The Balfour Declaration and the Palestine Mandate, 1917-1923: British Imperialist Imperatives

The article sets the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the final confirmation of Britain's Palestine Mandate in 1923 within the context of national imperial concerns: in particular, anxieties over the security of the Suez Canal and the country's sea-route to its economic and military power-base in India. In 1917 strategic issues were paramount in the progressive annexation of Palestine by the Lloyd George coalition, this the essential territorial precondition for the pursuit of the Zionist project. In 1923 these global considerations were again to the fore when the new Conservative administration, less Zionist than its predecessor, decided finally to accept and implement the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine and the obligation therein to advance the cause of a Jewish national home. And throughout this period there was a widespread sense in official circles that Zionist settlers might perform as direct agents of Empire, acting as grateful, loyal, and developmental servants of the British imperial interest. Paradoxically, however - and largely on account of the ill-informed and reflexive manner in which plans were formulated in London - the entire exercise was, in the long-term, to prove a source of profound weakness to Britain's strategic authority in the East. Palestine policy, like so much imperial reasoning in the twentieth century, was to prove intrinsically delusional.