BICOM

In advance of Israel’s Independence Day, Cabinet Secretary Zvi Hauser announced that the original copy of the Balfour Declaration will be loaned by the British Library to the State of Israel, to be displayed at Independence Hall in Tel Aviv, where David Ben Gurion declared the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

The document, signed by then Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour in 1917, declared the support of the British government for the establishment of “a national home for the Jewish people” in what was then the Ottoman Turkish region of Palestine. The Balfour Declaration is considered to be a seminal document in the diplomatic process which led to the establishment of the British mandate and ultimately the State of Israel. The document itself was addressed to Baron Rothschild, a leading figure in the British Jewish community at the time, with instructions to pass it on to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain. The Rothschild family eventually gave it to the British Museum, which transferred the letter to the British Library.

Hauser recently travelled to London with Reuven Pinsky, a representative of the Prime Minister’s Office, and with the help of Lord Jacob Rothschild is working to secure the agreement of the British Library to loan the original Balfour Declaration to Israel for a limited period. Hauser told Haaretz “The document is the Archimedean point of the recognition of the Zionist movement, and led to the founding of the State of Israel” and pledged to give Israelis “the opportunity to see with their own eyes a piece of history that changed the reality for all of us.”

The letter is likely to be displayed in two years time as a centrepiece of a renovated museum at Independence Hall alongside the original copy of Israel’s Declaration of Independence.