Mandatory Palestine

• 1. Introduction

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  Mandatory Palestine existed for less than three decades, yet within that compressed span it became the site of one of the most contested political experiments of the twentieth century. On the 20th of June 1920, Sir Herbert Samuel, a Zionist and former British cabinet minister, arrived in Jerusalem to serve as the territory's first High Commissioner. He set up his headquarters in part of the Augusta Victoria Hospital complex on Mount Scopus, a building originally constructed for the Germans around 1910. That choice of venue was, in miniature, a symbol of everything that would follow: a foreign power settling into someone else's architecture and trying to govern from it.

  Britain had inherited a web of promises it could not reconcile. In the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence it had pledged support for Arab independence. In the Sykes-Picot Agreement it had carved up Ottoman Syria with France. And in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 it had promised to support the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. All three commitments pulled in different directions, and Mandatory Palestine was the place where those tensions were forced to live side by side.

  What followed was not a simple colonial story of occupier and occupied. It was a triangle: British administrators trying to hold a mandate together, a Jewish community building quasi-governmental institutions and managing waves of immigration from an increasingly dangerous Europe, and an Arab population pressing for the political rights that their numerical majority seemed to demand. By the time the British lowered their flag over the port of Haifa on the 30th of June 1948, the territory no longer existed as a unified entity.

• 2. Competing Promises

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  The Balfour Declaration, issued on the 2nd of November 1917, is the document that hangs over everything that came after. Britain promised its support for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine while stipulating that nothing should be done to prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities. That double clause was, from the start, a source of irreconcilable tension.

  The mandate that Britain received from the League of Nations in 1922 was classified as a Class A Mandate, the highest grade, reserved for territories judged to have the greatest capacity for self-governance. Every other Class A Mandate had achieved independence by 1946. Palestine did not.

  A British Colonial Office statement issued on the 3rd of June 1922 tried to clarify what the Jewish national home was not. It was not the conversion of all Palestine into a Jewish national home; Britain did not contemplate the disappearance of the Arabic population, language, or customs. Yet Arab leaders pressed the British throughout the mandate period to grant representative government reflecting the Arab majority, and the British consistently declined, making acceptance of the mandate's terms a precondition for any constitutional change.

  In 1947, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin admitted publicly that over the previous twenty-five years Britain had failed to secure the development of self-governing institutions as required by the mandate's own terms. That admission came far too late to repair the damage.

• 3. Building Two Governments

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  From its earliest years, the mandate saw two communities building institutions that ran parallel to, and increasingly in competition with, British authority. The Peel Commission would later note that the Jewish Agency and the Arab Higher Committee had grown into parallel governments of their own, a situation the Commission described as imperium in imperio: a state within a state.

  On the Jewish side, the Jewish Agency for Palestine, which took over from the Zionist Commission in 1929, functioned as a quasi-governmental body. Its leadership was elected by Jews from around the world by proportional representation. It ran schools and hospitals, managed immigration, organized land purchase, and formed the Haganah, a paramilitary force established on the 15th of June 1920 to defend Jewish residents. Its annual budget was around 600,000 pounds, a figure that dwarfed the resources available to the Arab Supreme Muslim Council.

  On the Arab side, High Commissioner Samuel appointed Mohammad Amin al-Husseini as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921 after the previous Mufti, Kamil al-Husayni, died in March of that year. Al-Husseini was young, had received the fewest votes from Jerusalem's Islamic leaders, and was an Arab nationalist. By 1922 he had also been elected President of the Supreme Muslim Council, which controlled Waqf funds worth tens of thousands of pounds annually and orphan funds worth about 50,000 pounds annually. He also controlled the Islamic courts, which had the power to appoint teachers and preachers.

  The deep rivalry between al-Husseini and Raghib Bey al-Nashashibi, who had been appointed Mayor of Jerusalem in 1920, dominated Palestinian Arab politics throughout the mandate period. An editorial in the Arabic-language Falastin newspaper in the 1920s described a society where factionalism had penetrated most levels, from journalists to the rank and file, with people declaring allegiance to one side or the other with pride.

• 4. Immigration and the Land

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  Between 1920 and 1945, official records show that 367,845 Jews and 33,304 non-Jews immigrated to Palestine legally. An estimated 50,000 to 60,000 additional Jews arrived illegally during the same period. The Jewish share of the population rose from roughly 11 percent at the time of the 1922 census to nearly 30 percent by the end of 1936, a transformation driven primarily by immigration rather than natural increase.

  The land question ran alongside the population question. As of 1931, the total territory of the Mandate was 26,625,600 dunams, of which 8,252,900 dunams, or 33 percent, were arable. By 1945, Jews privately and collectively owned 5.23 percent of Palestine's total land area. By May 1948, depending on the source, Jewish land holdings ranged from about 6.94 percent of the total according to one estimate, to 7.51 percent according to another, while a third source puts Jewish ownership of all cultivable land at 20 percent.

  The 1945 United Nations estimate shows that Arab ownership of arable land averaged 68 percent of a given district, ranging from 15 percent in the Beersheba district to 99 percent in the Ramallah district. Palestinian Arab villagers also expanded rural settlement during the mandate period, reclaiming forested and marginal lands and intensifying cultivation.

  In February 1940, Britain promulgated the Land Transfer Regulations, dividing the territory into three zones with different restrictions on land sales. In Zone A, which covered the hill country of Judea and parts of Gaza, no land could be sold to anyone other than a Palestinian Arab without the High Commissioner's permission. These regulations were the British attempt to prevent a landless Arab population from being created, but they came late and satisfied almost no one.

