A few days ago, I went to see the play "Herzl Said" at the Gesher Theater in Tel Aviv, produced to mark the birth of the State of Israel 70 years ago. The play is based on the utopian novel “Altneuland” ("Old New Land" in German) written by the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, some 120 years ago. In his book, Herzl envisioned Jews and Arabs coexisting and world leaders journeying to the country to learn about peace, tolerance, brotherhood and prosperity. Playwright Roi Chen brings Herzl back to life in 1949, shortly before his remains were brought from Austria, where he died in 1904, to be buried in the old new land (Israel). Herzl is disappointed by the religious nationalism he encounters in the Jewish state founded in 1948. He tries to convince the young Israelis he meets that if they wish, his vision of Jews and Arabs spending their vacations together on the shores of the Sea of Galilee and homosexuals being lovingly accepted by society would come true. As we know, political and social reality in Israel is turning his vision into a dream that comes true for few.

There’s no telling what Lord Arthur Balfour would have said to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were he sitting at his side during the Nov. 2 dinner thrown in honor of the Israeli leader by British Prime Minister Theresa May. The event marks the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration that announced British support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. Judging by the op-ed penned this week by British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who tried to imagine what his long-ago predecessor would have thought of the way things turned out, Balfour would not have taken part in the festivities. In the piece published in the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth and the British Telegraph, Johnson noted that the man who 100 years ago sat under the same gilded ceiling stipulated in his declaration that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities,” a caveat that “has not been fully realized.”

In his op-ed, Johnson draws a straight line between the 1917 Balfour Declaration to a document compiled by a committee headed by another fellow Briton, Lord Robert Peel, in 1937. (The Peel Commission was appointed by the British government to investigate unrest among Palestinian Arabs and Jews in Palestine.) Johnson described it as a “vision of two states for two people.” He then fast-forwards to June 4, 1967 — the Six-Day War — pointing to the border that delineated Israel from the Kingdom of Jordan as the course along which the “unfinished business of the Balfour Declaration” can be completed. That “unfinished business” has cost the lives of thousands of Jews and Arabs to date. The violent Arab rejection of United Nations Resolution 181 of Nov. 29, 1947, on the creation of a Jewish state alongside an Arab one wrought a catastrophe for the Palestinian people and gouged deep wounds in the relationship with their Jewish neighbors.

On Nov. 22, 1967, 50 years and 20 days after Balfour sent his famous letter to Lord Walter Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, the UN Security Council tried its hand at completing the “unfinished business,” UN Security Council Resolution 242, that rules out the acquisition of territory by war and demands that Israel withdraw from territory it conquered to secure and recognizable borders, provided official recognition of Israel’s June 4, 1967, borders, which had until then only been recognized as a demarcation line. However, the Arab states’ refusal to recognize the State of Israel along with the growth of Palestinian terrorism, and Israel’s subsequent unilateral annexation of East Jerusalem and the settlement enterprise on which it embarked, once again took the wind out of the Balfour Declaration’s sails.