Few documents reveal an enduring political phenomenon as solitarily as the Balfour Declaration. Still keeping its spirit alive, the document decodes not only the origins of the Israeli state but also the ideological foundations of Zionist colonialism. Indeed, a closer look at the text, pretext and context of the declaration sheds light on Israel’s genocidal and settlement policies, as well as the century-old complicity of its Western enablers.
Dated November 1917, the infamous Balfour Declaration was an affirmative direct response to the over-zealous efforts of influential Zionist leaders such as Lord Walter Rothschild, Chaim Weizmann and Nahum Sokolow. Nevertheless, it was also the British Empire’s proposed solution to Europe’s long-standing “Jewish problem”: Finding a new home for the European Jews meant a Europe with fewer Jews, meaning a "purer" home for Europeans. However, the implicitly anti-Semitic declaration aimed to achieve several objectives at once.
By declaring open support for the Zionist cause, the British Cabinet wanted to guarantee and bolster Jewish support in America, Germany and Russia as part of its World War I strategy. The aim was to acquire the support of the Jewish elites inhabiting these countries to keep the U.S. and Russia as allies and preempt the potential advantage of a similar declaration from its rival, Germany. The declaration was, therefore, a product of mixed motives: Britain’s imperial strategy, anti-Semitic tendencies, and personal sympathy.
Nevertheless, the declaration’s text was as notable for what it omitted as what it promised. The indigenous population was codified in the declaration, which dismissively referred to the 700,000 Arabs, who constituted 90% of the population at the time, as the “non-Jewish residents of Palestine.” In this regard, the Balfour Declaration’s essence was colonialist. As Edward Said stated, it was “a statement by a European power about a non-European territory, in flat disregard of both the presence and wishes of the native majority.”
Sponsoring a settler community in a land already inhabited by other people, the British Mandate thus operated as the facilitator for Zionist settler colonialism. The mandate quickly opened Palestinian lands to large-scale Jewish immigration and allowed Zionist institutions to purchase land for new colonies after 1922. Consequently, the Jewish settler population grew from about 60,000 in 1918 to over 600,000 by 1947, and this structure, inaugurated in 1917, set the stage for the 1948 Nakba – the mass displacement of 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland. The League of Nations dressed the Mandate in the language of “civilization” and “tutelage,” while quietly subordinating the rights of the indigenous majority to a project of national home-building for an external constituency.
The “imperial arrogance” persists more than a century later, not only in policy, but in the century-old complicity of its Western enablers. When contemporary powers offer unconditional support for actions built on the very displacement and land acquisition that the Mandate facilitated after 1922, they effectively reaffirm Balfour’s colonial assertion. The regime instituted through external guarantee and international sponsorship reproduces itself by invoking security to normalize exception, legality to rationalize dispossession, and diplomacy to defer accountability.
The long genealogy of dispossession authorized in 1917 and operationalized through the Mandate explicitly shows how it began long before Oct. 7. The frame that grants existential privilege to the colonizer while designating the indigenous as disposable bodies is still in effect, even though it shifted institutional forms over time. The frame remains visible in the cartography of settlements, the grammar of permits and checkpoints, and the bureaucracies that render the everyday a theater of control in the West Bank.
What the Balfour Declaration reveals today is that settler colonialism is a structure, not an event. Codified more than a century ago, the declaration signaled a colonial architecture that persists: one people endowed with political privilege and global sponsorship, and another fighting merely to have their basic rights recognized. The legacy of the Balfour Declaration, therefore, is not merely the text of a 1917 letter, but its enduring and active logic.
This logic, which codified an indigenous majority as “non-Jewish residents” and, as Balfour himself later admitted, never intended “even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants,” did not expire with the British Mandate; it became the operating principle of a colonial structure designed to be permanent.
