The Balfour Declaration

Britain occupied Palestine after World War I under a mandate ultimately sanctioned by the League of Nations.

Incorporated into the mandate was the Balfour Declaration, issued in 1917 by British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, who endorsed the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine (but not, the declaration stipulated, at the expense of the Palestinian Arabs). The British also had promised to help Arab leaders create their own independent states in return for their support against the Ottoman Empire.

But a misunderstanding arose that would have longstanding implications: The Arabs thought Palestine would be among the newly independent Arab states. The British said that was not what they intended. Rather, they said, a Jewish state would exist within Palestine.

The British did lay the foundation of a separate Arab state in 1921. They reserved lands east of the Jordan River -- or Transjordan, three quarters of the Palestine mandate -- exclusively for Arabs and transferred control to the Hasemite royal dynasty. Now called Jordan, the region gained full independence from Britain in 1946.

By the 1930s, tensions in the remainder of the Palestine mandate continued to test British resolve, and in 1937 they declared martial law. That same year a British commission recommended that the rest of Palestine be partitioned into Jewish and Arab states, with the British controlling Jerusalem. The Zionists accepted the idea, albeit reluctantly.

The Arabs, enraged that they might be removed forcibly from the proposed Jewish state, rejected it. And with World War II on the horizon, the British government realized it would need Arab support in the Middle East and thus put the idea aside. After the war, as Holocaust survivors and other Jewish displaced persons streamed toward Palestine, the partition idea was revived, this time in the newly created United Nations.

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