The politics of the Balfour Declaration: Nationalism, imperialism and the limits of Zionist-British cooperation

2016/07/02 by Danny Gutwein · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies #Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics #African history and culture studies

paper · doi:10.1080/13531042.2016.1244100

openalex publication_date 2016/07/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06

Abstract

This article proposes a new perspective on the much debated question of why the British government published the Balfour Declaration? It argues that the Declaration was published as part of the struggle that took place in the course of the First World War between two rival factions in the British government on the question of the future of the Ottoman Empire: the “radical” faction that strove to partition the Ottoman Empire as a means to extend the British imperial hold on the Middle East, and the “reformist” faction that opposed this. By promising to turn Palestine into “a national home for the Jewish people” the Declaration advanced the radical agenda of dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and expansion of British imperialism in the Middle East.

Citations

• Woodrow Wilson and the Balfour Declaration
• The balfour declaration and its makers
• The French pro‐zionist declarations of 1917–1918

Cited by

• Balfour Declaration [wikipedia]

Related

• The Balfour Declaration and the Palestine Mandate, 1917–1923: British Imperialist Imperatives
• War-Time Contingency and the Balfour Declaration of 1917: An Improbable Regression
• BRITISH WORLD WAR I DIPLOMACY AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE ARAB-ISRAELI CRISIS 1914 – 1920
• The Debate over British Reparations for Mandate-Era Governance of Palestine? Three views
• Nationalism in the Middle East, 1876–1945