The 1917 statement in which the British government pledged support for ‘a national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine, while promising not to prejudice the rights of the existing non-Jewish communities — then the large Arab majority, named only by what they were not. Just sixty-seven words in a letter from the Foreign Secretary, it never defined ‘national home’ and clashed with other wartime British promises. Folded into the Mandate, it became a founding document for the State of Israel and a founding grievance in the Palestinian national story.
It was one sentence, roughly sixty-seven words, signed by a British foreign secretary and addressed to Lord Rothschild, a Jewish peer and a bridge to the Zionist cause. It did not name a state, did not draw a border, and did not name the people who were then nine in ten of Palestine's inhabitants except as "non-Jewish communities." Yet for many Jews those words promised a homeland long prayed for, and for many Palestinians they began the loss of one. More than a century later, the same sentence is read at celebrations and at protests, cited as a charter and demanded back as an apology. Almost nothing in it was fixed, and that was the point.