Thanks for the shout out @pap . To be honest there isn’t anything I can argue with here.
This is unfortunately a country (of our design?)'which needs to take a good long hard look at itself but won’t…
(edit: & the country needs to stop playing on the persecution of its diaspora in the past and look at what they are doing to the non Jewish population - ooops, is that an elephant in the room?)
It’s not really a country of our design, more of obligation.
Even before you consider the long term implications of the Balfour Declaration, it was singular at the time. We stated that we were in principle, committed to establishing a Jewish state in Palestine, somewhere the British Empire did not control.
We were eventually granted the League of Nations mandate to look after Palestine, and thus, the prospect of that declaration became reality.
In the abstract, Balfour seems ridiculous. Why does it matter if the British Empire thinks a piece of the Ottoman Empire should be turned over to foreign settlers?
In reality, Britain got something for it. Knee deep in an attritional war against superior and better trained forces, the British made the Balfour Declaration because of the groundbreaking strides in political influence that political zionism had made in its first 29 years in US society.
The movement had already scored victories through letter writing campaigns. It promised to use the same tactics to swing public opinion in favour of the US entering the war.
It succeeded, the British Empire ended up getting the Palestine mandate. The rest is both history, present and future.
The tragedy is that the will of the people was ignored. In 1919, during the Paris Peace Conference, the findings of a hugely important report were deliberately suppressed until decisions were irrevocable.