Today in history... December 5th

• 1854 - Aaron Allen of Boston patents the folding theatre chair

•1957 - New York City is 1st city to legislate against racial or religious

discrimination in housing market (Fair Housing Practices Law)

•Happy Birthday ...

•1963 - Doctor Dre (48) (rapper, CEO, entrepreneur

• 1901 - Walt Disney (DISNEY!)

•1968 - Margaret Cho (45) - American comedian, advocate for LGBTQ rights

fashion designer, actress and author.

The Balfour Declaration

• November 2, 1917: Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour writes a letter

to Britain’s most prominent and influential Jewish citizen, Baron Lionel

Walter Rothschild, expressing the British government’s support for a

Jewish homeland in Palestine.

• Britain’s public acknowledgement and support of the Zionist movement

emerged from its growing concern surrounding the direction of the First

World War. By mid-1917, Britain and France were in stuck in a deadlock

with Germany on the Western Front, while efforts to defeat Turkey failed.

Motives for Britain to publicly support:

• genuine belief in the righteousness of the Zionist cause

• Britain’s leaders hoped that a formal declaration in favour of Zionism

would help gain Jewish support for the Allies in neutral countries, in

the United States and especially in Russia, where the powerfully anti-

Semitic czarist government had just been overthrown with the help of

Russia’s significant Jewish population.

• Britain wanted dominance in Palestine—a land bridge between the

crucial territories of India and Egypt—an essential post-war goal. The

establishment of a Zionist state there—under British protection—

would accomplish this.

• Self-determination for smaller nations.

• November 2nd 2013 marked the 96th anniversary since Britain's Foreign

Secretary Arthur Balfour issued the Declaration to establish a national home

for the Jews in Palestine.

• The Balfour Declaration forms the cornerstone of the Zionist design. They

have relied on it as if it were a document of title to Palestine. It is often

regarded as Britain's greatest allowance to political Zionism.

• Although the document in its draft stage was amended and endorsed in

Washington by supreme judge Louis Brandais and President Woodrow Wilson

it took its name from the British foreign secretary who finally signed it.

• There was notable opposition to the Declaration in the cabinet of Prime

Minister Lloyd George. Lord Curzon warned of the consequences of

issuing a deliberately ambiguous statement that would allow the

interpretation that a Jewish 'state' was a possibility.

• During 1919, an official US investigation into the conditions existing in

certain parts of the former Ottoman Empire led by Henry King and

Charles Crane found that

"...the erection of such a Jewish state cannot be accomplished without the

gravest trespass upon the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish

communities in Palestine."

• 1917, a vigorous anti-Zionist movement within Parliament held up the

progress of the planned declaration.

• Led by Edwin Montagu, secretary of state for India and one of the first

Jews to serve in the cabinet, the anti-Zionists feared that British-

sponsored Zionism would threaten the status of Jews who had settled in

various European and American cities and also encourage anti-Semitic

violence in the countries battling Britain in the war, especially within the

Ottoman Empire.

• This opposition was overruled, however, and after soliciting—with varying

degrees of success—the approval of France, the United States and Italy

(including the Vatican) Lloyd George’s government went ahead with its

plan.

• The influence of the Balfour Declaration on the course of post-war events

was immediate:

• According to the "mandate" system created by the Versailles Treaty of

1919, Britain was entrusted with the temporary administration of

Palestine, with the understanding that it would work on behalf of both

its Jewish and Arab inhabitants.

• Arabs, in Palestine and elsewhere, were angered by their failure to

receive the nationhood and self-government they had been led to

expect in return for their participation in the war against Turkey.

• In the years after the war, the Jewish population in Palestine increased

dramatically, along with the instances of Jewish-Arab violence.

• The area’s instability led Britain to delay making a decision on

Palestine’s future. In the aftermath of World War II and the terrors of

the Holocaust, however, growing international support for Zionism led

to the official declaration in 1948 of the State of Israel.