On September 1, 1920, a little under three years after the Balfour Declaration was proclaimed, general Henri Gouraud: the commander of the French “Army of the Levant” declared the creation of the “State of Greater Lebanon”. The representative of the French government in the Middle East had effectively expanded a predominantly Christian autonomous zone into a heterogeneous state with a sizeable Muslim denomination. This action was carried out partially in response to the demands of the Lebanese Maronite elites, and in complete disregard of the desires of the mostly Muslim indigenous population of the annexed provinces. This paper analyzes the receptions and responses of the Lebanese Christian intelligentsia to the Balfour Declaration over the course of the 1920s and the 1930s. The paper examines the yearly commemorations of the Balfour Declaration in the press of the nascent Lebanese republic during the aforementioned decades. The research questions that the paper addresses are as follows: (a) Were Lebanese Christian elites supportive of the Balfour Declaration under the British Mandate in Palestine as they were with the declaration of Greater Lebanon under the French Mandate in Syria and Lebanon? (b) What were the main factors that informed their readings of the Balfour Declaration? (c) Was there a shift among the Christian elites in Lebanon from the 1920s to the 1930s in their perceptions of the Balfour Declaration? And (d) How did the changing relationship between the French Mandate authority and Lebanese nationalists affect such a shift? The sources that inform the study are located in the Lebanese press of the 1920s and 1930s. The daily newspaper al-Bayraq is the main source covering the early phase, and the Annahar along with al-Bayraq newspapers are the main sources for the period of the 1930s. The paper sheds light on the fact that the Maronite support for the French Mandate authorities and their hostility towards Muslim Arab power in Greater Syria were conceived within the framework of self determination for Lebanese Christians and did not in fact imply support for British imperial policy in Palestine. The unsympathetic attitude toward the Balfour Declaration became more pronounced in the 1930s. This shift was due in part to the rapprochement with Lebanese Muslim political elites and a realization that Lebanese Christian nationalism no longer shared common interests with the French Mandate, leading to their increased scrutiny of imperial policies in the region.

This paper assesses the role played by the League of Nations’ Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC) in ensuring that the promises made in the Balfour Declaration could not easily be rescinded during the interwar period, despite the growing troubles on the ground. It begins by charting British administrators’ responses (in Palestine and in the Colonial Office in London) to the Balfour Declaration: left to deal with the consequences of a promise that gave rise to clearly irreconcilable demands, the response of British officials who were left to hold the balance was marked by increasing frustration, ranging from initial tolerance to outright hostility, with what was increasingly seen as a terrible misjudgement. Yet, no change of policy was made. In identifying why, this paper starts from the premise that “the drafting of the [League of Nations] mandate was an act of far greater importance than the drafting of the Balfour Declaration” (Yapp,329). Once the Balfour Declaration was written into the terms of the 1923 League of Nations mandate that sanctioned British rule in Palestine, it turned one of several competing wartime promises into a binding contract mediated by the League of Nations. Restrained in this way, British officials found it very problematic to ever consider changing the terms of the mandate, and rescinding the Balfour Declaration, however obvious the misjudgement. To be sure Palestine operated very much as a typical colony, but the mandate system differed from prewar imperialism in the extent that Britain remained fettered by an institution that placed the Palestine administration in the court of international public opinion. The PMC may have done little to constrain officials in their day-to-day running of Palestine, but it was nonetheless a forum in which the colonial powers’ prestige was at stake. Rather than simply dismissing a war-time promise, the process of changing the terms of the mandate would require, as one official fretted, “going in to the dock” in Geneva, “while the French representatives sit there smirking.” At worst, this would “open the gates to French or other intrusion” (Fieldhouse, 218), at a time when British defence remained strategically committed to remaining in Palestine. As the leading official in the Colonial Office Sir John Shuckburgh admitted in 1929, "the balance of advantage lies in doing nothing.” M. Yapp, The Making of the Modern Near East, 1792-1923 (Longman, 1987). D.K. Fieldhouse, Western Imperialism in the Middle East (Oxford, 2006).

