Anti-Zionism in the context of "Balfour Declaration of 1917"

The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British Government in 1917 during the First World War announcing its support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population. The declaration was contained in a letter dated 2 November 1917 from Arthur Balfour, the British foreign secretary, to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. The text of the declaration was published in the press on 9 November 1917.

Following Britain's declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire in November 1914, it began to consider the future of Palestine. Within two months a memorandum was circulated to the War Cabinet by a Zionist member, Herbert Samuel, proposing the support of Zionist ambitions to enlist the support of Jews in the wider war. A committee was established in April 1915 by British prime minister H. H. Asquith to determine their policy towards the Ottoman Empire including Palestine. Asquith, who had favoured post-war reform of the Ottoman Empire, resigned in December 1916; his replacement David Lloyd George favoured partition of the Empire. The first negotiations between the British and the Zionists took place at a conference on 7 February 1917 that included Sir Mark Sykes and the Zionist leadership. Subsequent discussions led to Balfour's request, on 19 June, that Rothschild and Chaim Weizmann draft a public declaration. Further drafts were discussed by the British Cabinet during September and October, with input from Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews but with no representation from the local population in Palestine.

Palestinian nationalism is the national movement of the Palestinian people that espouses self-determination and sovereignty over the region of Palestine. Originally formed in the early 20th century in opposition to Zionism, Palestinian nationalism later internationalized and attached itself to other ideologies; it has thus rejected the occupation of the Palestinian territories by the government of Israel since the 1967 Six-Day War. Palestinian nationalists often draw upon broader political traditions in their ideology, such as Arab socialism and ethnic nationalism in the context of Muslim religious nationalism. Related beliefs have shaped the government of Palestine and continue to do so.

In the broader context of the Arab–Israeli conflict in the 21st century, Palestinian nationalist aims have included an end to the refugee status of individuals separated from their native lands during the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight, advocates stating that a "right of return" exists either to the occupied territories or to both those areas plus places within Israel itself. Nationalists have additionally worked to advance specific causes in terms of current residents' lives such as freedom of assembly, labor rights, the right to health care, and the right to travel. Divisions exist between nationalists over particular ideological goals, an example being the gulf between Islamist Palestinians favoring a more authoritarian state compared to centrist and secular Palestinians supporting democratic self-determination. Palestinian nationalists are also divided by preferred tactics; some favor nonviolent resistance while others advocate for and engage in political violence both inside and outside Israel.

The legitimacy of the State of Israel has been challenged since before the state was formed. There has been opposition to Zionism, the movement to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, since its emergence in 19th-century Europe. Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, a number of individuals, organizations, and states have challenged Israel's political legitimacy and its occupation of territories belonging to Palestine, Syria and Lebanon. Over the course of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and broader Arab–Israeli conflict, the country's authority has also been questioned on a number of fronts.

Criticism of Israel may include opposition to the country's right to exist or, since the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, the established power structure within the Israeli-occupied territories. Israel has also been accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes—such as apartheid, starvation and genocide—including by scholars, legal experts, and human rights organizations. Israel regards such criticism as attempts to delegitimize it. Israel has also been criticized for maintaining "the longest and one of the most deadly military occupations in the world".

The Old Right, also called the Old Guard, is an informal designation used for a branch of American conservatism that was most prominent from 1910 to the mid-1950s, but never became an organized movement. Most members were Republicans, although there was a conservative Democratic element based largely in the Southern United States. They are termed the "Old Right" to distinguish them from their New Right successors who came to prominence in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

Most were unified by their defense of authority, tradition, morality, religion, limited government, rule of law, civic nationalism, capitalism, social conservatism, anti-Communism, anti-socialism, anti-Zionism, and anti-imperialism, as well as their skepticism of egalitarianism and democracy and the growing power of Washington. The Old Right typically favored laissez-faire classical liberalism; some were free market conservatives; others were ex-radical leftists who moved sharply to the right, such as the novelist John Dos Passos. Still others, such as the Democrat Southern Agrarians, were traditionalists who dreamed of restoring a pre-modern communal society. Above all, Murray Rothbard wrote, the Old Right were unified by opposition to what they saw as the danger of "domestic dictatorship" by Democratic president Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal program.

