J.M.N. Jeffries (1880-1960) was a British journalist and historian of Anglo-Irish origin. He is best known as the author of the 1939 book Palestine: The Reality, at once a detailed and scholarly history of British involvement in Palestine from 1914 to 1938, and a searing indictment of Britain’s wartime betrayal of her Arab nationalist allies and embrace of the Zionist movement, culminating in the issuance of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and the assumption, in 1920, of a League of Nations’ mandate over Palestine, predicated on the transformation of an Arab country into a “national home for the Jewish people.”

Career

A graduate of Stonyhurst College, Jeffries began a lengthy career as a journalist for Lord Northcliffe’s Daily Mail. As a war correspondent in World War I, he reported from Belgium, Egypt, Bulgaria, Italy, and Greece. His experiences on these fronts, as well as his post-war career as a foreign correspondent, he chronicled in a memoir, Front Everywhere: The Reminiscences of the Famous Special Correspondent (1935).

Jeffries worked as a press attaché at the British embassy in Madrid during the Second World War, and spent most of his remaining years in Spain.

Palestine: The Reality

Despite many favourable contemporary reviews, Palestine: The Reality all but disappeared in the decades following its publication, with copies only rarely appearing in the online, second-hand book market. This prolonged, even mysterious eclipse, however, has finally come to an end with the 2017 republication of the book in the United States by the Olive Branch Press. The work contains the most forensic analysis of the text of the Balfour Declaration ever written, with Jeffries condemning it as “the most discreditable document to which a British Government has set its hand within memory.” [1]

Bibliography

The Palestine Deception: ‘Daily Mail’ Enquiry on the Spot (1923)

Front Everywhere: The Reminiscences of the Famous Special Correspondent (1935)

Sanctions without Sanction (1936)

London & Better (1936)

Palestine: The Reality (1939)

The Palestine Deception 1915-1923: The McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, the Balfour Declaration, and the Jewish National Home (2014) Edited with an introduction by William M. Matthew

Sources

Balfour in the Dock: J.M.N. Jeffries & the Case for the Prosecution (2017). A political biography of J.M.N. Jeffries by Colin Andersen, published on the centenary of the Balfour Declaration  in the UK by Skyscraper publications.

Footnotes

[1] Palestine: The Reality, p 201.