Balfour Declaration Centenary

Lord McInnes of Kilwinning Excerpts

Wednesday 5th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord McInnes of Kilwinning (Con)]

My Lords, it is important that we as Britons feel immense pride in the Balfour Declaration and its consequences. I think so for two reasons. I am an optimist, so I will try to get them out in two minutes.

First, we as a country were able to offer the Jewish nation a country and we were the first to do so. I think that makes up why we should celebrate this important declaration. We as the British Empire failed the Jewish people in the 1930s and 1940s and then most egregiously, probably, in the way that we treated those refugees who had survived the Holocaust by refusing them permission to come to the mandated territories. It was the Balfour Declaration that gave hope to many Jewish people throughout eastern Europe who faced pogroms and oppression and for whom there was no viable option other than emigration, and emigration to the Jewish homeland was surely the best hope for those individuals.

My second point is a more contemporary one. Without the Balfour Declaration the pluralism which defined the Middle East for 2,000 years would have been lost. What would have become of the Jews who lived in the Arab lands and who were already facing riots and pogroms in Baghdad and Tehran in the 1930s and 1940s? Those people could not sustainably remain in the Middle East beyond that period, which was before the State of Israel was created.

As we have heard already, there is pluralism in religion and sexuality and democracy in Israel that does not exist in a viable form anywhere else in the Middle East. For that, we should take immense pride in the Balfour Declaration.