Leslie Turnberg - Beyond the Balfour Declaration: The 100-Year Quest for Israeli–Palestinian Peace

I WAS VERY HONOURED when Leslie Turnberg asked me to compose a preface to this book, written to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, signed by my forebear, Arthur, and Foreign Secretary at the time, in a letter to Lord Rothschild. In it, he expressed His Majestys Governments support for making the old Biblical lands of Palestine once more a home for Jewish people, a large number of whom had been evicted from Russia and elsewhere in the pogroms of the previous decades. It was this humanitarian aspect of the Declaration of which our family are most proud.

Notwithstanding this humanitarian imperative, many post-1948 commentators, after the formal creation and UN recognition of the state of Israel, have sought to blame the Declaration as the fountain of all conflict in the cauldron of the Middle East since then. Of course I have followed events in the region keenly and if ever the aphorism my enemys enemy is my friend was true then it has been there. At many times, and this probably applies to the very present, the regional conflicts have been power-mongering between the many countries and an ever-escalating struggle for supremacy between Shia and Sunni Muslims.

The Declaration never anticipated the Holocaust thirty years later or the pressures a burgeoning Palestinian population would bring to a very small area over which all the Abrahamic faiths claim viscerally felt rights. The wish expressed in the Declaration that creating a Jewish homeland should not interfere with the current inhabitants at the time has clearly been overtaken by these events and factors. Nonetheless, it is our familys sincere hope that some resolution can be found for the problem, which will probably require much shuttle diplomacy, some giving of ground by Israel and some arm-twisting of the Palestinian militants (most of whom are sworn to destroy Israel) by neighbouring Arab states.

Of course this has all been tried before, and written about, but for myself, finding a book which deals with the whole of the past 100 years and which is concise and readable has too often found me putting down a tome which isolated a period of time and was likely to be verbose as a result.

Thus it was that when I was introduced to Leslie he told me he was writing this book and offered it to me to read in its raw draft form. I was immediately drawn to his style and his pinpointing of key moments and the circumstances building up to them or their after-effects. He maintains a wonderful pace to keep the reader from getting bogged down and it is his enormous research and ability to winnow out the unimportant which make the book so readable to somebody like myself, an average reader and student of current affairs and history. I commend it to anybody who feels that getting a good understanding of the machinations surrounding Palestine in the last 100 years is just too big a task to undertake. Leslie Turnberg has done all the heavy-lifting for that reader.

The 5th Earl of Balfour
February 2017