Arthur Balfour spent 1905 keeping Jews out of Britain and 1917 finding them somewhere else to go. The two sides of his mouth worked as a single policy, and today we mourn how it worked.
The first part was the border. As Prime Minister, Balfour had carried the Aliens Act of 1905, the first peacetime immigration control in British law, written for Jews fleeing the Russian pogroms. In committee on 10 July 1905 he gave the Commons his reason, recorded in Hansard at col. 155:
He undoubtedly thought that a state of things could easily be imagined in which it would not be to the advantage of the civilisation of the country that there should be an immense body of persons who, however patriotic, able, and industrious, however much they threw themselves into the national life, still, by their own action, remained a people apart, and not merely held a religion differing from the vast majority of their fellow-countrymen, but only inter-married among themselves.
The same evening he named the alternative. His government had offered “the Jewish race a great tract of fertile land in one of our possessions” so that they might find “an asylum from their persecutors” there (Hansard, col. 178).
Where was that? The land was in East Africa. A closed port at home was coupled with a colony abroad: Jews go elsewhere.
The second part was selling a destination. By 1917 Balfour was Foreign Secretary and the colony had moved to Palestine. A famous Jew serving in the Cabinet said out loud what Balfour meant. Edwin Montagu circulated a memorandum on 23 August 1917 titled “The Anti-Semitism of the Present (British) Government“. He warned that once Jews were told Palestine was their national home, “every country will immediately desire to get rid of its Jewish citizens,” and that “Palestine will become the world’s ghetto” (UN study, Part I, sect. II).
Montagu, despite concern for Jews, himself being one too, lost the debate. A clause was added on “the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country” to mollify him. It was meant in words only.
The third part was militancy. The War Cabinet approved the text on 31 October 1917. The minute records Balfour’s argument that since Jews in Russia and America appeared to favour Zionism, a declaration in their favour would let Britain “carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and America” (CAB 23/4, WC 261, minute 12). The premise was that Jews moved as a bloc and could be bought during war. That premise is antisemitic on the face of it. The Cabinet purchased Jewish wartime support with Arab land.
Balfour said so once the bill came due, in a memorandum to Curzon on 11 August 1919 (UN study, Part I, sect. IV):
For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country, though the American Commission has been going through the form of asking what they are. The four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.
The famous declaration by Balfour of 2 November 1917 reads as though he had sympathy for Jews. His own words show what the sympathy consisted of: from the London docks in 1905 to Curzon’s desk in 1919, at every point the Jews are a people spread apart, to be relocated into a single population that can be pulled as a single lever. The Arabs of Palestine appear twice in his papers: once as “existing non-Jewish communities“, and once as a number to be overridden.