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1 the Balfour Declaration's Territorial Landscape: Between Protection and Self Determination

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1 the Balfour Declaration's Territorial Landscape: Between Protection and Self Determination The Balfour Declaration’s Territorial Landscape: Between Protection and Self Determination Karin Loevy, NYU (very rough first draft, please do not circulate) The Balfour Declaration as it was published in The Times on November 9, 1917 Famously declaring British support for the establishment of a Jewish ‘national home’ in Palestine, the Balfour declaration (November 1917) is commonly understood as the first international instrument recognizing the right to self-determination for the Jewish people in Palestine, and the first step towards the 1948 establishment of the State of Israel. Based on analysis of the declaration’s drafting process and its international law background in 19th century practices of imperial protection, the paper challenges this perception. The framers of the Balfour declaration, Zionist activists as well as British officials, did not envision nor did they wish to establish a sovereign jurisdictional Jewish state in Palestine. What they had in mind was a space of protection for Jewish ‘homelessness’ under the auspices of a European Power. The legal framework that they imagined drew on such 19th century precedents as Ottoman autonomous zones, British and French protectorates and other mechanisms that sustained both rule and expansion in multi- national empires. Reframing the Balfour declaration as a document of protection may contribute to the study of the colonial context of contemporary post-colonial international norms such as that of self- determination of nations. But more importantly it may contribute to the legal and political discourse about the region’s national conflicts by enriching our perspective over their territorial past. 1 Table of contents: I. Introduction: Balfour’s Territory II. A European Protected Home for Jewish Homelessness III. The Background to the Balfour Declaration in 19th Century Imperial Protection A. The Politics of Protection: European Expansion and Inter-Imperial Legalities B. National Movements and Autonomy in Russia and Eastern Europe C. Ottoman Autonomous Zones of European Protection D. Jewish Communities and Imperial Protection in the Middle East IV. Conclusion: I. Introduction: Balfour’s Territory ....We hear a great deal of a new word ‘self-determination’. Well, I don't know that it is a new thing. It certainly is not new in the British Empire. The empire has always striven to give to all the peoples that make it up the fullest measure of self-government of which they are capable. (Hear hear). We have always strived to keep all peoples within bounds complete liberty and equality before the law. (Hear hear). We are adjourned to respect the principle of self-determination but I see the British Empire was the first organization to teach that principal to the world, and one of the great courses for which we are in this war is to secure to all people the right to govern themselves and to work out their own destiny, irrespective of the threats and menaces of their greater neighbor. Lord Robert Cecil, On December 2, 1917 ‘Thanksgiving meeting’ at London Opera House The Balfour Declaration - stating on November 2nd 1917, that the British government will ‘use its best endeavors to facilitate’ the ‘establishment in Palestine of a Jewish national home’ - still holds strong symbolic effect on the heightened political discourse about the ongoing Israel/Palestine conflict in the Middle East.1 Zionists still celebrate it as a first step towards the establishment in 1948 of the State of Israel. Anti-Zionists still bemoan it as a moment of British betrayal and the beginning of Palestinian disinheritance. The extensive historiography of the 1 The Balfour Declaration 1917, November 2nd 1917 (hereinafter: the Balfour declaration); available online: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/balfour.asp; The official text continues: “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” 2 document follows this trajectory, as historians still hotly dispute the purpose of the document, the sincerity of British Zionist aspirations and the depth of betrayal.2 The document is read and re- read within the history of the ongoing national conflict to an extent that shadows and often distorts any broader international and regional significance that it might have.3 This paper aims to pull the Balfour declaration away from the grips of the discourse of national conflict to expose its broader significance in the history of international law in the Middle East. It does so by presenting the document within 19th century discourse of imperial protection, a category that blends, as Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford recently showed, the expansion of colonial jurisdiction with the politics of inter-imperial legalities.4 In the Balfour declaration, a non-state regional national organization (the Zionist Organization), successfully employed the idea of European imperial protection over a national home in colonial space. In the midst of the war this idea proposed an attractive solution to a European problem (the problem of eastern European Jewish immigration), outside of Europe: in post-Ottoman colonial territories. This novel use of the idea of protection is overlooked by historians because of the way the Balfour declaration is usually studied, within the conflict's nationalist discourse of self-determination, rather than the inter- regional and inter-imperial discourse of protection in which it was drafted. (more omitted) The first part of the paper (Part II) presents the broader geopolitical scope of the Balfour declaration. Rather than a claim for an independent state, the declaration embodied a claim that was consistently made from the very first days of the Zionist movement: that a European protected space in colonial territory will solve the European (and globalizing) Jewish problem. The second part of the paper (Part III) illustrates the legal and political background on which this claim is to be understood - in 19th century ideas, debates and practices of protection in and between 2 The historiography. 3 The exceptions: Renton, Marianne Rehtt, Jonathan Schneer’s book about British/Ottoman intrigue and the post- Renton debates. But even when the debate moves on to the global context the background questions often persist. The centennial to the Balfour declaration saw a much more visible claim to read the Balfour declaration from its “victims” perspective – not as a triumphant instrument of Jewish nationalism but as the beginning of the tragedy Palestinian dispossession (Khalidi et al.) As important as this perspective is – it tends to reinforce the problamatization of the declaration within the traditional framework of the national conflict. 4 Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford, Rage for Order: The British Empire and the origins of international law, 1800-1850 (Harvard University Press, 2016), especially chapter 4. 3 multinational empires. After a brief theoretical analysis of the category of ‘protection’ in 19th century imperial law (A) the paper moves to examine three contexts of protection that may have shaped the declaration’s territorial vision: Zionist experiences in Eastern European multinational empires (B), British and Zionists experiences in Ottoman autonomous zones of protection (C), and the history of British protection of Jews in the Levant (D). The paper concludes by suggesting some of the implications of reframing the Balfour declaration as an instrument of protection, rather than as the first step towards international recognition of the Jewish right to self-determination in Palestine. In the past decades historians of international law have shown that central elements of nineteenth century international law are reproduced in current approaches to international law and relations.5 The Balfour declaration is a good case study to show how such transition was possible, almost seamless. If the declaration signifies an early pronouncement of the right to self-determination the problem is simply that it recognized Jewish self-determination in Palestine at the expense of Palestinian self-determination. The solution is therefore to extend the right to self-determination to the Palestinians by way of creating a Palestinian state alongside the Jewish state. This narrative is problematic because it relates to colonialism as if it has already been overcome: self-determination is embedded in international law’s anticolonial present and the problem is simply how to extend it universally, especially in complex cases such as that of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But is it? Can we really understand the norm of self-determination outside of the colonial context in which it was imagined? And what was that colonial context? Which set of norms, institutions and relations were involved in the transition between the 19th century international law and the 20th century anti-colonial discipline? The example of the Balfour declaration unravels an aspect of the transition. While envisioned within 19th century legal politics of protection and thus a part of the project of European expansion in colonial territories, the declaration was at the same time already instrumentalized as a part of a new narrative of a completely new international order that is made out of equal sovereign nations within equal territorial states. The idea here is not simply to deconstruct the Balfour declaration as a document embedded in colonialism but to understand what exactly was the colonial heritage of the Balfour declaration. If not ‘self determination’, what were the international legal frameworks at the background of the Balfour declaration? 5 Anghie, Koskenniemi etc. 4 Even more broadly, understanding the Balfour declaration within the Middle East’s pre- nation state territorial landscape may broaden our perspective over the concept of territory in international law and international relations. The aim is to use this historical context to make visible that territory cannot be reduced to either national territory or state territory, and thereby to give the category of territory a measure of conceptual autonomy from the nation-state.
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