Articles
On Balfour’s 100th Anniversary, Time for a New Definition of Sovereignty, Independence and the Nation-State
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On Balfour’s 100th Anniversary, Time
for a New Definition of Sovereignty, Independence and
the Nation-State
by Mark LeVine and Mathias Mossberg
November 2nd marks the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, the letter from Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Lord Arthur James Balfour to British Jewish leader Walter Rothschild in which the British Government promised Jews a “national home” in Palestine should they win the war, while offering only to safeguard the “civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.”
Most “non-Jews”–i.e., Palestinian Arabs–joined by key members of Palestine’s existing Arab Jewish population and some Diaspora Jewish figures, understood that Balfour’s promise would lead to permanent hostility between the two emerging nationalist communities. Some local Jewish leaders even put forward an alternative to the Balfour Declaration, declaring that peace in the Holy Land would only be possible if “both sides… develop their national homes in the same land, which is destined to be one state.”
It’s tragic but fitting that on the Balfour Declaration’s centenary the most right-wing government in Israel’s history is pushing to annex large swaths of the West Bank to Jerusalem, permanently foreclosing the possibility of a second state being created on the territory of Palestine/Israel, and returning the conflict to its roots as a zero-sum territorial struggle between Jews and Palestinians.
Of course, Palestinians are not unique in being on the losing end of the Post-World War I nation-state order. Catalans and Kurds are only the most recent and newsworthy examples of how states established on territories with more than one ethnonational community—never mind established after the conquest and occupation of territories with large indigenous populations—have failed to provide equal political, economic and social rights to all inhabitants.