Balfour Declaration

The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British government on 2 November 1917, during the First World War, announcing its support for the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small Jewish minority among an overwhelming, mostly Muslim Arab majority. It took the form of a letter from British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland, and was published in the press on 9 November 1917 after negotiations between the British government and Zionist leaders including Chaim Weizmann. It called for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of the Palestinian Arabs, who composed the vast majority of the local population, but the term "national home" had no precedent in international law and the boundaries of Palestine were left unspecified. The declaration became a core component of the British Mandate for Palestine, indirectly led to the emergence of the State of Israel, and is considered a principal cause of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.