the Balfour Declaration was basically a statement of British policy; it did not establish legal rights. This first occurred with the meeting of the victorious allied powers at San Remo, Italy in 1920, where they adopted the Balfour Declaration in an international agreement. Then in 1922, 51 members of the League of Nations approved the document for the Palestine Mandate.

the Ottoman census already showed a Jewish majority in Safed in the 16th century. European consular reports in the 19th century showed that by the 1860s the Jews re-established their majority in Jerusalem -- decades before British armies took over the Middle East. The Balfour Declaration reflected a historical trend that was already underway, but it did not launch the Jewish return to Eretz Israel.