| British Mandate for Palestine
The British Mandate for Palestine refers to:
A- The international authorization for British rule in Palestine between 1922 and 1948.
B - The document that created the mandate under the League of Nations in 1922 - See
The British Mandate for Palestine for the original document.
Inception and Basis of the British Mandate for Palestine
Following World War I, the victorious allies apportioned the lands of the
Ottoman Empire as well as former colonies
of Germany and Italy to different victors. However, in keeping with the principle of self-determination advocated by
Woodrow Wilson, most of the governments were to be mandates, a form of trusteeship, that would prepare the areas in
question for self government. Most of the Middle East was assigned to Britain. Syria and Lebanon were assigned to
France. The Palestine Mandate was assigned to Britain under the terms of the Balfour Declaration,
the wording of which was incorporated into the mandate. Accordingly, unlike the other territories, Palestine, or a part
of it, was to be prepared as a national home for the Jewish people, and the British people were to ensure conditions for
Jewish immigration and colonization. Though it has been claimed otherwise, there was agreement that this was the intent
of the Balfour declaration and the mandate and it is incorporated unambiguously in the wording of the mandate. In a 1919
memorandum, Balfour noted that the mandates did not all strictly fulfill the letter of the League Covenant commitment to
self government for native inhabitants, and particularly so in the case of the mandate for Palestine:
The contradiction between the letter of the Covenant is even more flagrant in the case of the independent nation of
Palestine than in that of the independent nation of Syria. For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the
form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country, though the American Commission [evidently the
King Crane Commission] has been going through the forms of asking what they are. The four great powers are
committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs,
in future hopes, of far profounder importance than the desire and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that
ancient land. In my opinion, that is right.
Balfour was an ardent supporter of Zionism. In the above quote, however, he was neither focusing on
upholding or denigrating the Palestine mandate. Rather, he was trying to use the British Mandate for Palestine as an
example to show that the mandate system was not intended in general to be solely an expression of the rights of the
indigenous inhabitants.
With the League of Nations mandate for Palestine, the
Zionists had ostensibly achieved the goal set out in the First Zionist Congress in 1897: a national
home in Palestine that was guaranteed in international law.
Removal of Transjordan and Golan from the British Mandate for Palestine
 Britain
ruled Palestine or parts of it from November 1917, under military rule. The mandate government did not take effect until
1922. By that time, the British Foreign Office was under some pressure from Arabs and their supporters and was having second thoughts about
the national home for the Jews. Britain's first act was to split off 78% of the land from the mandate without consulting
the League of Nations and to create Transjordan, as shown at right. Another bit of the mandate was removed in 1923,
in an agreement with France that gave the entire Golan heights to mandatory Syria.
At the same time Winston Churchill issued the Churchill ("Command") White Paper
which can variously be interpreted as reaffirming British commitment to a Jewish national home in a "part" of Palestine,
which is how Churchill liked to present it to his Jewish constituents, or as more or less an attempt to renege on the
commitment.
Britain was bankrupt. The British mandate for Palestine was therefore to finance itself from taxes and donations.
Zionist immigration and land purchases and development would of course have to be funded from the resources of the
Zionist movement. European Jewish financiers were not notably interested in funding the project. The Russian revolution
soon effectively slammed shut the gates on the largest European Jewish population that might want to immigrate to
Palestine. During the 1920s therefore, Jewish emigration to Palestine was slow, especially during the first years
when Palestine was reconstructing after the ravages of World War I. However, with the world depression beginning in
1930, and increasing anti-Semitism in Poland and Germany, Jewish immigration increased.
High Commissioners of the British Mandate for Palestine
The end of military rule was signaled by the appointment of Herbert Samuel as the first British High Commissioner of
Palestine. Samuel was a Jew and a Zionist, but he was cautious about implementing the Jewish national home. He devised a
system of limiting immigration and appointed an Arab radical, Hajj Amin El Husseini, to be Grand Mufti of Jerusalem,
over the wishes of most of the Palestinian Arab community. Samuel took office in 1920, as the first civil administrator
of Palestine, before the mandate system was officially instituted in 1922.
The British High Commissioners were:
Sir Herbert Louis Samuel 1920–1925
Sir Gilbert Falkingham Clayton (acting) May–December 1925
Herbert Onslow Plumer 1925–1928
Sir Harry Charles Luke (acting) 1928
Sir John Chancellor 1928–1931
Sir Mark Aitchison Young 1931–1932 (acting)
Sir Arthur Grenfell Wauchope 1932–1937
William Denis Battershill 1937–1938 (acting)
Sir Harold MacMichael 1938–1944
John Vereker, 6th Viscount Gort 1944–1945
Sir Alan Cunningham 1945–1948
Economic success of the British Mandate for Palestine
During the period of the British mandate, both Arab and Jewish populations increased. Jewish population rose from around
85,000 to 600,000 by 1948, while Arab population increased from about 670,000 to 1.8 Million in 1948 (See Population of
Palestine). The economic growth and increase in standard of living for both populations was impressive as well.
