Balfour declaration (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
A letter issued by the British government favoring the establishment of a national home for the Jewish People.
Yesterday we remembered the Balfour Declaration of 1917
According to And the Hills Shouted for Joy; the Day Israel Was Born, "The
Balfour Declaration was the first public acknowledgment by a Great
Power of the Jewish connection with Palestine as well as an undertaking
by that government to help restore the Jewish people to its homeland.
For the first time a sovereign government had entered into a pact with
a people scattered over the face of the earth to return them to a
land."
The Balfour Declaration—the fruit of 12 months of intensive
negotiations between Foreign Office officials, Prime Minister David
Lloyd George and leading British Zionists—was issued
by Arthur James Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, to Lord Walter
Rothschild, a British Jewish leader who was to convey the news to the
Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday:
"Today we remember and welcome those people among the nations of the world who have not forgotten history and who remember our link to our land and our right to [a] state of our own,"