Book Review: The long overdue return of an incredible insider’s view of the Balfour Declaration

Out of print for many years, 'Palestine: The Reality' reveals the shocking truth behind the political scheming that continues to affect the Middle East a century later.
Updated 10 March 2018
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Book Review: The long overdue return of an incredible insider’s view of the Balfour Declaration

“Palestine: The Reality” contains invaluable historical information about the genesis and significance of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, and some startling revelations about the actions of UK officials at the time, yet it was very difficult to find a copy for many years.
First published in 1939 by Longman Green and Company, most copies were destroyed when the publisher’s offices in London were bombed by the Germans in the Blitz in 1941. It was republished in the 1970s but even secondhand copies remained almost impossible to find. The new edition, released in 2017, the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, was therefore long overdue.
The author, Joseph Mary Nagle Jeffries, was a war, foreign and political correspondent for the Daily Mail, then Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper. He covered the First World War and then became the newspaper’s reporter in the Middle East.
Encouraged by his editor, Thomas Marlow, “to go fully into the question,” Jeffries witnessed history in the making during the turbulent 1920s, and filed regular stories on the Palestine Question. Along the way, he acquired deep understanding, knowledge and feeling for the political situation in the Middle East.
If the mainstream press largely ignored the book upon its publication, Ghada Karmi reminds us in a new introduction that Sir Arnold Wilson MP thought highly of the book, describing it in 1939 as “the most important study of Palestine yet published. As such it deserves to be in the hands of every man who cares for justice and peace.”
In the same year, Jemal Husseini, president of the Palestine Arab Delegation, called on everyone in England to read this book.
It certainly contains a wealth of information. One of the most startling revelations is that the Civil Government of Palestine, set up in 1920, was an unlawful government.
“It is impossible to find that the supposititious Mandatory Administration for the three years between August 1920 and September 1923 had any mandatory status or any legal status whatsoever. It was called a Government, but it had none of the title-deeds or rights of a government. It was not a government,” Jeffries wrote.
He also tells how the text of the Balfour Declaration was approved on November 2, 1917, then sent in the form of a letter from the foreign secretary, Arthur James Balfour, to Lord Rothschild, a leading figure in the British Jewish community.
The final line of the letter read: “I should be grateful if you would bring this Declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.”
Jeffries writes: “Nothing more cynically humorous than the final couple of lines of this letter has ever been penned.”
This is a reference to the fact that British government officials were not the authors of the Balfour Declaration. A committee of about 20 Zionist leaders, working on both sides of the Atlantic, composed the text under the strong influence of Chaim Weitzman, the president of the British Zionist Federation, who would become the first president of Israel in 1949. It was then forwarded to the British officials.
As far as the public was aware this text, on which Zionists of many nationalities had collaborated, was entirely a British government creation. It was also presented to the Arabs as the voice of Britain.
Jeffries described the declaration as “unlawful in issue, arbitrary in purpose, and deceitful in wording. The Balfour Declaration is the most discreditable document to which a British Government has set its hand within memory”.
Palestinians were the first direct victims of the Balfour Declaration, which triggered an inexorable process leading to their eviction, dispossession and lifelong exile. Most of Palestine’s expelled Arabs were sent to refugee camps, which exist to this day – such as the Ain Al-Hilweh camp in southern Lebanon, which has grown into a town of 120,000 refugees.
The Balfour Declaration consists of 67 words. Jeffries takes 750 pages to tell the inside story of those words which, a century later, continue to have a profound effect on the Middle East.
In his original introduction, Jeffries explains that his book is so long because the true history of Palestine has been hidden from the world for decades.
“Half the facts I have to give have never been mentioned at all, many of the documents have never been quoted,” he wrote.
He also sheds some light on why it took so long for the book to be published.
“It is because of the primary handicap upon the Arabs and their defenders,” he said, referring to the fact that unlike the Zionists and their British allies, who held prominent positions in Parliament, the Press and high society, Arabs had no voice and were largely invisible to the British public.
“From the Arab the British Public has heard little, despite all the endeavors the Arabs themselves have made to present their cause,” Jeffries wrote. “How could it be otherwise? The lonely groups of men, whom their countrymen have sent so often to our shores to plead for them, have never obtained in the newspapers or upon the platform one thousandth part of the space or of the time which they needed to say all that they had to say.”
In her introduction, Karmi recounts how in 1950s Britain it was almost impossible to plead the Palestinian cause. When she told people she came from Palestine, most thought she was referring to Pakistan.
“As a child, I found it the most frightening deletion of my identity, history and memory imaginable, further compounded by so profound a British dismissal of our side of the story as to make me doubt the reality of my own living experience,” she wrote.
The new edition of this book, while long overdue, is a timely reminder of the true story and the disreputable role played by Great Britain and its allies.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Private Finance, Public Power’