Palestine had been the most backward of the Ottoman Empire
prior to World War I, but it had become more prosperous than its neighbors by 1948.
Arab Jewish Strife in the British Mandate for Palestine
The British ruled Palestine under the mandate from 1922 until 1948. Increasing Arab agitation against a Jewish state led them initially to
remove Transjordan from the mandate territory and then to limit Jewish immigration in order to assuage ire. Arab riots
in 1929 sparked an initiative to curtail immigration, on the theory that Jewish land purchases were dispossessing Arabs.
The British reaction to the Arab riots of 1929 was to draw up the Passfield White Paper of 1930,
limiting Jewish immigration to virtually nothing. The League of Nations protested that this policy violated the terms of
the mandate, and Zionist protests soon forced the British government to rescind the Passfield White paper. (see
Letter of Ramsay
MacDonald to Haim Weizmann Rescinding the Passfield White Paper)
The Jewish community had quickly achieved a noticeably higher standard of living than the Arabs of Palestine and Zionist
ideology favored Jewish over Arab labor, creating resentment and feeding Arab nationalist and extremist views. These
were skillfully exploited by Hajj Amin El Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and others. In 1936 an Arab general strike
and revolt broke out, consequent to the death of the Syrian agitator Izzedin Al Qassam who had moved to Palestine and
preached Jihad against the British from Haifa. Husseini took charge of the revolt. Despite British efforts at
compromise, the revolt continued for three years, evidently with the aid of funding and arms from the Axis powers,
organized from Damascus with the connivance or passive acquiescence of the French. The Mufti and his allies used the
revolt as a means of establishing dominance, slaughtering numerous Palestinian Arab clans and thereby depleting Arab
Palestinian leadership. Some 5,000 Arabs are estimated to have perished in the revolt, mostly at the hands of the Mufti. British
repression was also fierce. The Zionist Haganah,
which had been organized in 1920, was a small underground defense force. It was reorganized and expanded, but originally
remained strictly on the defensive. The
Irgun, an organization of the breakaway
Zionist revisionists, began reprisal operations against Arab civilians, including bombings in public markets. In 1938
the Haganah was given semi-official recognition by the British, and under the leadership of
Orde Charles Wingate undertook
reprisals and patrols against the Arab guerillas, who had been engaged in sabotaging the TAP oil pipe as well as in
attacks on Jewish civilians and British targets. The Haganah had also organized its own units that brought the battle to
Arab towns and villages that harbored supporters of the insurgent. Like the Irgun, these units often attacked
civilian targets.
In the autumn of 1937, Hajj Amin El Hussein was forced to flee Palestine, as he was implicated in the
murder of the British Commissioner for the Northern District. He fled first to Lebanon and then to Iraq, where he helped
to organize a coup against the British supported Iraqi government of Nuri as Said (See Iraq Axis Coup).
When that failed, he fled to Nazi Germany, where he broadcast for the Nazi government, organized an SS division and
ensured that no Jews would be rescued from Nazi death camps or given visas to neutral countries. Disputed testimony
claimed that the Mufti was an active advocate of the extermination of European Jewry. Following World War II, the French
government, still trying to foil British policy in the Middle East, released the Mufti from captivity, while he was
awaiting trial for war crimes. He made his way to Cairo where he organized opposition to the Zionists. (see the notes in Iraq Axis Coup
and also see Grand Mufti Hajj Amin Al
Husseini )
Following the inception of the revolt in 1936, the British got the Arabs to agree to a truce, during which the Peel
Commission proposed to partition Palestine into a minuscule Jewish state, a small British administered area in Jerusalem
and a large Arab state (see The
Peel Commission Report and Partition Plan Maps ). The Arab side, led by the Mufti, rejected this and successive partitions. The Zionist
executive reluctantly accepted the Peel partition, as by this time it was foreseen that the Jews of Europe were threatened
with catastrophe by the rise of Nazism and urgently needed a shelter, even if it was only a small land area. By 1939 it
was clear to the British that they were facing a World War in Europe. The foreign office concluded that the Jews would
be less troublesome than the Arabs, particularly as the Arabs controlled the petroleum reserves that fueled the British
Navy. King Saud had expressed his negative opinions of Jewish statehood and of the Jewish people in the most frank and
outspoken terms. (See King Saud's Views on Palestine and Partition). Therefore, the
British issued the British White Paper of 1939 limiting Jewish
immigration to 15,000 per year and stopping it thereafter, as well as severely limiting the purchase of land by Jews or
the Zionist organization. The League of Nations, which had governed the mandate, no longer existed and therefore could
not declare the policy illegal. The Arabs, under the leadership of the Mufti from exile, rejected this British policy as well. It
is unlikely that the Mufti would have accepted any British offer. He had told his nephew Jamil Husseini that he did not
want to settle with the British, and preferred the Axis. It is possible that Axis agents had instructed him to reject
any British offer.