Reception and Instrumentalization of the Balfour Declaration among Jews, 1917-1937 The Balfour Declaration was hailed by many Jews as a definitive recognition of the national solidarity of the Jewish people and, in popular understandings, its right to establish sovereignty over Palestine; but Britain’s pledge of support to Zionist Jews also provoked protests from important sections of Jewry in the U.K. and elsewhere. While scholarship has examined in detail the origins of the Declaration, less well-studied aspects of the Declaration are its reception and interpretation over time, especially its instrumentalization in intra-Zionist polemics. The paper analyzes reception of the Balfour Declaration among Jews of various ideologies and regions, 1917-1937, focusing on the large, influential, and free-spoken Diaspora communities in Germany and the U.S. Four sets of research questions are pursued. (1) What were the immediate reactions of Jews to the Declaration, in 1917? What factors (geographical, political, religious, ideological, etc.) influenced these reactions? (2) In the two decades after 1917, how was the Declaration commemorated, and what was its place within the historiography of Zionism? (3) How was the Declaration deployed in intra-Zionist debates? (4) In Jewish and Zionist thinking in the two decades after its issuance, what were the obstacles causing “delay” in the Declaration’s implementation? Documentation of the study rests on the German-Jewish periodical press, e.g., Palästina, Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, Menorah, with special attention to a major essay in Der Morgen, “Juden und Araber in Palästina” (1929). Other sources include mainstream and Jewish sections of the U.S. press; archives of the American Jewish Committee; Palestine Bulletin/Palestine Post; and documents from the British National Archives. The paper documents the spectrum of Jewish reaction to the Declaration, from enthusiastic endorsement, to qualified approval, to categorical rejection and hostility. Negative reactions in Germany were influenced by the war with Britain, but also by contrasting conceptions of Jewish identity; there were also approving responses among German Jews. U.S. Jews’ reactions exhibit the same diversity. Although commemorations took place, little ceremony attended “Balfour Day”; but the Declaration was a historiographical watershed, consistently articulated to the 1897 Zionist Congress. In intra-Zionist controversies, loyalty to the Declaration became a shibboleth. But Jews’ failure to respond in terms of immediate large-scale immigration and funding for colonization made an aggressive implementation impossible, and critics from within Zionist circles argued that misapprehensions of the Declaration’s meaning, fostered by Zionist propagandists, had exacerbated relations with the Arabs.

Based on British Foreign Office files, and records of Palestinian representations to the British authorities, this paper argues that the inclusion of the Balfour Declaration in the Palestine Mandate knowingly violated Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations. This is further proved by a comparison of the League of Nations' Mandates for Syria and Lebanon, with that of the Mandate for Palestine. Yet there exists a tradition within Middle East scholarship of defending the Declaration's inclusion in the Mandate by ignoring the League's Covenant and insisting, falsely, that Arab notables, e.g., Sharif Husayn of Mecca, had accepted the Declaration. In fact, British records show that David Hogarth, Britain's emissary, deceived Sharif Husayn with respect to the terms of the Declaration. The historian Elie Kedourie dismissed George Antonius' comments on Hogarth's message to Sharif Husayn as 'worthless,' but Antonius was correct in noting that Hogarth withheld the full terms of the Declaration. This paper traces this scholarly tradition, beginning with Elie Kedourie, in Anglo-Arab Labyrinth.It also considers Isaiah Friedman, in Question of Palestine; and David Fromkin, in Peace to End All Peace. The last work is frequently cited in American historiography on World War I, yet Fromkin is part of this apologetic tradition and pays tribute to Kedourie in his introduction. Moreover, this argument is overlooked in more recent broader studies of the Middle East in the war, including Eugene Rogan's Fall of the Ottomans, and Leila Fawaz's Land of Aching Hearts, works which do not deal with the Mandates or the League of Nations. Sharif Husayn appears solely in his role as one party in the Husayn-McMahon Correspondence; this is also true of Scott Anderson's Lawrence in Arabia. Natasha Wheatley's important 2015 article presents Palestinians as calling attention to Article 22 in petitions to British officials, who denied the validity of their claims, but does not herself question the legality of the mandate ("Mandate Systems As a Style of Reasoning,” The Routledge Handbook of the History of the Middle East Mandates). In sum, the 'denial of Arab history' as an imperial mindset refers to: British misrepresentations of terms to Arab leaders during the war; the rejection of valid Palestinian arguments expressed in petitions and protests during the mandate; and continuing misrepresentations in histories of the topic.