"After the British captured Jerusalem from the collapsing Ottoman Empire in the wake of World War I, a headline in the New York Herald of December 11, 1917, declared that JERUSALEM HAS BEEN RESCUED AFTER 673 YEARS OF MOSLEM RULE. That same year, the British foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, in a declaration named after him, promised the Jewish people a national homeland in the biblical land of Palestine but stated that it was “clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish Communities in Palestine.” In 1921, the British High Commissioner reported that Jews were only 10 percent of the population of British Mandate Palestine—most of whom had arrived in the prior forty years, including from Russia where they had fled pogroms— though they were already a majority in Jerusalem. More were arriving, and Hebrew, once rarely spoken, was being revived along with the growth of settlements, agricultural colonies planting oranges and eucalyptus and producing wine."
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Prime Ministers of the United KingdomUniversity of Cambridge facultyBritish peersPhilosophers from ScotlandPoliticians from Scotland
Original Language: English
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Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East (2016)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arthur_Balfour
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Arthur Balfour
Arthur James Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, KG, OM, PC (25 July 1848 – 19 March 1930) was a British Conservative statesman and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1902 until 1905. The author of several influential works of philosophy, he was one of the most intellectual prime ministers of the 20th century. As Foreign Secretary he authored the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which supported the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine.
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