In an interview late Wednesday, Mr. Bahlool spoke of the Balfour Declaration as if it were a fresh wound. “This declaration virtually buried the existence of the Palestinian people, which I am a part of,” he said. The document, he said, promoted self-determination for the Jewish people “while completely ignoring the fact that there were Palestinians here.”

But then, a century is not so very long in the Holy Land.

The fundamental problems the Balfour Declaration raised — as “one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third,” in the author Arthur Koestler’s memorable formulation — have not been resolved in the intervening years but rather compounded and complicated.

It is going too far to say the Balfour Declaration alone paved the way for the creation of Israel, but it is not an exaggeration to say that without it Israel probably could not have come to be, said Martin Kramer, a history professor at Shalem College in Jerusalem and author of an exhaustive retelling of the document’s genesis and aftermath in Mosaic magazine.

“What Palestinians do when they focus on the Balfour Declaration as the root cause is to absolve themselves of all they did after,” he said. “They could have tried to reach an agreement with the Zionists. But they wanted zero immigration of Jews. That put them in an untenable situation.”

Dated Nov. 2, 1917, the letter was delivered to the leaders of Britain’s Jewish community at the height of World War I, when Britain was driving the Ottomans from Palestine and seeking Jewish support in the United States to spur the American war effort. It did not gain the force of international law until 1920, when the remains of the Ottoman Empire were divided into mandates by the League of Nations, and the British inserted the Balfour Declaration into the text for their mandate for Palestine.