History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

Balfour thus became a staunch Zionist ally and at the Foreign Office moved towards a definite and public British commitment. Events favoured it. In January 1917 British troops began the conquest of Palestine. The same month the Tsar’s regime collapsed, thus removing the biggest single obstacle to wholehearted, world-wide Jewish support for the Allied cause. The provisional Prime Minister, Kerensky, ended Russia’s anti-Semitic code. And at the end of the month Germany began unrestricted U-boat warfare, making American intervention on the Allied side inevitable. The US government almost automatically became a strong supporter of the Jewish national home in Palestine.