I don't know of any other case in modern times in which the British or French promised a country to people who didn't even live there. British colonial adminis

I don't know of any other case in modern times in which the British or French promised a country to people who didn't even live there. British colonial administrators themselves quickly came to realize the insanity of what they were doing. The Balfour Declaration was basically a declaration of war against the population they were ruling over in Palestine, a population whose interests they were nominally supposed to rule in. Lord Curzon, who was the only British cabinet minister with expertise in the Middle East, warned about this before the Balfour Declaration was issued. > Israeli Jewish people, who are themselves plurality MENA people (contrary to the popular narrative that they're all displaced Europeans) Israel was founded pretty much solely by European Jews. Arab Jews emigrated to Israel years after it was founded, because the expulsion of the Palestinians and the Arab-Israeli conflict unleashed a wave of antisemitism across the Arab world.