Palestinians and Israelis E-Book

Michael Scott-Baumann

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 326

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

NEWLY UPDATED TO OCTOBER 2025 What are the origins of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict? Why has it proved so intractable, and what are the implications of escalating tensions for both the Middle East and the world? The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is one of the most bitter struggles of modern times, with consequences that are felt around the globe. In this comprehensive, stimulating and fully up-to-date overview, Michael Scott-Baumann succinctly describes its causes and charts its history from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Adopting a unique approach, each chapter starts with a lucid explanation of the politics and ends with personal testimony from the diaries, interviews and memoirs of Israelis and Palestinians whose lives have been marked by conflict. By presenting competing interpretations from both sides, Scott-Baumann examines the key flashpoints of the twentieth century, including the early role of the British, the circumstances surrounding the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and the dramatic impact of the Six-Day War of 1967. The latter part of the book focuses on the nature of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, and resistance to it – a matter at the heart of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in recent decades. The result is an indispensable account for anyone seeking to understand the context behind today's headlines, including analysis of why international efforts to restore peace have continually failed.

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PALESTINIANS AND ISRAELIS:A SHORT HISTORY OF CONFLICT

“This book is both necessary and accessible. So many people are mystified by this never-ending Middle East conflict. Here at last is a concise and readable account of a fundamental international issue of our time, one that has implications far beyond the region where it is set.”

Jon Snow, journalist and broadcaster, UK

“Michael Scott-Baumann makes the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict easy to understand in this clear, straightforward and unemotional history.”

John McHugo, author of A Concise History of the Arabs

“Excellent … the ideal introduction to the history of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. A masterpiece of clarity, concision and balance, and written in a lively and accessible style, it provides a lucid overview of all key aspects of this complex and extremely important story. Scott-Baumann writes with great sensitivity and insight, enabling his readers to understand the perspectives of different historical actors, and to grasp the essence of competing interpretations of key events … This book should be thrust into the hands of all those in need of a brief, clear and approachable account of the historical background to this still unresolved and geopolitically critical conflict.”

Adam Sutcliffe, professor of European history atKing’s College and coeditor of The CambridgeHistory of Judaism Volume VII

“It is a high-risk venture to attempt an impartial account of the process, enabled by the British, by which the Jews gained a state in Palestine and the indigenous Palestinian Arabs were denied one. Scott-Baumann has taken that risk and succeeded with as near as it comes to a textbook history that brings us up to date with the injustice and dispossession that inform Israel and Palestine.”

Tim Llewellyn, former BBC Middle East correspondent

“Scott-Baumann set himself the difficult challenge of writing a primer on the now over-a-century-long history of one of the most complex conflicts of modern times. Not only does he rise to the challenge, but he even manages to offer insights that go beyond conventional historical accounts.”

Gilbert Achcar, author of The Arabs and the Holocaust

“A complete history exploring the conflict between Israel and Palestine in just a few hundred pages … A useful reference.”

School Library Journal

“The huge library on the conflict and the massive information it contains requires that authors write books that effectively transmit that knowledge to a wide public. Now comes Michael Scott-Baumann, who does just this excellently. His thirty-five years’ experience as a teacher and lecturer in history is felt on each page of his book … A road map to students and an entrance gate to whomever wants to go beyond it.”

Menachem Klein, professor of political science atBar-Ilan University and author of Lives in Common

First published 2021

This updated edition published 2023

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

Published in North America in revised and updated form by The Experiment, LLC, in 2023 as The Shortest History of Israel and Palestine: From Zionism to Intifadas and the Struggle for Peace

© Michael Scott-Baumann, 2021, 2023

The right of Michael Scott-Baumann to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 75099 923 6

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

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Contents

Preface

Chronology

1. The Origins of the Conflict

2. The First World War and the British Mandate

3. British Rule in Palestine

1929–39

4. UN Partition, Israel, and War

1945–49

5. Palestinians and Israelis

1950s–60s

6. The Israeli Occupation of the Palestinian Territories

7. Palestinian Resistance and the First Intifada

1967–87

8. The Rise and Demise of the Oslo Peace Process

1993–2000

9. From the Second Intifada to War in Gaza

2000–08

10. Palestinians and Israelis in the Age of Netanyahu

2009–present

Epilogue

Notes

Glossary of Key Terms

Glossary of Key People

Bibliography

Image Credits

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Preface

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has existed for three-quarters of a century. In essence it is a dispute over land, the land of Palestine, and includes what is today the State of Israel together with the West Bank and Gaza. It is a relatively small area of land, not much larger than Belgium or the state of Maryland, and its population is no more than thirteen million. The conflict is a dispute between Jewish immigrants and their descendants who have followed the ideology of Zionism and the Palestinian Arabs among whom the Zionists settled. Both claim the right to live in, and control, some or all of Palestine.

