Leaders of Britain’s Jewish community have acknowledged their predecessors were wrong to argue against the creation of Israel.
One hundred years ago, on May 24 1917, The Times published a letter from the then president of the Board of Deputies David Alexander, and Claude Montefiore, president of the Anglo-Jewish Association. In it the two senior figures laid out the reasons not to set up a Jewish state.
They opposed Zionism because it regarded “all the Jewish communities of the world as constituting one homeless nationality, incapable of complete social and political identification with the nations among whom they dwell”.
“Emancipated Jews in this country regard themselves primarily as a religious community,“ with “no separate national aspirations”, the letter said. The founding of a Jewish homeland in Palestine would have the effect of stamping the Jews as strangers in their native lands, and of undermining their hard-won position- as citizens and nationals of those lands.”
