A. Pre-Mandate Palestine

At first, the region was seen primarily from the perspective of its access to India, Britain’s richest and most important colony. This made Egypt and the Suez Canal—conduits for trade with India—Britain’s colonial centerpiece.∣With events leading to WWI and during that war, Britain’s perceptions of the region’s geopolitical significance changed, as did its purported boundaries.

France and Czarist Russia had different interests in the region. In the period prior to WWI, Russia had designs on Turkey, the Trans-Caucus area, and, more particularly, on the Dardanelles, which link the Black Sea to the warm waters of the Mediterranean.⁵17At the time, Britain, of course, also had designs on this sea passage, but for different reasons.

Since the Crusades, France had maintained a cultural and religious interest in the Levant (today’s Syria and Lebanon) and considered itself the protector of Christians in that part of the world. Its alliance with Britain in WWI gave it the opportunity in 1916 to carve out the Levant from Britain’s zone of influence after the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. France held fast to the area from 1916-43, but with its independence, France traded military occupation for cultural influence. France also spread its influence in Egypt, knowing that it could not regain a foothold there after Napoleon’s 1798 campaign ended in failure and Britain began occupation of the country in 1882.

Algeria, Tunisia, and most of Morocco were also occupied by France in the 1800s for almost a century. Spain occupied a smaller part of Morocco for vital strategic reasons, being the other side of Gibraltar, a tiny enclave occupied by the British to control passage between the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. At this time, the Dardanelles, Gibraltar, and the Suez Canal were all of significant strategic importance to Britain.

In November 1914, when Turkey entered WWI on the side of the Central Powers, Britain began to maneuver for Arab support in the region through the Sharif Hussein ibn Ali, Sharif of Mecca and King of the Hejaz. The correspondence between the British high commissioner in Cairo, Sir A. Henry McMahon, and Sharif Hussein provided assurance to the Arab leadership of Britain’s support for Arab independence in the region. McMahon’s assurance can be read as a strategic move on the part of Great Britain to gain Arab support against Constantinople. Consequently, Hussein sided politically with Britain, hoping for an independent Kingdom of Hejaz at the end of the war. An interesting aspect of this correspondence is McMahon’s insistence that some Western parts of the territories, first and foremost Palestine, were not purely Arab and, thus, should be treated uniquely—a clear nod to Zionist interests in Palestine.

During the war, Britain also declared Egypt, then a formal Ottoman territory, a British protectorate, bringing it formally into the British Empire. This was followed by the deposition of the ruling khedive, King Fouad, the sixth son of Khedive Ismail, as well as the transformation of his flag into an Egyptian national flag.

In 1916, Britain and France under a secret plan known as the Sykes- Picot Agreement allotted themselves parts of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. In this agreement, signed by and named for Sir Mark Sykes of Britain and Charles Georges-Picot of France, Britain and France divide the provinces into zones of influence, intending to eventually grant independence to some future Arab states. According to the plan, Palestine would be subject to an international administration, to be settled in consultation with the Allies, Russia, and Sharif Hussein of Mecca. Later, British policy makers decided that internationalization was not in line with British interests and that aspect of the agreement was never implemented.

Partially in fulfillment of this plan, British forces captured Jerusalem and Baghdad in 1917, and France took Damascus by force in 1920. This entailed the removal of Emir Feisal, the third son of Sharif Hussein of Mecca, from his newly elected position as King of Greater Syria, following the General Syrian Congress. In 1921, Britain separated the land-mass east of the Jordan River from Palestine to create the Emirate of Transjordan and installed a Hashemite monarch, Emir Abdullah, the elder son of Sharif Hussein of Mecca.

That same year, Britain created the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq out of Mesopotamia and installed the recently ousted Emir Feisal as its king. Thus, the defeat and dismemberment of the Turkish Ottoman Empire resulted in the creation of four new states in the region—Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Transjordan, with Palestine as a quasi-state—which were each immediately placed under the tutelage of either Britain or France.

During this time, Zionism and Arab nationalism in Palestine were on the rise.

Theodor Hertzel, in 1896, published a pamphlet entitled DerJudenstaat promoting the establishment of a Jewish state, though not necessarily one in Palestine. Hertzel’s vision of the state was more than a refuge from persecution: it was to be a model of tolerance to set an example for all of humanity, echoing the words in Isaiah, “a light unto the nations.” The first World Zionist Congress, organized and led by Chaim Weissman, was held in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897. Consensus within the Congress was enough to produce a final pronouncement, the Basle Program, which publicly declared the Zionist ambition to create a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine. This text set the institutional framework for all subsequent Zionist policy, which included securing a homeland according to public law and procuring the assent of all necessary governments. The following year, the Second Zionist Congress established the Jewish Colonial Trust, a financial institution that would serve the political and economic needs for the establishment of a Jewish national home.

