A Foreign Office official in 1917 drafting a letter that is 67 words long. The Balfour Declaration. The most consequential letter in modern Middle Eastern history, written in a country that did not own the land it was promising, to a movement representing people who mostly did not yet live there.
In 1915–16, Britain promised Sharif Hussein of Mecca an independent Arab state in exchange for the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans. The boundaries were deliberately vague. In 1917, Britain promised the Zionist Federation a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. Both promises were made in wartime, both were strategic, both were made by the same government to incompatible recipients.
Britain needed Arab support against the Ottomans. Britain also needed American Jewish support to bring the United States into the war. The Balfour Declaration was partly a piece of geopolitical calculation dressed up as moral commitment. Percy did not think thirty years ahead.
There is a private memorandum Balfour wrote in August 1919, two years after signing the Declaration, in which he stated that in Palestine, Britain did not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants. He named the 700,000 Arabs living there and wrote that Zionism was of far profounder import than their desires and prejudices. He knew. He wrote it down. He didn't care.
As for the Hussein-McMahon letters — the earlier promise of an Arab state — they contained a phrase about "districts" that was almost certainly chosen because it was ambiguous. Britain later claimed Palestine was excluded. Arab leaders said it was included. The word was probably chosen precisely because both readings were possible, which means someone in Whitehall knew they were writing something that could mean two incompatible things, and wrote it anyway. Balfour put his name on things. That man didn't even do that.
Britain spent the 1920s and 1930s trying to honour both promises simultaneously, which meant honouring neither. Jewish immigration increased, Arab resentment increased, violence increased. The 1920 and 1921 riots, the 1929 Hebron massacre, the Arab Revolt of 1936–39 — all suppressed by British force. The British response to rising tension — the 1939 White Paper limiting Jewish immigration — came just as European Jews most desperately needed somewhere to go.
The moral case for a Jewish state became unanswerable after 1945. Six million dead. At the end of 1946, an estimated 250,000 Jewish displaced persons were in camps in Germany, Austria and Italy — people with nowhere to go, turned away at gunpoint from the one place they wanted to be. The British, still trying to limit immigration for geopolitical reasons, were intercepting ships and sending survivors back to Europe. The Irgun and Lehi drew their own conclusions.
In 1947 Britain handed the problem to the UN and announced it was leaving. The UN proposed partition. The Arabs rejected it. The Jews accepted it. Britain left. The war began the next day.
Palestinians who left their homes — fleeing violence, told it would be temporary, caught on the wrong side of a front line — returned to find their houses occupied, the locks changed, their belongings gone. The Israeli Absentee Property Law of 1950 defined anyone who had left as an absentee, regardless of why they left or how briefly they were gone. Some Palestinians had sheltered their Jewish neighbours during the violence. They returned from a few days away to find the locks changed. The law did not ask why you had left, or for how long, or what you had done for the people now living in your house.
The right of return built on the moral urgency of the displaced persons camps — people with nowhere to go, turned away at gunpoint — became in time a right exercised by Australians who fancied a change of scenery. Mark Regev, born in Melbourne, emigrated to Israel and became its government spokesman. A perfectly legal exercise of the right of return. The sanctuary and the lifestyle choice share the same legal basis. The moral weight is not equally distributed.
Britain created the conditions for a conflict it then declined to resolve, and departed leaving two peoples fighting over a promise that had been made twice to different people from the same desk in Whitehall.
Britain's promises to both peoples turned out to be worth less than a pinkie promise. At least children who break one know they have done something wrong.
Britain left in 1947 with the quiet dignity of a man who has set fire to a building and decided not to hang around for the fire brigade.
The United States was already waiting outside.
Israel's strategic value to America was never purely moral, though the moral case — six million dead, displaced persons still in camps two years after the war ended, survivors turned back at gunpoint from the one place they wanted to be — was genuine and overwhelming. But the Cold War had begun, the Middle East sat on the world's oil, and a reliable, militarily capable, Western-aligned state in the region was worth more to the Pentagon than any number of UN resolutions. By the 1970s the relationship had hardened into something that looked less like an alliance between equals and more like a forward operating base with its own foreign policy. An aircraft carrier, permanently stationed, that had somehow acquired the right to set the fleet's course.
The figures are not subtle. The United States has given Israel more foreign aid than any other country in its history. The $38 billion military package signed in 2016 — Obama's parting gift, in the final year of an administration that had spent eight years being lectured by the man it was funding — was the largest such agreement America had ever made with anyone.
A country of eight million people. Wagging the dog.
How this became politically immovable is a story Barack Obama told on himself, with more candour than he perhaps intended. He came up through Chicago's Jewish establishment. He later joked — the word "joked" is doing some work here — that the liberal Zionist network there formed the "cabal" that made his political career possible. His first appointment as president was Rahm Emanuel, a man whose father had served in the Irgun, the Zionist paramilitary organisation that bombed the King David Hotel in 1946, killing 91 people. Ha'aretz, Israel's newspaper of record, greeted the appointment by describing Emanuel unambiguously as an Israeli.
Obama was not a passive instrument. He pushed for a settlement freeze. Netanyahu rejected it in the Oval Office — the Israeli prime minister, in the White House, telling the American president what American policy would be — and the freeze was dropped. Obama's foreign policy aide Ben Rhodes wrote later that at almost every turn, Obama was painted into a corner by Netanyahu with the organised support of the American pro-Israel lobby. Emanuel, meanwhile, had nicknamed Rhodes "Hamas" for raising Palestinian human rights in internal discussions. The chief of staff of the President of the United States. In the White House. Calling a colleague Hamas for mentioning that Palestinians were people.
Rhodes, for what it is worth, has a Jewish mother — which means he could emigrate to Israel tomorrow under the Law of Return. The right of sanctuary and the epithet apparently travel on separate tracks.
Obama himself noted that Democratic members of Congress in districts with significant Jewish populations were reluctant to say anything about Palestinian statehood because they were frightened of losing AIPAC support and facing a well-funded opponent at the next election. He knew the mechanism. He described it clearly. He was also subject to it.
This is not a conspiracy. AIPAC publishes its work. It holds conferences. It grades members of Congress on their voting records and funds primary challenges against those who fall short. It is legal, transparent, and devastatingly effective. What makes it remarkable is not that it exists — every interest group in America does something similar — but that its subject is the domestic politics of a foreign country, and that criticising it too plainly risks accusations of antisemitism that can end a career.
The conflation is deliberate and effective. The Israeli government and the Jewish people are not the same thing. Many Jewish Americans oppose Israeli government policy. Many of AIPAC's most reliable supporters are evangelical Christians who believe Jewish control of the Holy Land is a precondition for the Second Coming — a theological position that is, if you examine it, not especially complimentary to Jewish people. The lobby is about a state. Treating criticism of that state as hatred of an ethnicity is a category error that has been industrialised into a political weapon.
Percy's desk in Whitehall produced two incompatible promises. America inherited the consequences, decided they were strategically convenient, and then built a political architecture so robust that no president — not even one who understood exactly what was happening and wrote about it clearly — could alter the outcome by a single degree.
The land of two promises became the land of one catastrophe. Percy caught the boat home.
Eighty years on, more than 200,000 survivors are still alive, with a median age of 87. Seventy percent are expected to die within the next ten years. When they are gone, only the books will remain.
The locked doors remain locked. The aircraft carrier remains on station.