Professor Sir Adam Roberts on the Balfour Declaration as a harbinger of the West's interventions in the Middle East

Adam Roberts' opinion piece in the Israeli news website, Haaretz, on what his grandfather, George Adam Smith, wrote regarding Lord Balfour’s, and the British Government’s, support of “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” — and how Smith’s long-held views were misinterpreted in a 1993 book by Benjamin Netanyahu, now Prime Minister of Israel. 

Adam’s grandfather, George Adam Smith, a Scottish Presbyterian biblical scholar and author of The Historical Geography of the Holy Land (1894), wrote “The idea that it (Palestine) can ever belong to one nation… is contrary both to Nature and to Scripture.”