider that without the opportunity the Balfour Declaration gave in the pre-war years to come to that national home, soon to be Israel, it would have been three out of three Jews murdered in those barbaric times.

History always casts a long shadow, anniversaries often a longer one. But what we take from anniversaries are the choices we make, so let us choose this centenary to rededicate ourselves to the aspiration of this document, which, like every democracy, remains a work in progress. Let us use the centenary to promote that positive vision for the future, finding a vocabulary that is sensitive to conflicting emotions and, above all, strengthening courageous moderate voices of both sides will work tirelessly to end the conflict.

We enter this centenary year inspired by two things. We are inspired by the pioneering spirit of those who wrote those 67 words into history and in doing so saved lives by the millions, and equally inspired by and committed to the task of building a lasting, just and secure peace for all the inhabitants of that blessed land.