League of Nations Mandate for Palestine
The goal of the mandate authority was to lead the Palestinian territory to full independence within a relatively short period of time. But the double promise of a Jewish homeland on the one hand and the preservation of the rights of the Palestinians proved eventually to be inconsistent, thus causing the British Mandatory Power to play a numbers game with regard to Jewish immigration.
In 1922, when the mandate began, approximately nine out of every ten residents in Palestine were Arab. IWith immigration during the successive waves of Aliyah, the number ofJewish residents from Eastern and Central Europe steadily increased, contributing to vast social and economic changes in the area. This was the result of agreed-upon quotas designed to fulfill the promissory clause of the Balfour Declaration and to meet the needs and expectations of the world Zionist movement. The resistance and the protest, frequently violent, by the indigenous Arab population would force the British to impose limitations on Jewish immigration.Subsequently, there was extensive correspondence between Feisal and the British government with respect to the future administration of Palestine, what was to become of the Kingdom of Transjordan, and British interests in the area. It reveals Prince Feisal’s vision of a peaceful co-existence with the Jews, as contemplated in the Balfour Declaration. As history has shown, this was not to be the case—angry protests and violent demonstrations erupted recurrently on a large scale throughout the mandate period, making such an arrangement impossible.
Intensifying conditions, the British Mandatory Power issued conflicting and inconsistent policy statements (or White Papers) during this period, exacerbating tensions between Arab and Jewish communities. White Papers regularly favored one side over the other depending on Britain’s immediate political interests.
This approach naturally caused alarm and frustration among the newly disfavored group. Britain, thus, managed to alienate both sides of the conflict in Palestine. In 1936, Palestinian Arabs, dissatisfied with British policy and trying to stop further Jewish immigration, began a three- year struggle to effect governmental change in Palestine. In response, Britain expelled the Palestinian leadership, leaving the primary Arab political role in Palestine to the Hashemites of Transjordan.Between 1922, when the mandate began, and 1947, when the United Nations approved the Partition Plan, there was room for reconciling the Zionist claim with indigenous Palestinian rights by providing for a “national Jewish homeland in Palestine.” At the time of the Balfour Declaration and for almost two decades after, there was not much expectation that large numbers of Jews would be interested in exercising a right to immigrate to Palestine. Early on, the assumption was that the limited number of immigrant Jews who would want to return to Palestine could be absorbed without disrupting the civil, political, and religious rights of the Palestinian Muslims, Christians, and others already there.
Jewish immigration to Palestine, however, was accelerated by tragic events taking place on the world stage. The Russian pogroms of the 1880s and the Holocaust prompted hundreds of thousands of European Jews to flee hostile states in search of a safe haven. 0When the Nazi regime expanded its autocratic character, particularly after it passed the antiÂSemitic laws of 1936, the numbers of Jews seeking to migrate increased significantly. Some settled in Western Europe, others crossed the Atlantic to the United States and South America (predominantly Argentina), and still others settled in Palestine. The years 1936-1947 witnessed especially large waves of Jewish immigrants from Europe, a continent that was rapidly becoming a mass grave for itsJews. By the time the declaration of independence of the State of Israel was made in May 1948, the Jewish population of Palestine stood at 650,000.
Some of these immigrants had entry visas, but most of those escaping the Holocaust did not.It is worth noting that until Nazi repression gained considerable force, Zionists did not have an easy time recruiting immigrants to Palestine, particularly among German and Austrian Jews who were deeply attached to their countries, only later to be brutally repressed by them. But the meaning and value of a Jewish homeland changed considerably during the period of Nazi repression in the late 1930s and more significantly after the war ended in 1945, when the world took cognizance of the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust. And in the late 1930s and early 1940s, it was difficult for European Jews to gain visas for resettlement in European countries and the United States, often the direct expression of anti-Semitic quotas and immigration policies. In this sense, it was a combination of brutal Nazi repression and international neglect that spurred the immigration movement of European Jews to Palestine between 1936 and 1947.
After WWII ended and the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust became known, the United States and the liberated countries of Europe found themselves confronted with what was then euphemistically called the “displaced persons” problem. From the perspective of many European governments, the easy solution was resettlement in Palestine. In part, Palestine was appealing because it relieved these governments from absorbing these populations and in part because it responded to the aspirations of some elements of the Jewish population. As a result of these circumstances, a large number ofJewish refugees sought to enter Palestine between 1945-47, most of whom lacked legal immigration visas and thus entered the country illegally.