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Updated 27 June 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Private Finance, Public Power’

  • Public-private negotiations over financial governance has evolved into an essential ecosystem of banking risk management

Authors: Peter Conti-Brown and Sean H. Vanatta

Banks in America are private institutions with private shareholders, boards of directors, profit motives, customers, and competitors. And yet the public plays a key role in deciding what risks are taken as well as how, when, and to what end. Public-private negotiations over financial governance has evolved into an essential ecosystem of banking risk management.

In “Private Finance, Public Power,” Peter Conti-Brown and Sean Vanatta offer a new history of finance and public policy in the US by examining the idiosyncratic way the nation manages financial risk across the public-private divide.

Covering two centuries, from the founding of the Republic to the early 1980s, Conti-Brown and Vanatta describe the often-contested, sometimes chaotic, engagement of bankers, politicians, bureaucrats, and others in the overlapping spaces of the public-private system of bank supervision.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Anxious Generation’ by Jonathan Haidt

Updated 26 June 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Anxious Generation’ by Jonathan Haidt

In “The Anxious Generation,” Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults.

He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Standard Model’

Updated 25 June 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Standard Model’

Authors: Yuval Grossman and Yossi Nir

“The Standard Model” is an elegant and extremely successful theory that formulates the laws of fundamental interactions among elementary particles.

This incisive textbook introduces students to the physics of the Standard Model while providing an essential overview of modern particle physics, with a unique emphasis on symmetry principles as the starting point for constructing models.

“The Standard Model” equips students with an in-depth understanding of this impressively predictive theory.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Dynamics and Astrophysics of Galaxies’

Updated 24 June 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Dynamics and Astrophysics of Galaxies’

Author: Jo Bovy

This book provides an in-depth introduction to the dynamics, formation, and evolution of galaxies.

Starting with the basics of galactic structure and galactic dynamics, it helps students develop a sophisticated understanding of the orbital structure of spirals, ellipticals, and other types of galaxies.

The book demonstrates how observations led to the discovery that galaxies are dominated by dark matter and explores in detail how structure evolves from the primordial universe to form the halos that host galaxies.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X’

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Updated 24 June 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X’

  • Haley structures Malcolm’s blistering critiques — including his rejection of nonviolent protest and disillusionment with white liberalism — with journalistic precision

Author: Alex Haley

Malcolm X’s posthumously published 1965 autobiography, crafted with Alex Haley, remains an indispensable document of the 20th-century US.

Its visceral narrative traces an extraordinary metamorphosis — from street hustler to revolutionary thinker — and offers enduring lessons about systemic injustice and the power of self-reinvention.

The opening chapters detail the African American civil rights activist’s fractured youth: His father’s violent death (officially a car accident, though family attributed it to white supremacists), his mother’s mental collapse and his pivot to crime as “Detroit Red.”

What struck me most was how imprisonment became his unlikely crucible.

Through voracious self-education and conversion to the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X transformed into one of America’s most incisive racial commentators.

Haley structures Malcolm’s blistering critiques — including his rejection of nonviolent protest and disillusionment with white liberalism — with journalistic precision.

Malcolm X’s 1964 pilgrimage to Makkah proves the memoir’s most consequential pivot. Witnessing racial unity in the holy city fundamentally reoriented his worldview. He began advocating cross-racial coalition-building against oppression, a philosophical evolution abruptly halted by his February 1965 assassination.

Haley’s contribution deserves note: His disciplined prose tempers Malcolm’s polemical intensity, lending the narrative reflective depth without diluting its urgency.

While academics occasionally quibble over timeline specifics (notably Malcolm X’s early NOI chronology), the memoir’s moral core stands unchallenged.

What lingers for me is Malcolm X’s intellectual ferocity — how his advocacy for education as liberation weaponized knowledge against subjugation.

Malcolm X’s demand for Black self-determination continues to challenge America’s unresolved racial contradictions with unnerving relevance. Half a century later, the book remains essential reading not for easy answers, but for its uncompromising questions.