That (see above) is that; a short typewritten letter of three paragraphs. The key part is emphasised below:
His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, 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.
During World War I the great powers made a number of decisions concerning the future of Palestine without much regard to the wishes of the indigenous inhabitants. Palestinian Arabs, however, believed that Great Britain had promised them independence in the Hussein-McMahon correspondence, an exchange of letters from July 1915 to March 1916 between Sir Henry McMahon, British high commissioner in Egypt, and Hussein ibn Ali, then emir of Mecca, in which the British made certain commitments to the Arabs in return for their support against the Ottomans during the war (see below). Yet by May of 1916 Britain, France, and Russia had reached an agreement (the Sykes-Picot Agreement, see below) according to which, inter alia, the bulk of Palestine was to be “internationalised.”
Regarding the Balfour Declaration, while the precise meaning of the correspondence has been disputed, its statements were generally contradictory to both the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Hussein-McMahon correspondence (an exchange of letters between the British high commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, and Hussein ibn Ali, then emir of Mecca), which in turn contradicted one another.
Earl A. J. Balfour
Balfour was
L. W. Baron de Rothschild
Both were good friends with Chaim Weizmann.
Context
There is lots.
Firstly, there is no escaping the fact that this was a duplicitous move and one that did betray (contradict, disregard) previous commitments with regard to the land of Palestine made to other actors (i.e., the Arabs).
Following Britain’s declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire in November 1914, it began to consider the future of Palestine. Within two months a memorandum was circulated to the War Cabinet by a Zionist member, Herbert Samuel, proposing the support of Zionist ambitions to enlist the support of Jews in the wider war. A committee was established in April 1915 by British prime minister H. H. Asquith to determine their policy towards the Ottoman Empire including Palestine. Asquith, who had favoured post-war reform of the Ottoman Empire, resigned in December 1916; his replacement David Lloyd George favoured partition of the Empire. The first negotiations between the British and the Zionists took place at a conference on 7 February 1917 that included Sir Mark Sykes and the Zionist leadership. Subsequent discussions led to Balfour’s request, on 19 June, that Rothschild and Chaim Weizmann draft a public declaration. Further drafts were discussed by the British Cabinet during September and October, with input from Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews but with no representation from the local population in Palestine
Hussein-McMahon correspondence
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Sykes-Picot agreement
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King-Crane commission
Although the commission was sympathetic toward Zionism,[22] the Balfour Declaration‘s requirement that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights existing in non-Jewish communities in Palestine” led the commission to recommend “that only a greatly reduced Zionist program be attempted by the Peace Conference, and even that, only very gradually initiated.”[23] The commission found that “Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, by various forms of purchase”.[23] Nearly 90% of the Palestinian population was emphatically against the entire Zionist program.[23]
The report noted that there is a principle that the wishes of the local population must be taken into account and that there is widespread anti-Zionist feeling in Palestine and Syria, and the holy nature of the land to Christians and Muslims as well as Jews must preclude solely Jewish dominion. It also noted that Jews at that time constituted only 10% of the population of Palestine.[3]
Even though the Commission’s report did not lead to Palestinian independence, it acts as an important historical reference point for Palestinians to prove the existence of their movement, nationhood, and political goals as early as 1919.