The Unique Position of the Jews

The position of the Jews is unique. For them race, religion and country are interrelated, as they are inter-related in the case of no other race, no other religion, and no other country on earth. In no other case... is its past development so intimately bound up with the long political history of a petty territory wedged in between States more powerful far than it could ever be; in the case of no other religion are its aspirations and hopes expressed in language and imagery so utterly dependent for their meaning on the conviction that only from this one land, only through this one history, only by this one people, is full religious knowledge to spread through all the world. By a strange and most unhappy fate it is this people of all others which, retaining the full its racial self-consciousness, has been severed from its home, has wandered into all lands, and has nowhere been able to create for itself an organized social commonwealth. Only Zionism, so at least Zionists believe, can provide some mitigation of this great tragedy.

—Arthur Balfour (25 July 1848 – 19 March 1930, British Conservative statesman. As Foreign Secretary in the Lloyd George ministry, he issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917 which spoke of the favor for establishing a homeland in Israel for the Jews).