Palestine: The Reality—The Inside Story of the Balfour Declaration 1917–1938

British journalist Jeffries (1880–1960) combines the skills of an investigative reporter, a scholar’s assiduity in pursuing available documents, and an engaging writing style in this long-unavailable 1939 exposé of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which underwrote a “national home” for the Jewish people in Palestine. Jeffries covered WWI in the Middle East and emerged as a committed anti-Zionist. For the next quarter century he focused on the Balfour Declaration, drawing three principal conclusions: First, its real authors and supporters were Jewish, British, and international Zionists who shaped the document and lobbied for it in London and at Versailles (Jeffries unflatteringly portrays both the Jewish Zionists and their gentile counterparts). Second, Britain lied and broke promises to both its Arab and French allies on every aspect of the Palestine question. Third, Britain callously dismissed Palestinian Arabs’ rights and welfare. Jeffries’s work received significant prepublication support, but his publisher’s warehouse and most of the existing copies were destroyed during the 1941 German blitz. The centennial of the Balfour Declaration occasioned this new edition, and though Jeffries’s narrow focus underplays Britain’s desperate wartime situation in 1917, the book will be welcomed by critics of Britain and Israel. Maps & illus. (Aug.)