Israel Matzav does a great and thorough job discussing the history and importance of the Balfour Declaration from November 2, 1917.
The Palestine Post had this to say at the 25th anniversary, during the depths of the Holocaust:
Notice how even then, as Jews argued that the immediate establishment of a state would save countless lives from the Nazis, they still bent over backwards to point out that Jewish immigration to Palestine helped the Arab community and did not displace a single person. Notice also that even then it was assumed that the Palestine spoken of in 1917 included Transjordan. (See also my posting on Eastern Palestine.)
In 1947, on the eve of the UN Partition vote, the Arabs decided to strike on this anniversary, As usual, the strike ended up helping the Jews more than it hurt them:
But while the real Palestinian Arab people took advantage of a nice day off by visiting Jewish shops, their self-declared thought-leaders looked at things a little more violently, figuratively bashing Balfour’s head with Arab hammers:
The Jewish claim on Palestine does not depend on the Balfour Declaration, of course, but it was an important moment in modern Zionist history that illuminates much about the conflict.
cross-posted on Elder of ZiyonÂ
Indeed, the Jewish claim to a homeland does not depend on the Balfour Declaration. Quite the contrary, the Balfour Declaration merely acknowledged an irrevocable land grant which already existed (Exodus 32:13).
One irony is that the Palestinian Arabs exist as a people only because of the Jewish immigration. If Palestine had not been established as a Jewish Homeland the place might well have been folded into the Syria Mandate, as the French wished. I suppose the Arabs would think it a fine thing to be oppressed by the thugs who have ruled Syria over the last sixty years.
It also seems likely that if Israel had not been established there would have been a huge intra-Arab war by now, with Egypt trying to conquer the Levant and other countries (Iraq and Syria for certain, and maybe Turkey) fighting to prevent it. That is what happened in the 1830s and early 40s, and it took the intervention of the British on the side of the Turks to put Egypt in its place. Who would have intervened this time, the USA? The USSR? Maybe both? Now there would have been a nice prospect, potentially leading to WWIII sometine in the 50s, sparked off by the internecine warfare among Pan-Arab Nationalists, ever jealous of each other.
People who believe that the Middle East would be sweetness and light, and the US have much greater influence and many friends there without Israel, are really naive.
Until the “Palestinian people” was invented as a weapon against Israel, the local Arabs did think of themselves as Syrians, when they weren’t actually recent immigrants from somewhere else.