ABSTRACT
This chapter shall endeavour to describe the general outline of the tortuous path from the Protestant idea for the restoration of the Jews in Palestine via the Balfour Declaration and over the various Committees of Enquiry to the final abandonment of the national home and mandate commitments. In order for the non-specialist reader to understand, and for him to be able to follow the tangled skein of the early honeymoon between Britain and the Jews, as well as the subsequent love-hate relationship with the Zionists, it was considered essential to include a chapter showing the deteriorating determinants of British policy towards Jewish immigration into Palestine. For the sake of the then prevailing atmosphere we may follow the atmosphere of idealism, practically from the period of Palmerston, his predecessors and contemporaries until Balfour and beyond and until the nadir of the British decision finally to abandon the Jewish national home and the mandate commitments had been reached.
