In 1917, Britain promised a national home to a people who made up roughly 8% of Palestine. Britain did not even control Palestine yet.
A Soviet documentary lays out the sequence in under a minute 👇
The Balfour Declaration was a letter addressed to Lord Rothschild, asking him to communicate it to the Zionist Federation.
Then came the Zionist Commission.
In 1918, Chaim Weizmann arrived in Palestine at the head of the commission and dealt directly with the British military administration. At the time, Jews were still a small minority of Palestine’s population, roughly 8% according to commonly cited Ottoman-era estimates.
Britain was not simply watching Zionist settlement happen from the sidelines. The British government had officially committed itself to facilitating a Jewish national home before it even received the Mandate for Palestine.
And Britain had its own imperial interests in the region. Palestine sat beside Egypt and the Suez Canal, one of the most strategically important arteries of the British Empire.
The Soviet documentary calls the process “Zionist colonization.” British imperial strategy, the Balfour Declaration, Rothschild, Weizmann, the Zionist Commission, and an overwhelmingly non-Jewish Palestine.
The clip is from a Soviet documentary. Funny how this history was discussed way more openly in the USSR than in the West.