Balfour Declaration a Propaganda Tool for World War 1

According to sources from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the only reason the British even made the Balfour Declaration was for foreign Propaganda purposes, not domestic consumption. People in British intelligence believed that the Jews controlled the American press and gaining the support of the American Jews was key to obtaining the commitment of the U.S. government to send more than token forces after it entered World War 1.

Some of the senior officials of British intelligence believed that they could tip the American public opinion in favor of a genuine military commitment by dangling a bit of bait before the noses of the American press barons. In fact, there were only two Jewish families of any significance among American publishers and their influence was hardly enough to swing a local election.

The truth is that the support of American Jews(1) was unnecessary. The American military commitment was well under way even before the Balfour Declaration was published. Still, it was an article of faith among some British leaders, such as Winston Churchill, that the declaration was the price England had to pay to the Jews to ensure the full commitment of the United States to the war.

(1) The Jewish establishment in in the United States cared very little for Zionism, Palestine or for that matter, other Jews. There was less then a quarter of a million Jews in the country before the 1890’s and they were largely Germanic stock. The leaders were upper-middle class mercantilists, well educated and attempting to be fully assimilated. After the Russian pogroms, the old-line upscale American Jews were buried in a wave of 5 million Jewish immigrants inside a decade. The “native” Jews despised the new immigrants with a passion and treated them most severely, just as German Jews treated Russian and Polish Jews who had resettled in Germany. The new Jews barely spoke English. Far from controlling American elections, a few of them could not even vote. As far as public opinion went, the newspaper’s they read were written in Yiddish.