• 5. The Arab Revolt

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  Sheikh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam arrived in Palestine from Syria in 1930 and organized the Black Hand, an anti-Zionist and anti-British militant group. He recruited and trained peasants, and by 1935 he had enlisted between 200 and 800 men. In November 1935, two of his men killed a police officer during a firefight. British colonial police surrounded al-Qassam in a cave near Ya'bad, and he was killed in the ensuing battle on the 20th of November 1935.

  His death provoked widespread outrage. Huge crowds accompanied his body to his grave in Haifa. By April 1936, a general Arab strike had broken out, organized by the Arab Higher Committee under Amin al-Husseini. The strike lasted until October 1936. During that summer, thousands of Jewish-farmed acres and orchards were destroyed, and Jewish civilians were attacked and killed. Some Jewish communities, including those in Beisan and Acre, fled to safer areas.

  The Peel Commission investigated and proposed partition in 1937, but the Arabs rejected it outright. The revolt resumed that autumn. Over the following 18 months, the British lost effective control of Nablus and Hebron. British forces, supported by 6,000 armed Jewish auxiliary police, eventually suppressed the uprising. British officer Charles Orde Wingate organized Special Night Squads combining British soldiers and Jewish volunteers such as Yigal Allon, which conducted raids on Arab villages in the lower Galilee and the Jezreel valley. By the time the revolt ended in March 1939, more than 400 Jews and 200 British had also been killed, and at least 10 percent of the adult Arab male population had been killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled.

  The revolt had a lasting and damaging effect on Palestinian Arab political cohesion. As one historian's assessment recorded in the source put it, when the Palestinians faced their most fateful challenge in 1947 to 1949, they were still suffering from the British repression of 1936 to 1939, and were, in effect, without a unified leadership.

• 6. War, Immigration, and Insurgency

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  On the 10th of June 1940, Italy declared war on the British Empire. Within a month, Italian aircraft bombed Tel Aviv and Haifa, inflicting casualties. When General Erwin Rommel's forces advanced eastward across North Africa toward the Suez Canal in 1942, the period became known among the Jewish population as the "200 days of dread". That crisis prompted Britain to support the founding of the Palmach, a highly trained regular unit within the Haganah.

  About 30,000 Jews from Mandatory Palestine served with the British Armed Forces during the war, more than 700 of whom were killed in action. On the 3rd of July 1944, the British government consented to the establishment of a Jewish Brigade within the British Army; the official announcement from the War Office came on the 20th of September 1944. The Brigade fought in Italy's Spring Offensive and was later stationed in Tarvisio, near the border triangle of Italy, Yugoslavia, and Austria, where it helped Jewish refugees escape Europe via the Berihah network.

  Meanwhile, the 1939 White Paper had set an annual immigration quota of 15,000. Jews fleeing Nazi persecution who exceeded that quota were interned in detention camps or deported to places such as Mauritius. A clandestine immigration effort called Aliya Bet, organized by a group called Mossad LeAliyah Bet, dispatched tens of thousands of European Jews toward Palestine in boats and small ships. The British Royal Navy intercepted many vessels. A Haganah bomb sank one ship, killing 267 people. Two other ships were sunk by Soviet submarines; the motor schooner Mefkure was torpedoed, shelled, and its survivors machine-gunned in the water, killing between 300 and 400 refugees.

  After the war ended, 250,000 Jewish refugees remained stranded in displaced persons camps in Europe. Despite repeated requests from U.S. President Harry S. Truman and the recommendations of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry that 100,000 Jews be immediately admitted to Palestine, Britain maintained the ban. The Jewish insurgency hardened. On the 6th of November 1944, Lehi members Eliyahu Hakim and Eliyahu Bet Zuri assassinated Lord Moyne in Cairo, an act said by some to have turned Prime Minister Winston Churchill against the Zionist cause. In 1946, the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 92 people.

• 7. The End of the Mandate

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  On the 29th of November 1947, the UN General Assembly voted 33 to 13, with 10 abstentions, to adopt Resolution 181, recommending partition into separate Arab and Jewish states with Jerusalem under international administration. Seven members of UNSCOP, the UN Special Committee on Palestine created on the 15th of May 1947, backed the two-state recommendation. Three supported a single federal state. The Jewish Agency accepted the plan. The Arab League, meeting in Cairo in November and December 1947, endorsed a military solution instead.

  Civil war broke out immediately after the resolution. On the 16th of December 1947, the Palestine Police Force withdrew from the Tel Aviv area, home to more than half the Jewish population, transferring law-and-order responsibility to Jewish police. British authority disintegrated progressively across the territory through early 1948. In March 1948, all British judges in Palestine were sent back to Britain.

  On the 14th of May 1948, on the afternoon of the final day of the mandate, David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the State of Israel. The United States immediately recognized the provisional government as the de facto authority. At midnight on the 14th of May, the Palestine Government formally ceased to exist, the Palestine Police Force was disbanded, and British passports no longer offered protection to former Palestinian citizens.

  The 1948 Arab-Israeli War that followed saw approximately 700 Lebanese, 1,876 Syrian, 4,000 Iraqi, and 2,800 Egyptian troops cross into the former mandate territory in the days after independence. Around 4,500 Transjordanian troops, commanded in part by 38 British officers who had resigned their commissions only weeks earlier, including General John Bagot Glubb, moved into the Jerusalem area. The war lasted until 1949, with Israel expanding to encompass about 78 percent of the territory of the former mandate. Transjordan annexed the West Bank, and Egypt seized the Gaza Strip. The last British troops were evacuated from Haifa on the 30th of June 1948, when the British flag was lowered from the Port of Haifa's administrative building and the Israeli flag raised in its place.