This book examines the development and issuance of the Balfour Declaration, the document that set the stage for the creation of the state of Israel, within its global setting. The heart of the book demonstrates that the Declaration developed and contributed to a juncture in a global dialogue about the nature and definition of nation at the outset of the twentieth century. Embedded in this examination are gendered, racial, nationalistic, and imperial considerations. The work posits that the Balfour Declaration was a specific tool designed by the manipulation of these ideas. Once established, the Declaration helped, and hindered, established imperial powers like the British, nascent imperial powers like the Japanese and Indians, and emerging nationalist movements like the Zionists, Irish, Palestinians, and East Africans, to advocate for their own vision of national definition.

In the middle of the First World War, the British War Cabinet approved and issued a statement in the form of a letter that encouraged the settlement of the Jewish people in Palestine. Signed by the Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, the Balfour Declaration remains one of the most important documents of the last hundred years. Jonathan Schneer explores the story behind the declaration and its unforeseen consequences that have shaped the modern world, placing it in context paying attention to the fascinating characters who conceived, opposed and plotted around it - among them Lloyd George, Lord Rothschild, T.E. Lawrence, Prince Faisal and Aubrey Herbert (the man who was 'Greenmantle'). The Balfour Declaration brings vividly to life the origins of one of the world's longest lasting and most damaging conflicts.

The true history of the imperial deal that transformed the Middle East and sealed the fate of Palestine On 2 November 1917, the British government, represented by Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour, declared it was in favour of “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” This short note would become one of the most controversial documents of modern history. Offering new insights into the imperial rivalries between Britain, Germany and the Ottomans, Regan exposes British policy in the region as part of a larger geopolitical game. He charts the debates within the British government, the Zionist movement, and the Palestinian groups struggling for selfdetermination. The after-effects of these events are still felt today.

The Balfour Declaration: Sixty-Seven Words 100 Years of Conflict is a concise account of the players, motivations, and setting for one of the most consequential letters of modern history. The letter began a process by which the international community came to embrace the idea of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. Jager brings to life the extraordinary personalities working amid the global conflict that was World War I. With the war still raging and despite political machinations and numerous secret deals, the Balfour Declaration was issued publicly. Britain promised Palestine to no one but the Jews yet almost immediately, it began backtracking. One hundred years later, amid the Arab world's unremitting rejection of the very idea of a Jewish homeland, this book spells out the backstory of today's headlines.

A landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective. Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process. Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.

A critical examination of the history of US-Palestinian relations The United States has invested billions of dollars and countless diplomatic hours in the pursuit of Israeli-Palestinian peace and a two-state solution. Yet American attempts to broker an end to the conflict have repeatedly come up short. At the center of these failures lay two critical factors: Israeli power and Palestinian politics. While both Israelis and Palestinians undoubtedly share much of the blame, one also cannot escape the role of the United States, as the sole mediator in the process, in these repeated failures. American peacemaking efforts ultimately ran aground as a result of Washington’s unwillingness to confront Israel’s ever-deepening occupation or to come to grips with the realities of internal Palestinian politics. In particular, the book looks at the interplay between the U.S.-led peace process and internal Palestinian politics—namely, how a badly flawed peace process helped to weaken Palestinian leaders and institutions and how an increasingly dysfunctional Palestinian leadership, in turn, hindered prospects for a diplomatic resolution. Thus, while the peace process was not necessarily doomed to fail, Washington’s management of the process, with its built-in blind spot to Israeli power and Palestinian politics, made failure far more likely than a negotiated breakthrough. Shaped by the pressures of American domestic politics and the special relationship with Israel, Washington’s distinctive “blind spot” to Israeli power and Palestinian politics has deep historical roots, dating back to the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate. The size of the blind spot has varied over the years and from one administration to another, but it is always present.

It is now more than seventy years since the creation of the state of Israel, yet its origins and the British Empire's historic responsibility for Palestine remain little known. Confusion persists too as to the distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. In Legacy of Empire, Gardner Thompson offers a clear-eyed review of political Zionism and Britain's role in shaping the history of Palestine and Israel. Thompson explores why the British government adopted Zionism in the early twentieth century, issuing the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and then retaining it as the cornerstone of their rule in Palestine after the First World War. Despite evidence and warnings, over the next two decades Britain would facilitate the colonisation of Arab Palestine by Jewish immigrants, ultimately leading to a conflict which it could not contain. Britain's response was to propose the partition of an ungovernable land: a 'two-state solution' which - though endorsed by the United Nations after the Second World War - has so far brought into being neither two states nor a solution. A highly readable and compelling account of Britain's rule in Palestine, Legacy of Empire is essential for those wishing to better understand the roots of this enduring conflict.