World War One and The Balfour Declaration

The roots of the Balfour Declaration lay in three bizarre ideas that were floating around in the 19th century Britain. The theology of the Christian Israelite Church influenced the wide-spread British-Israelism movement with which many upper-class Victorians, who embraced Imperialism, identified. The British people were identified as the lost tribes of Israel, creating a "chosen nation" narrative that appealed to the aristocracy. In the 19th century, another widespread belief known as Christian Restorationism (now Christian Zionism) emerged within Evangelical Protestantism. The return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land must occur before the Second Coming of Christ. Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, was a prominent British politician and evangelist who heavily lobbied for a Jewish homeland in Palestine to prepare for the end times.

Different versions of anti-Semitism were widespread amongst all classes in Britain at the time from paranoid conspiracy theories of Jews secretly controlling world governments exemplified by the "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" to snobbish aristocratic aversion to Jewish "pushiness" and nouveau riche poor taste. British Cabinet Ministers knew that Jews weren't governing the world because they knew that they were, but during WW1 an unrealistic belief that American Jews could force the United States into the war influenced the Foreign Office to consider the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In fact, Zionism was very much a minority movement within the global Jewish population, facing significant opposition from religious, socialist, and liberal groups of Jews. Lord Balfour was Prime Minister, First Lord of the Admiralty, Foreign Secretary in a 60 year career.

In 1917 the British government released the Balfour Declaration: "His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people …" shortly before the British conquered Palestine. They also promised to make members of the Hashemite family kings of various Middle Eastern countries if they aided in the war effort against the Ottomans. As more Jews migrated after the First World War the local Muslims began attacking them. The British realised they might have created a problem promising the same land to more than one group.

By 1918 the population of Zionists had fallen from 80,000 to 55,000.

• Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of Christian Zionism - Stephen Spector
• The Protocols of the Elders of Zion