The British pursued the immigration ban with a vengeance. The Zionist organization and the revisionist Zionists both
organized illegal immigration from Europe, but the British would not let them enter Palestine. Boatloads of Jewish immigrants escaping Nazi persecution were
caught and the immigrants interned at various destinations. Some of the boats sank. A Soviet submarine sank one boat,
the Struma,
in the Black Sea, after the Turkish government had turned it away and it could not continue to Palestine. Apparently,
this was done in connivance with the British. By 1942, illegal immigration activities had ceased, because it was no
longer possible to operate in any of the European countries under German rule or allied to Germany. In 1944, Lord
Moyne, the British Minister of State for the Middle East, and responsible for enforcing the ban on immigration, was
assassinated by the
LEHI underground. Moyne was a close personal
friend of Prime Minister Churchill, and the assassination was thought to have turned Churchill against Zionism.
Throughout World War II, the official Zionist organization and the Hagannah cooperated with the British. Large numbers
of Palestinian Jews, and a smaller number of Arabs enlisted in the British army. The Hagannah also sent paratroopers
into occupied Europe, both to carry out British intelligence missions and to attempt to rescue Jews or at least make
contact with Jewish resistance groups and ghetto organizations. When Lord Moyne was assassinated, the Hagannah
cooperated with the British in tracking down members of the Irgun and Lehi during a period known as the Sezon. However,
in 1942, the Zionists also began to lay plans for postwar policy. It was apparent that they could no longer rely on
British support for a Jewish national home in Palestine and therefore, at a meeting at the Biltmore Hotel in New York,
the Biltmore Conference, they
formulated the
The Biltmore Program, calling for a Jewish state in Palestine as part of the post war peace settlement.
Dissolution of the British Mandate for Palestine
The allies had known that the Nazis were systematically exterminating the Jews of Europe since about 1942. Following
World War II, the extent of the Nazi massacre of European Jewry in the
Holocaust became fully evident. The Jews
demanded a state, or at least immigration for the 250,000 surviving Jews in the Displaced Persons camps scattered
throughout Europe. The British government was now controlled by the Labor party. Labor had promised to back a Jewish
state in 1944. Once in power, they reneged on their promise and tightened up the ban on immigration. The Jewish
underground cooperated for a period in numerous attacks on British personnel and installations. This cooperation ended
following the bombing of the King David Hotel by the Irgun in 1946.
The constant attacks on British soldiers created pressure in Britain against continuation of the mandate. The Americans
pressed Britain to allow at least 100,000 Jewish refugees to emigrate to Palestine (see President Truman and United
States Support for a Jewish State) but the British government deemed that this would alienate the Arabs. The
British announced that they would be leaving Palestine and returning the mandate to the United Nations.
A United Nations commission (UNSCOP) was sent to investigate conditions in Palestine. Some of its members witnessed as
British troops boarded the illegal immigrant ship Exodus
and forced it to return to Hamburg, Germany. The commissioners were also impressed by Zionist development efforts and by
the impossibility of forming a unitary state in Palestine due to irremediable enmity of the Arab and Jewish populations.
They recommended partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The UN voted for partition in UN General Assembly Resolution 181
on November 29, 1947. The USSR supported the resolution in order to combat British imperialist influence in the Middle
East.
The British and others had understood that partition would likely result in civil war. They had assessed that the
Arabs would have the upper hand, and they wanted to create, according to one theory a Jordanian ruled state that would
include the West Bank, the Gaza strip and a portion of the Negev, and which would provide them with a Mediterranean base
to replace Haifa. The British were convinced that the Jewish state would be pro-Soviet or at least anti-British. This
conviction was shared by the United States State department, whose officials were of the opinion that most Jews and
especially most Zionists were communists.
Fighting between Jews and Arabs broke out immediately following the partition resolution. When the British left
Palestine on May 15, 1948, the Zionists had declared an independent state of Israel (see Israel Declaration of Independence).
The armies of several Arab states, including Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Iraq, invaded. The Jordanians confined themselves
to Jerusalem, which was to be internationalized and to areas that were to be part of the Palestinian Arab state. The
Egyptians and Syrians invaded territory that was to have been part of the Jewish state as well. The war was carried on
sporadically with many cease fires and resulted in a victory for the Israelis, who had conquered about half the
territory that had been allotted to the Palestinian Arab state. (see The first Arab-Israel War
)l
Synonyms and alternate spellings:
Further Information: History
of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Palestine
|
