Remembering the Balfour Hoax

In 1917, Britain's government officially endorsed “a national home for the Jewish people.” In October 2026, Britain's Green Party formally declared itself anti-Zionist and adopted a policy treating Zionism as racism.

That's like the royal family—King George and Queen Mary—giving birth to the Zionist state, only for Zack Polanski to show up a century later demanding a DNA test.

Fine. Let's do the test. Let's go back to 1917.

World War I was raging, and things were going badly for Britain. Germany was attacking Britain from the air. At first, it was Zeppelins. By 1917, the Germans had figured out that airplanes were considerably more useful when you wanted to bomb somebody. In June, a daylight German air raid killed 162 people.

German U-boats were sinking British merchant ships, contributing to shortages of tea, bacon, butter, margarine, potatoes and meat. For the British, this wasn't merely a national emergency. They were running short of tea.

Things were even worse in the east. The Russian Czar abdicated in March. Lenin called for armed insurrection in October. If the Bolsheviks seized power and Russia stopped fighting, Germany would suddenly transfer fifty divisions of troops west against Britain and France.

Britain was so desperate to conserve energy that it established daylight savings by moving clocks forward an hour during the summer to increase the time people didn’t have to pay for light.

Even back then, nobody liked it.

Britain was being attacked at home, bleeding men abroad and watching Russia collapse. So, it turned for help to one of the last groups you'd expect the British establishment of 1917 to regard as its geopolitical cavalry:

The Jews.

For three years, America had stayed out of the war. Powerful German-American groups lobbied President Woodrow Wilson to keep America out of the war, which benefited Germany. Powerful Anglo groups worked to persuade him to join the war on the British side.

Wilson finally entered the war on Britain's side in April 1917, but how strongly America would commit remained critically important.

Among the German-American population were Jews.

This was before Nazi Germany. A Jew could still be named Wilhelm, drink two gallons of beer and eat three feet of bratwurst without anybody detecting a contradiction.

Britain didn't need America making a symbolic appearance. With Russia disappearing from the battlefield, Britain needed American commitment.

Meanwhile, in November 1917, the British were in Egypt preparing to accomplish what Richard the Lionheart had failed to do centuries earlier: conquer the Land of Israel. General Edmund Allenby—yes, Tel Aviv's Allenby Street Allenby—was closing in on Ottoman Palestine.

And suddenly the Jews became extremely interesting.

The British figured that support for Zionism could help win Jewish sympathy, weaken pro-German Jewish influence, encourage Jewish support in Palestine and strengthen enthusiasm for the Allied cause.

Thus began the Balfour Hoax: Britain promising the Jewish people a national home in the Land of Israel.

There was only one small problem. Britain had been making promises all over the neighborhood.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Hussein-McMahon correspondence had already created competing expectations about what would happen to Ottoman territory after the war. Britain was effectively selling the same house to multiple buyers, then hoping to catch a steamer to Hawaii with the briefcase before everybody showed up at closing.

And they accuse us of stealing.

It gets better.

At San Remo in 1920, the victorious Allied powers assigned Britain the Mandate for Palestine. What is a mandate? It’s an authorized assignment. The San Remo Conference gave Britain the assignment of establishing a Jewish home in the Land of Israel. If you ever wondered what the Mandate part of the British Mandate means?

The League of Nations—the original gangster version of the United Nations—approved Britain’s mandate to give the Jews a home in Israel in 1922.

Britain then took 80% of the Land and gave it to the Arabs, establishing the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

This is where the great theft really happened. But it’s just the tip of the stolen iceberg.

Jordan today has a population roughly comparable to Israel's. Israel, meanwhile, has spent decades squeezing a rapidly growing population into a very small country while housing prices have soared.

Imagine the alternative history.

Suppose the Jewish national home had developed across a much larger territory. More land. More cities. More resources. More room for immigration. More economic possibilities.

There might never have been a “West Bank” as we understand the term today. The political geography of the Israeli-Arab conflict could have developed completely differently.

No Jordanians. No Palestinians. Just Arab Israelis and Egyptian Gazans.

Imagine how things would look if it were Egypt and not Hamas who governed Gaza in 2023?

And the region might not merely have been calmer. It might have been richer.

Jordan contains enormous oil-shale deposits. Had those resources fallen within an expanding Israeli economy, imagine what might have developed: energy wealth alongside agriculture, manufacturing and eventually high technology.

Israel could have become a multitrillion-dollar economy much earlier.

And that changes immigration.

Millions of Jews might have come to Israel not merely because this was their ancient homeland, not merely to eat kosher McDonald's or dance in circles on a kibbutz, but for the same thoroughly unromantic reason people have migrated throughout history: Opportunity.

Jobs. Money. Careers. A better future for their children.

You know what the worst part is?

I moved to Israel years ago, and my Hebrew is still terrible. It's tragic. I've been horrible at second languages since I was a kid.

When I was in the army, I used to greet the staff sergeant— sarsap — by calling him a pimp -- sarsool. He seemed to enjoy it.

After World War II, my grandfather, a decorated fighter pilot, was offered good money to fly for Chiang Kai-shek in China. He seriously considered it. The money was attractive.

What if that kind of opportunity had existed in Israel?

Maybe my grandfather comes here. Maybe I grow up here. Maybe I speak flawless Hebrew and spend my afternoons explaining to tourists from Liverpool where the bathroom is instead of wondering whether I have just accidentally insulted a sergeant.

Multiply that possibility by millions of Jews.

Israel could have developed an energy industry alongside what eventually became its high-tech economy. It could have had both natural resources and technological power. Instead of Israeli technology hopelessly dependent on foreign capital, Israel could control the capital.

The money leash wouldn't be around our neck. Ours might have been around theirs.

Britain helped create the diplomatic framework for a Jewish national home when Britain needed Jewish support. It then spent decades narrowing, qualifying, and restricting what that commitment meant.

Now, more than a century later, we're supposed to accept lectures from British politicians about the illegitimacy of Zionism?

Come on.

Britain should be honoring the Jews who fought alongside it during World War I, not treating the national movement it once endorsed as something morally radioactive.

And the Arabs deserve a better story, too. An Arab in Israel makes 10 times more money than one in Jordan and the West Bank.  An Arab in Israel or the West Bank can turn on a faucet any time he wants and take a shower.

Jordanians are so starved for water, they can only access it one day a week. Had Israel been the Israel Britain promised, there would be 30 million Jews and Arabs living in peace, prosperity, and proper hygiene.

At what point do we get to put Britain's decisions on trial?

Imagine an Israel with a $2 trillion economy stretching eastward toward Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Imagine the economic gravity that creates.

Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates already understand the power of trade, energy and investment. Combine an enormous Israeli technology-and-energy economy with the capital and resources of the Gulf and you begin imagining something extraordinary: a regional economic bloc capable of becoming one of the world's great centers of wealth.

Would it rival the European Union or the United States immediately?

Give it time.

China itself was only a fraction of its present economic size a generation ago. What could an oil-rich, high-tech regional juggernaut accomplish in the age of artificial intelligence?

That's the part of the Balfour hoax that terrifies me. Britain didn't merely make promises and then retreat from them. Its decisions plunged our region into an entire century of poverty, terror, and chaos.

And perhaps the funniest part is that we still describe ourselves using Britain's map. We call this place the Middle East.

Middle of what?

If Jerusalem and Riyadh are the Middle East, apparently the center of the universe is somewhere near London. Maybe that's our first problem.

Before rebuilding the regional economy, solving a century of conflict and collecting our reparations, we need a new name.

“Baghdad Café” isn't quite doing it for me.

How about the KDR?

King David's Region.