The return of the Jews to the “promised land” has long formed part of the daily Jewish prayer, although for some OrthodoxJews it did not comport the necessity of actual physical transfer to Jerusalem or Palestine. In time, this expectation turned into a political program.

In 1901, one of Hertzeks early attempts to achieve this political pro­gram was to persuade the Grand Vizier and Sultan of the Ottoman Empire to allow the establishment of a Jewish colony. In the following years, Zionists would try alternative methods of achieving a homeland in Palestine. The Jewish National Fund, established at the fifth Zionist Congress, served a non-political method of acquiring land in Palestine. Despite resistance by the Ottoman Empire, the Jewish National Fund served as a method for purchasing and developing land for Jews in Palestine.

At the time of the Balfour Declaration, there was a great deal of uncertainty as to whether the modern Zionist movement would gain much strength in Europe. Early on, many involved in the movement were more concerned with anti-Semitism in Europe, particularly in France after the infamous trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French army. In 1894, Dreyfus came under suspicion of providing classified information to the German government. Though claiming innocence, he was found guilty of treason in a secret military court-martial, during which he was denied the right to examine the evidence against him. The French writer Emile Zola, made the case a not only French, but also a European cause celebre, publishing in a daily newspaper his denunciation of the cover-up.

Certainly, European anti-Semitism was not new. While attention in the first twenty years of the 1900s symbolically focused on the Dreyfus case, Jews also recalled their historic persecution in Russia and in Eastern European countries. Many Jews linked European anti-Semitism to the long-standing Jewish history of persecution, from their slavery under the Egyptian Pharaohs and exodus out of Egypt to their expulsion from Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 C.E.

But, the Arab indigenous population of Palestine could not be indifferent to the presence of the new Jewish settlers. From 1891 and onward, tensions existed between Jewish settlements and Arab residents and these tensions came to a boil in 1920 when riots broke out in Jerusalem during the Nabi Musa pilgrimage. The protesting during the riots was targeted specifically against establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. In response to the riots, the British military instituted a court of inquiry to establish the causes of the protests. In the initially unpublished inquiry, the court found the causes to be from disappointment at the non-fulfillment of British promises, conflicts between the Balfour Declaration and promises to the Palestinian people, and fear of Jewish competition and domination. Continued riots in the following year lead to the Haycraft Commission of Enquiry. The commissioner’s report found similar frustration with Jewish immigration and influence on government policies. These tensions would only increase as British influence in the region supplanted that of the Ottoman Empire in the years following World War I.

Three British reports were released in 1930 (the Shaw Commission of Inquiry, the Hope-Simpson report, and the Passfield White Paper of 1930, which before it could come into effect was abrogated by the MacDonald letter thanks to Chaim Weizmann’s skillful lobbying) in response to demonstrations and protests in 1928-1929. The disturbances were precipitated by disputes over rights to worship in front of the Western Wall in Jerusalem which occurred after police removed a dividing curtain during Jewish prayers. The reports, however, delved further into the underlying causes for the protests. In addition to the Shaw Commission’s stipulations to worship at the Western Wall, the White Paper concluded that continued Jewish immigration would encroach upon Arab villagers and, as such, implemented limits on further Jewish immigration.

Despite these limitations, Jewish immigration markedly increased in the early 1930s, in part due to the rise of the National Socialist party in Germany. Resentment against the incoming Jewish population and the British presence in Palestine resulted in general strikes by the Arab population and eventually the outbreak of the Great Arab Revolt which lasted from 1936 to 1939. As attacks on Jewish settlements and British authorities increased to levels much more intense than that of the riots in the preceding decade, the British authorities called for additional reinforcements and appointed a Royal Commission of Inquiry to investigate the causes of the insurgency. The Peel Commission of Inquiry determined the revolt, much like riots of the past, was caused by the Arab opposition to the Jews getting any part of the country they viewed as rightfully theirs, and as sacred Muslim soil, and by concern over the ever increasing Jewish presence. Additionally, the commission suggested an end to the British mandate and a partition of Palestine between the Jewish and Arab population. The Zionists accepted the commission’s recommendations, and they were especially happy with the recommendation that called for the transfer, forcefully if needed, of Arabs from the proposed Jewish state. The Arabs rejected all the commission’s recommendations.

B.