The Balfour Declaration matters in Edward Said’s account as both a consequential statement about Palestine and a recurring object of political interpretation. Its place in the First World War, the developing American role in the Middle East, and the later polemics surrounding demonstrations held on its anniversary reveal how decisions made within imperial power structures can be narrated in ways that obscure local political agency and the history of colonization.

Wartime Policy and American Interest

Said places the declaration within the wartime development of American policy, rather than treating it as a matter confined to British diplomacy. He notes that, during the First World War, the prospect of Zionism and the colonization of Palestine became a significant American policy interest and played an appreciable role in bringing the United States into the war. British discussions before and after the declaration’s issuance in November 1917, he argues, show that American officials took it seriously. The declaration thus appears in his account as part of a broader political alignment, with consequences extending beyond the document and its issuing government.

The surrounding institutional history helps explain why Said emphasizes that wider frame. During and after the Second World War, American interest in the Middle East increased markedly. Cairo, Tehran, and North Africa were important wartime arenas; meanwhile, Britain and France had pioneered the exploitation of the region’s oil, strategic, and human resources. Against that background, the United States prepared to assume a new postwar imperial role. The declaration’s importance is therefore connected, in Said’s analysis, to the longer transition from European to American power and to the strategic interests that helped shape that transition.

Palestine and the Politics of Historical Omission

Said’s criticism is not that the declaration can be understood only through one political formula, but that accounts of the region often present selective histories as neutral expertise. In his discussion of Bernard Lewis, he points to a conspicuous omission: Lewis could recount Arab opposition to Zionism without acknowledging the Zionist invasion and colonization of Palestine, which Said says took place despite and in conflict with the native Arab inhabitants. The omission matters because it removes a central circumstance from the history being interpreted. Opposition then appears detached from the political conditions to which it responded.

Said places that omission alongside Lewis’s treatment of democracy and Israeli rule. Lewis criticized the absence of democracy in the Middle East, with Israel as his exception, but, Said argues, did not discuss the Emergency Defense Regulations used to govern Arabs in Israel, preventive detention, settlements in the militarily occupied West Bank and Gaza, or the denial of Arab human rights, including immigration rights in former Palestine. These examples do not make the declaration itself a complete explanation of later events. They show instead how arguments about the region can privilege some political facts while leaving other conditions of power out of view.

That dispute reflects Said’s larger account of Orientalism: knowledge about the Orient is not separate from the power relations that enable it. An authoritative historical narrative can describe a conflict while narrowing the field of what counts as relevant history. In the case of the declaration, the contrast is between accounts that treat Arab opposition as a self-contained cultural or religious disposition and an account that situates it amid colonization, political claims, and unequal power. Said’s point is that omission is not simply a gap in detail; it can change the apparent causes and meaning of political action.

The Cairo Demonstrations and Lewis’s Revisions

The declaration’s anniversary became the occasion for demonstrations in Egypt on November 2, 1945. Said uses Lewis’s two accounts of the ensuing events to show how changes in description can produce a changed political interpretation. In the 1964 version, Lewis says that Egyptian political leaders called for demonstrations on the anniversary and that these rapidly developed into anti-Jewish riots. He cites attacks on Catholic, Armenian, and Greek Orthodox churches, then asks what those churches had to do with the declaration. Said observes that the cited evidence does not explain how the riot was anti-Jewish; the churches named do not, by themselves, establish the characterization.

In Lewis’s 1976 version, published in Commentary, the account is reframed. The earlier emphasis on political leaders sponsoring the demonstrations gives way to a description in which demonstrations were simply held. Lewis then presents the events as an anti-Jewish riot that broadened into a more general outbreak, again citing Catholic, Armenian, and Greek Orthodox churches as attacked and damaged. Said draws attention to two alterations: the changed account diminishes the stated role of political organizers, and its phrasing suggests that several churches of each named denomination were attacked, whereas the earlier version specifies one church of each kind. The event’s narrative changes even though the cited examples remain closely related.

For Said, these revisions serve Lewis’s polemical argument that Islam is an anti-Semitic ideology and that Muslim political behavior is governed by instinctive communal loyalties rather than historical or political circumstances. Said argues that the anecdote is arranged to make Islam appear as an irrational mass phenomenon and to encourage readers to regard Muslims as unchanging. His objection is not merely that Lewis uses a disputed label; it is that the account’s altered agency, suggestive wording, and selective evidence transform a demonstration associated with the anniversary of the declaration into support for a general claim about Muslim character.

A Declaration in Contested Histories

The episodes surrounding the declaration bring together several strands of Said’s argument. The document figures in wartime diplomacy and the expansion of American interest in the Middle East; its anniversary becomes the setting for demonstrations whose meaning is subsequently contested; and later scholarship can either acknowledge or suppress the history of colonization in interpreting Arab opposition. Those strands are related, but Said does not collapse them into a single event or cause. Instead, he asks readers to trace the political conditions and the retrospective descriptions that make particular interpretations persuasive.

His broader purpose is to replace short, antagonistic explanations with historically situated analysis. The declaration and its aftermath cannot be understood by treating either the region’s peoples or their political actions as expressions of an unchanging essence. Said’s account insists on the importance of agency, context, and the unequal power to define what events mean. It also clarifies why disputes over the declaration’s history matter: the struggle is not only over the past, but over whether Palestinian claims and the realities of colonization remain visible in accounts of the present.