The British Mandatory Authority sought to stem the wave of illegal Jewish immigrants by denying them entry into Palestine. However, these policies were broadly criticized in Europe and America because of the terrible destruction wrought by the Holocaust. The plight of Holocaust survivors presented the international community with serious and pressing human demands.
Notwithstanding the special relations of the Mufti Haj Amin al- Husseini, the leader of the Palestinians, with Nazi Germany and with Hitler personally, the Palestinian Arabs and other Arab states’ populations had little knowledge or understanding of what had happened in Europe and in particular the extraordinarily brutal destruction of the Holocaust. For almost all Arabs, what they vaguely heard of the Nazi policies towards the Jews seemed to them unbelievable. In general, people in the Arab world could not fathom that such atrocities had been carried out on such a large scale. Even today, many Arabs do not believe that the Holocaust was real, and it is common to hear that it is an exaggeration designed to gain sympathy for the Zionist cause and for Israel. Still, the Holocaust was a catalyst for advancing the goals of an independent Jewish state, though many Arabs saw it only as an excuse for Zionists to lay claim to Palestine and they still fail to see its significance.
It is worth noting that, between 1937 and 1939, several commissions issued recommendations to end Jewish immigration to Palestine as a way of reducing the severity of the internal conflict brimming between the two communities. Considering what the Jews were facing in Nazi Germany, these recommendations were seen by the Palestinian Jews and the Zionist movement as a warning that they had no alternative but to bolster their political efforts and for some to resort to violence in order to keep open Jewish immigration to Palestine. This gave rise to negative reactions on both sides that brought about a wave of violence between the two communities.
Palestine could hardly accommodate the influx of post-WWII Jewish settlers in compliance with the Balfour Declaration’s offer to the Jews of a “national home” while keeping the promise that “nothing should be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non- Jewish communities in Palestine.” This inconsistency lay at the root of the Arabs vehement opposition to the Balfour Declaration.
A major flaw of the declaration was that, while endorsing the political aspirations of the Jews, it did not acknowledge the political rights of the Palestinian Arabs; theirs were “civil and religious rights,” not political. However, an immigration process of that scope required significant economic and social development programs necessary to aid in the absorption of so many immigrants from many different countries in fewer than five years. There were certainly tensions between Jews and Arabs in their struggle for the control of resources, but the mandate years were generally a time of economic prosperity with some of the British high commissioners leading a Keynessian policy of considerable investment in the country’s infrastructure. Understandably, historians have focused on Jewish immigration—and there is no doubt that the Jews benefited from the economic policies of the mandatory power more than the Arabs—but there was also considerable immigration of Arabs from the surrounding countries precisely because of the opportunities offered by the Palestinian economy.As large numbers of immigrants continued to arrive in Palestine without external economic support, the clash between Jewish settlers and indigenous Palestinian Jews on one side and Palestinian Arabs on the other became inevitable. Solidarity between Palestinian Jews and Jewish settlers was stronger than that between Palestinian Jews and Palestinian Arabs.
Jewish employers were known to fire Arab employees to replace them with Jewish immigrants. There were campaigns by the Jewish Agency and other funds to buy Arab lands for use by Jewish immigrants. This period saw many violent demonstrations and the gradual emergence of hard-line positions on both sides, prefiguring the divisions that characterize the conflict today.
The Jewish community in Palestine (the Yishuv) was deeply divided over what strategy to follow. Those led by David Ben Gurion initially believed that a political solution could be found, while those led by Jabotinsky and groups such as the Irgun and the Lochamei Heruth Israel (LHY or so-called Stern Group) believed that violent conflict was inevitable.
As violence commenced, it did not take much to escalate, and the spiraling process fed itself. There was a sense among the Arabs that their living space, not only economically but also politically and nationally speaking, was being reduced by Jewish immigration and land acquisition. And though the Arabs were more than willing to sell land to the Jewish settlers, the problem was essentially that of an alien people coming to Palestine. The Arabs would have opposed this growing Jewish presence even if it would not have had any adverse economic consequences on them. Notwithstanding the intensive efforts at social reconciliation, the demographic, economic, social, and political situation that developed from 1936-47 led to an escalation of violence, inevitably paving the way to a greater conflict that eventually involved all neighboring Arab states.Israel Zangwill, one of the Zionist leaders in Britain in the early years of the movement, coined the slogan, “A land without people for a people without a land.” For those in Europe and America who knew little of the history of Palestine, a statement of this type seemed reasonable. However, for the Palestinian Arabs who had inhabited the land for centuries, along with a Jewish minority, the slogan was factually incorrect and roundly insulting. A wall mounting in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington still prominently displays this motto attesting to the fact that significant historical misunderstandings continue to define this conflict to this day.
D.