Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks seized power in Russia and withdrew from the war, adding insult to injury by publishing the secret Sykes-Picot-Sazonov carve-up which they had found in the tsarist archives.
The Cauldron
On 2 November, after the US and France had approved the plan, the Balfour Declaration was issued, stating that 'His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, provided this did not 'prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine' - in other words, the Palestinian Arabs who were the overwhelming majority of inhabitants. The failure to even name them was a revealing mistake. The words were carefully negotiated - 'a home' not a state, in Palestine not of Palestine.