a Jewish state.
On November 2, 1917, the British Government expressed its sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations and announced that it would use its “best endeavours” to facilitate “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. The announcement came in a letter from Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lionel Walter, 2nd Lord Rothschild (1868-1937), the unofficial leader of the British Jewish community. The Balfour agreement became the diplomatic foundation stone of the state of Israel. The origins of the letter had begun in the early twentieth century, when Chaim Weizmann, the leading spokesman for Zionism in Britain began to solicit support among the British people, shortly after he settled in Manchester in 1904.