Why Britain is being forced to revisit the Balfour Declaration

Submitted by Soumaya Ghannoushi on Tue, 10/06/2026 - 15:41 More than a century after promising the Jewish people a national home in Palestine, the document's fundamental contradiction has become inescapable

Pro-Palestinian supporters march past Downing Street, in central London, at a demonstration marking the anniversary of the Nakba, in May 2024 (Benjamin Cremel/AFP) Off

At its annual conference this past weekend, the Green Party of England and Wales voted by 1,022 to 813 to make itself formally anti-Zionist.

The motion approved by the party defines Zionism as an ethno-nationalist project, rejects the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, and reaffirms support for Palestinian liberation, the right of return, and a single democratic state across historic Palestine.

British parties have criticised Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before. They have condemned the destruction of Gaza, deplored settlement expansion, and demanded an end to occupation.

The Greens have crossed a different line. They have moved beyond the conduct of an Israeli government to question the ideology on which the state was built.

That this has happened in Britain gives the moment its historical weight. Britain was no bystander at the birth of the Zionist project in Palestine; it was one of its principal imperial sponsors.

The Balfour Declaration of 1917 committed the British government to facilitating “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. Under the Mandate that followed, Britain governed the country through the decisive decades in which Zionist immigration, settlement and institutions laid the foundations of the future state.

There is a profound irony, then, in the familiar story of Israel winning its “independence” from Britain: the empire it supposedly threw off was the empire that had helped make its creation possible.

Palestine, however, was never an empty land awaiting a people. It was already a homeland comprising families, towns, villages, farms, orchards, businesses and institutions. Israel’s birth did not take place beside that Palestinian reality; it violently remade it.

Villages destroyed

For Israelis, 1948 was the year of independence. For Palestinians, it was the Nakba: the catastrophe. Around 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled, and hundreds of towns and villages were depopulated or destroyed.

In July 1948, the people of Lidd, their numbers swollen with refugees from surrounding villages, were driven out on foot under the summer sun. Months earlier, before statehood had even been declared, Deir Yassin had become synonymous with massacre.

When the fighting ended, the great majority of the refugees were not permitted to return. Many kept the keys to homes they would never see again, and passed them to their children.

For the Palestinians who lived through it, this was not a footnote to Israel’s creation. It was their experience of Israel’s creation.

An ideology is not a people, and no state acquires immunity from scrutiny because it claims to speak for a people who have endured centuries of persecution

Yet the dominant western narrative remembered 1948 as Israeli independence, and pushed the Nakba to the margins - and not only on the right.

Conservatives admired Israel as an ally, a military power and a strategic foothold in the Middle East. The left was offered something more seductive: the kibbutz and the Histadrut, collective farms and trade unions, pioneers making the desert bloom - survivors of European persecution building a refuge at last.

And so one of the great contradictions of 20th-century progressive politics took hold. People who opposed colonialism everywhere else could romanticise a national project whose establishment was accompanied by the mass displacement of an indigenous population.

Israel became a rare point of convergence between the western right and left, and Britain still bears the imprint of that consensus in the parliamentary groups and networks built around support for Israel.

Gaza has fractured that consensus. In the weeks after 7 October 2023, 19 percent of Britons said they sympathised more with Israel and 19 percent with Palestinians, while others were equally sympathetic or unsure.

By September 2025, sympathy with Palestinians had doubled to 38 percent, the highest in YouGov’s tracking, while sympathy with Israel had fallen to 12 percent. In two years, a public that was evenly divided became one that sided with Palestinians three to one.

Definition of the state

For decades, Israel possessed one of the most successful brands in modern history: the “only democracy in the Middle East”. Everything that contradicted that image could be filed away as an exception.

Occupation was temporary; settlements were excesses; Gaza was a security problem; military violence was self-defence. Each controversy could be treated in isolation, while the more dangerous question went unasked: what if these were not aberrations from the system, but expressions of it?

That question leads beyond Netanyahu, to the structure of the state itself. Israel’s 2018 nation-state law declares Israel to be the nation-state of the Jewish people, maintains that national self-determination in the country is “unique to the Jewish people”, and deems Jewish settlement a national value to be encouraged and promoted.

In a land whose indigenous people have endured dispossession, exile, occupation and the steady loss of their land, the state reserves self-determination for one people alone, and makes settling that land a national value. No change of prime minister can explain that away. It is written into the definition of the state.

Against that principle, the Green motion sets another. It restates the party’s backing for the right to self-determination, and calls for a single democratic state throughout historic Palestine, “with equal rights for all”.

That is the heart of the matter. A state that reserves self-determination for one people builds inequality into its foundations. A state of equal citizens, Palestinian and Jewish alike, removes it. The answer to ethnic hierarchy is not a different hierarchy; it is equality.

Questioning that definition requires a distinction that has too often been blurred. Judaism is an ancient religion and civilisation. Jewishness is an identity of extraordinary diversity. Zionism is a modern political movement. Israel is a state.

They are not interchangeable. A state is not a religion, an ideology is not a people, and no state acquires immunity from scrutiny because it claims to speak for a people who have endured centuries of persecution.

Crucial distinction

To insist that opposition to Zionism is inherently hostility towards Jews is to commit the very conflation it claims to reject: collapsing millions of diverse Jewish people into a single ideology, and making them collectively answerable for the actions of a state. Many Jews reject that equation, and Jewish opposition to Zionism is hardly new.

The distinction matters because antisemitism is real, and its history is monstrous. Precisely for that reason, it should neither be trivialised nor used to place an ideology beyond scrutiny.

The Green vote has not settled the argument over Zionism. It has redrawn its boundaries.

For decades, western politics permitted criticism of Israel, provided it stopped short of Zionism itself. Governments could be condemned, settlements criticised, occupation deplored, Netanyahu denounced - but the founding ideology remained beyond the limits of respectable debate.

British support for Israel is shattering Read More »

That line has now been crossed. And once Zionism itself becomes part of the argument, history travels backwards, to a time before Netanyahu; before far-right ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich; before 7 October; before 1967.

It travels back to 1948 and the Nakba - back to the question western politicians have spent decades avoiding: whether Palestinian dispossession was a tragic consequence of Israel’s creation, or inseparable from the way that creation occurred.

Nowhere is that question more charged than in Britain. The Balfour Declaration is remembered for its promise of a national home for the Jewish people. Far less often recalled is the clause that came immediately afterwards: that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”.

The Palestinian people, the overwhelming majority of the population, were not even named. They appeared only as “existing non-Jewish communities” in their own homeland.

Britain promised one people a national home in a country overwhelmingly inhabited by another, while assuring those already living there that their rights would somehow remain unharmed. History delivered its verdict on that contradiction in 1948. Britain wrote the promise, and Palestinians lived the consequences.

More than a century later, a British party has put the premise of that promise on the table. And Britain is finally being forced to read the other half of the page.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

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