European Judaism • Volume 52, No. 1, Spring 2019: 67–110 © Leo Baeck College doi: 10.3167/ej.2019.520112 On Vertical Alliances, ‘Perfdious Albion’ and the Security Paradigm Refections on the Balfour Declaration Centennial and the Winding Road to Israeli Independence Arie M. Dubnov Abstract Revisiting the Balfour Declaration, this article ofers a threefold argument: frst, chal- lenging those who read the Declaration as symbolizing a new dawn of Jewish political history, the article proposes an alternative reading that considers it as a continuation of familiar patterns of Jewish political behaviour based on the forging of ‘vertical alli- ances’. Second, it argues that this perspective led many Jews to treat the Declaration as an unsigned ‘contract’, and it was not until the 1940s, with the rise in popularity of a discourse concerning Britain’s ‘betrayal’, that this view began to be challenged. Third, explaining how and why the vertical alliance perspective was pushed to the margins of Israeli collective memory, the article looks at the rise of the ‘security paradigm’ in Hebrew literature and examines the ways in which the creation of a Jewish army was imagined as marking the end of old forms of Jewish politics. Keywords: Hannah Arendt, Balfour Declaration, British Empire, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Hebrew literature, independence, Jewish army, Zionism The sovereign is the representative of history. He holds the course of history in his hand like a scepter. —Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama Introduction: a dialogue of the deaf? If history could be defined as that never-ending process whereby people seek to understand the past and its many meanings, anniversaries and ISRAEL