JERUSALEM — Israelis are celebrating 50 years since the Six-Day War — and with good reason. That victory saved us from destruction and reunited our holiest city. Ultimately, it also brought us peace with Egypt and Jordan and a strategic alliance with the United States. The Palestinians, by contrast, are mourning a half-century of suffering. They claim that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza subjected them to colonization and denied them statehood.

While the war certainly shaped the modern Middle East, it alone cannot account for the contradictory ways Israelis and Palestinians commemorate it. The chasm can only be explained by events that preceded it. Far beyond 1967, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is in fact about 1917, 1937 and 1947. Those anniversaries can teach us much about the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and why peace has proved so elusive.

A century ago this November, Britain, anticipating Turkey’s defeat in the Middle East, issued the Balfour Declaration. Endorsed by the League of Nations, the declaration pledged to create a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. Britain did not commit to creating a Jewish state in all of Palestine — the national home could have been tiny — and promised to uphold “the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.” Still, the Palestinians vehemently rejected the document. “We Arabs,” wrote Jerusalem notable Musa al-Husayni, would never accept “such a nation.”

This year, Israelis are also celebrating the centenary of the Balfour Declaration because it formalized the international community’s recognition of a Jewish nation and our 3,000-year attachment to our homeland. But the Palestinians are mourning it — their leaders have even called on Britain to apologize. Today, as in 1917, they view Jews not as a people with rights to a national homeland but as a religious group and, throughout much of Islamic history, an inferior one at that. Understanding this reality helps explain why, in the 1920s, Arab rioters murdered Palestinian Jews, desecrated synagogues and eradicated the ancient Jewish communities of Hebron and Safed.