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Conscience of Empires

What broader historical trends were influencing San Remo?

Professor Efraim Karsh

hough relegated since Roman In the 1880s, a different type of recognition, by the-then foremost
times to a small minority in immigrant began arriving: young world power, of the Jews as a
Tthe Land of Israel (renamed nationalists who rejected diaspora national group (rather than a purely
‘Palestine’ by the Romans), not life and sought to restore Jewish religious community) entitled to
only was Jewish presence there national existence in the historic national self-determination in its
never eliminated, but the longing for homeland. In August 1897, the ancestral homeland, but because
the ancestral homeland occupied First Zionist Congress was held in it was rapidly incorporated into the
a focal place in Jewish collective the Swiss town of Basle, defining post-WWI peace treaties that laid
memory for millennia, with Jews the aim of Zionism as “the creation the legal foundations of the new
returning to ‘Palestine’ from the of a home for the Jewish people in world order. That constituted a
earliest days of dispersion. Palestine to be secured by public formal acknowledgement of Jewish
law.” indigenous rights by the League
of Nations: the newly-established
The Balfour Declaration world organisation and the UN’s
During WW1, the British government predecessor.
decided to “view with favour” this
goal, issuing a formal letter from Recognising that the age of
Foreign Secretary Balfour to Lord empires must now give way to
Rothschild on 2 November 1917 to
this effect, and promising to “use “the age of empires
its best endeavours to facilitate”
its achievement. Although not must now give way to
yet “secured by public law,”
the significance of this Balfour indigenous self-rule”
Declaration cannot be overstated.
First Zionist Congress, 1897 Not merely because it signified

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