The Balfour Declaration

After the first world war, the British empire began to collapse, as a result they decided to bequeath parts of their land as they could no longer afford to keep it. According to John Green’s crash course video on Palestine and Israel, in 1917 the Britishers created the Balfour Declaration, promising that they would give the Jews a homeland. They needed support from the Jews as their empire was collapsing, and the Jews needed a homeland as they had recently been persecuted from Europe subsequent to the holocaust. Palestine then became a homeland for the Jews, as they had been given a large part of Palestine which they considered their traditional homeland. However, the Arab-Palestinians and neighbouring Arab states were not happy with the idea. …show more content…
As a result, the Britishers created a statement saying that they would limit the Jews from immigrating to Palestine, and establish a joint state for the Arabs and Jews in Palestine within 10 years, but this only made it worse. The zionists were not happy as they were mad at Britain for limiting the number of Jewish immigrants when they were at a desperate need of a homeland, and the Arabs were not pleased with the idea of having to wait 10 years for their own state. The tensions became too complicated for the British Empire to handle so they handed it over to the “newly created” U.N. Unfortunately the UN’s plan of partitioning Palestine into fairly equal Palestinian and Jewish-states, failed. This lead to the Arab-Israeli war, following by many others such as the 6-day war and other wars to this