Chaim Weizmann: the Biochemist behind the Balfour Declaration

Sep 07, 2025

The Balfour Declaration promised away Palestine, but behind the Foreign Office letter stood a Russian-born chemist in Manchester. Chaim Weizmann turned British wartime calculations into policy, brokered elite access, and helped shape a pledge that ignored the indigenous Palestinian majority.

The hidden architect

Picture a government at war, an empire guarding the Suez lifeline, and in the middle of it all a Manchester chemistry lecturer who could get a cabinet minister to pick up the telephone. Chaim Weizmann, immigrant scientist turned lobbyist, grasped a simple truth. British power would be receptive to Zionism if it looked like an imperial asset. He set about making it so. By 1917, he had built the networks, framed the arguments, and helped steer the drafting that produced the Balfour Declaration, a pledge to establish a “national home” for Jewish people on Palestinian land.

From laboratory to the Cabinet ante-room

Weizmann arrived in Britain in 1904 and soon found a base in Manchester’s Liberal circles around C. P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian. Through Scott and local allies such as Charles Dreyfus, he met leading politicians, including Arthur Balfour and David Lloyd George. Weizmann later recalled Balfour asking why Zionists had rejected a scheme for a “Jewish homeland” in East Africa. Weizmann retorted: “we had Jerusalem when London was a marsh.”

During the First World War, Weizmann’s scientific breakthrough in producing acetone for cordite gave him unusual visibility with the Ministry of Munitions, then under Lloyd George. The discovery opened doors: suddenly a Manchester chemist was being ushered into Whitehall offices.

Lloyd George, a Welsh Baptist with strong biblical sympathies for Zionism, was Prime Minister when the Balfour Declaration was issued. In his memoirs, he claimed that Britain had offered the Declaration as a “reward” for Weizmann’s services.

Making the case to power

Weizmann crafted arguments to dovetail with British imperial priorities. In late 1914, he wrote that if Palestine fell into a British sphere and Jewish colonisation were encouraged “as a British dependency,” a million Jewish settlers could arrive within 20 to 30 years, “develop the country,” and form “a very effective guard for the Suez Canal.” By 1919, however, he stated that the goal was to make Palestine “as Jewish as England is English.”

The road to November 1917

Here is the compressed history of a deal-maker at work. In January 1917, Mark Sykes entered Weizmann’s orbit; on February 7^th, a first conference gathered Sykes and Zionist representatives. On June 13^th, Weizmann formally urged the Foreign Office to issue a declaration supporting Zionist claims in Palestine. On June 19^th, Balfour invited Lord Rothschild and Weizmann to submit a draft for War Cabinet approval.

The drafting then moved through multiple hands. A Zionist text was prepared in London under Nahum Sokolow with input from Weizmann’s Manchester-London circle; notably Harry Sacher, a Manchester Guardian journalist who later became a director of Marks & Spencer and whose annotated draft still exists. Weizmann later wrote that when Balfour asked to whom the declaration should be addressed, he proposed Rothschild rather than himself, despite his presidency of the English Zionist Federation. The point is not literal sole authorship. It is that Weizmann orchestrated the process, nominated interlocutors, and kept the machinery turning until the pledge was issued.

Meanwhile, British Jews who opposed Zionism, above all Edwin Montagu, pushed back, warning that the project endangered equal rights elsewhere. Their memoranda were read, discussed, and overruled. Palestinians, of course, had no seat at the table.

What the text did, and did not, say

Lord Curzon, who later became foreign secretary, saw exactly what was happening. In January 1919, Curzon cautioned Balfour that Weizmann’s call for a “Jewish Commonwealth” (rather than “national home”) was no semantic quirk. “A Commonwealth,” Curzon wrote, “is a body politic, a state.”

Weizmann’s own advocacy left little doubt. At the Paris Peace Conference one month later, he defined the aim as to “pour in a considerable number of immigrants” and “finally establish such a society in Palestine that Palestine shall be as Jewish as England is English.” The Declaration’s ambiguity hid a clear political project.

Networks, money, drafts

To understand the power behind the pledge, follow the networks. Weizmann’s Manchester allies included Simon Marks and Israel Sieff of Marks & Spencer, and Harry Sacher, who moved between the Manchester Guardian, commerce, and Zionist politics. The point is not conspiracy. It is the social fact of a tightly linked group turning ideas into texts and texts into policy.

The Palestinian perspective, registered and ignored

Palestinian newspapers and petitions immediately grasped the Declaration as a colonial imposition. Arab delegations warned British officials that privileging a settler project over the indigenous majority would lead to conflict and dispossession. Their objections were consistent and documented, from newspapers such as Falastin to memoranda submitted throughout the Mandate. Yet the pledge was incorporated into the League of Nations Mandate, structuring land policy, institutions, and immigration in favour of Zionist colonisation whilst withholding Palestinian political rights.

What Weizmann thought about Palestinians

Weizmann’s private comments reinforce the politics on display. In one oft-cited letter he likened the Arab Palestinians to “the rocks of Judea,” obstacles to be cleared on a difficult path. In another reported remark, he described the 1948 mass expulsion of Palestinians as a “miraculous clearing of the land.” Arthur Ruppin, an early proponent of ethnic cleansing as an integral part of the Zionist project, recorded Weizmann repeating a British dismissal of the indigenous population as “some hundred thousand negroes [kushim]” of “no value.” Palestinians were simply a demographic problem to be managed; a temporary obstruction to the Zionist project.

The through-line

Weizmann’s lobbying fused elite friendship, scientific celebrity, and relentless political labour. He mobilised a sympathetic press, corralled donors, channelled drafts, and neutralised opposition. The War Cabinet authorised the text on 31 October 1917; Balfour sent it to Rothschild on 2 November. Palestinians were written into the document only as “non-Jewish communities” with “civil and religious” protections, not as a nation with political rights.

Call the Balfour Declaration what it was: a colonial commitment secured by a master lobbyist who profited from access and influence. British archives preserve the paper trail. Weizmann’s own writings preserve the intention. To confront the Declaration today is to condemn the people that wrote it and remember the people it wrote over.