Antisemitism (prejudice against and hatred of Jews) has increased greatly in the Arab world since the beginning of the 20th century, for several reasons: the dissolution and breakdown of the Ottoman Empire and traditional Islamic society; European influence, brought about by Western imperialism and Arab Christians; Nazi propaganda and relations between Nazi Germany and the Arab world; resentment over Zionism and the experience of the Nakba; the rise of Arab nationalism; and the widespread proliferation of anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist conspiracy theories.

Traditionally, Jews in the Muslim world were considered to be People of the Book and were subjected to dhimmi status. They were afforded relative security against persecution, provided they did not contest the varying inferior social and legal status imposed on them under Islamic rule.

Conspiracy theories -- (i.e. explanations for an event or situation that asserts the existence of a conspiracy, generally by powerful sinister groups, often political in motivation), but always when other explanations are more probable -- are a prevalent feature of Arab politics, according to a number of sources. A 1994 paper in the journal Political Psychology by Prof. Matthew Gray writes they "are a common and popular phenomenon" that are important to understanding the political landscape of the Arab world. Variants include conspiracies involving Islamic anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, the machinations of Western colonialism, superpowers, oil, and the war on terror, which is often referred to in Arab media as a "War against Islam". Roger Cohen theorizes that the popularity of conspiracy theories in the Arab world is "the ultimate refuge of the powerless". The prevalence of conspiracy theories reflects effective top-down dissemination of disinformation by state actors, rather than a unique susceptibility of Arab culture to conspiracy, as some have claimed. State hostility and weak protections for journalists present major obstacles to challenging conspiracy theories, as journalists struggle to gather information and put their lives at risk by contradicting their governments. The spread of antisemitic and anti-Zionist conspiracism in the Arab world and the Middle East has seen an extraordinary proliferation since the beginning of the Internet Era.

Gray points out that actual conspiracies such as the 1956 plot to seize control of the Suez Canal encourage speculation and creation of imagined conspiracies. After the 1967 Six-Day War which resulted in a decisive Arab defeat, conspiracy theories started to gain traction in the Arab world. The war was perceived as a conspiracy by Israel and the United States—or its opposite: a Soviet plot to bring Egypt into the Soviet sphere of influence. Thomas Friedman notes the numerous conspiracy theories concerning the Lebanese civil war, attributing the source of the conflict to "Israelis, the Syrians, the Americans, the Soviets, or Henry Kissinger" in an attempt to destabilize the Lebanese government.

The Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry, often called the Khazar myth by its critics, is a largely abandoned historical hypothesis that postulated that Ashkenazi Jews were primarily, or to a large extent, descended from converts to Judaism among the Khazars, a multi-ethnic conglomerate of mostly Turkic peoples who formed a semi-nomadic khanate in and around the northern and central Caucasus and the Pontic–Caspian steppe in the late 6th century CE. It is still sometimes used in antisemitic conspiracy theories and in various anti-Zionist approaches. The hypothesis draws on medieval sources such as the Khazar Correspondence, according to which at some point in the 8th–9th centuries, a small number of Khazars were said by Judah Halevi and Abraham ibn Daud to have converted to Rabbinic Judaism. The hypothesis also postulates that after collapse of the Khazar empire, the Khazars fled to Eastern Europe and made up a large part of the Jews there. The scope of the conversion within the Khazar Khanate remains uncertain, but the evidence used to tie the subsequent Ashkenazi communities to the Khazars is meager and subject to conflicting interpretations.

Speculation that Europe's Jewish population originated among the Khazars has persisted for two centuries, from at least as early as 1808. In the late 19th century, Ernest Renan and other scholars speculated that the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe originated among refugees who had migrated from the collapsed Khazarian Khanate westward into Europe. Though intermittently evoked by several scholars since that time, the Khazar-Ashkenazi hypothesis came to the attention of a much wider public with the publication of Arthur Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe in 1976. It has been revived recently by geneticist Eran Elhaik, who in 2013 conducted a study aiming to vindicate it.