Please click to comment on Reddit.on this day the British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour expressed sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations in a secret letter addressed to Baron Walter Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community.

Other members of David Lloyd George's Cabinet strongly disagreed with the "view [in] favour [of] the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people", with Lord Curzon declaring that he "could not share the optimistic views held concerning the future of Palestine" and he feared that the Declaration "raised false expectations which could never be realised".

Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India and the only Jew in the Cabinet, regarded the Declaration as an anti-Semitic act because it would jeopardise the position of Jews throughout the world. He also believed that it broke promises made to the Arabs and violated the principle of self-determination.

Of course Baron Rothschild was fully aware that Britain was an unlikely sponsor of the Zionist initiative, considering that it was the first European country to expel its Jewish population in 1290, and that it did not grant full political emancipation to Jews until 1871. And so events developed, because in 1921, using his authority as Secretary of State for the Colonies, the British Minister Winston Churchill designated three-fourths of Palestine as a kingdom for Abdullah, the Hashemite prince who had fought alongside T. E. Lawrence¹.