This book provides an up-to-date, historical account both for the student and the general reader who follows news of the ongoing conflict yet struggles to understand how it originated and has developed over the last century. It comes in the wake of former president Donald Trump’s “Deal of the Century,” Israeli threats to annex Palestinian land on the West Bank, and the eruption of violence across Israel and Palestine in May 2021.

The book outlines the pre-1914 origins of the conflict before examining Britain’s role in the interwar development of the embryonic Jewish state and the Jewish-Arab tension that accompanied it. Above all, it explains the unique circumstances in which the State of Israel was created and examines both Israeli and Palestinian narratives of those events. It shows how history has shaped the present and continues to influence policy. In examining a century of rapid change, it identifies key turning points, but it also highlights the elements of continuity, the links between the past and the present.

While explaining the context of the wider Arab-Israeli conflict, the book focuses on the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians. Thus, the second half of the book explores the development of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, and resistance to it, which is at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today, as well as the challenges of peacemaking.

Each chapter starts with the key questions to be answered and ends by illuminating the human impact of the conflict with the inclusion of personal testimony, from an Israeli or a Palestinian perspective, using sources such as diaries, interviews, memoirs, and newspaper reports.

Throughout, maps show how boundaries have changed over the course of the last century, and a timeline of significant dates is included on pages 3 to 5. Key terms are set in bold, elucidated in the text, and further explained in a glossary at the end of the book. Here, you will also find brief biographical sketches of the key players, whose names are also in bold type.

Chronology

1882

Start of First Aliyah of Jews migrating to Palestine

1896

Publication of Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State

1897

World Zionist Organization (WZO) founded

1901

Jewish National Fund (JNF) founded

1914

Start of the First World War

1915

McMahon-Hussein Correspondence

1916

Sykes-Picot Agreement

1917

Balfour Declaration

1921

Haj Amin al-Husseini appointed as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem

1922

Supreme Muslim Council (SMC) established

1923

League of Nations formally recognizes British and French Mandates

1929

Arab-Jewish riots in Jerusalem, Hebron, and elsewhere

1930

Mapai (later Israeli Labor Party) founded

Passfield White Paper

1931

Irgun formed

1936–39

Arab Revolt

1937

Peel Commission recommends the partition of Palestine

1939

British Government issues White Paper

1939

Start of the Second World War

1942

Biltmore Program

1945

Arab League formed

1946

King David Hotel bombing in Jerusalem

1947

SS Exodus refugee ship prevented from landing in Palestine

United Nations votes for the partition of Palestine

Start of civil war in Palestine

1948

Declaration of the new State of Israel

1948–49

First Arab-Israeli War

1948

United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) established

UN Resolution 194 recognising Palestinians’ right to return

1950

Israel passes Law of Absentees’ Property

Israeli Law of Return allows any Jew to become a citizen of Israel

1955

Operation Black Arrow

1956

Suez Crisis

1959

Fatah formally established

1964

Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) founded

1967

Six-Day War

UN Resolution 242

1968

Battle of Karameh

1969

Yasser Arafat becomes chairman of the PLO

1970

PLO expelled from Jordan

1972

Munich Olympics massacre

1973

Yom Kippur War

1974

Arafat speech to UN

Gush Emunim founded

1977

Likud Government formed in Israel

1979

Egypt-Israel peace treaty

1982

Israeli invasion of Lebanon

Palestinians massacred in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps

1987

Start of the First Palestinian Intifada

1993, 1995

Oslo Accords

1995

Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin

2000

Camp David peace negotiations

Start of the Second Intifada

2001

9/11 attacks on the United States

Start of Hamas suicide bombings

2002

Israeli “Operation Defensive Shield” in occupied territories

2003

President George W. Bush releases the “Roadmap for Peace”

2004

Death of Yasser Arafat

2005

Israeli evacuation of Gaza

2006

Hamas victory in Palestinian elections

2008

War in Gaza

2009

Benjamin Netanyahu elected prime minister

2014

War in Gaza

2018

Israel passes the Nation-State Law

2020

President Donald J. Trump announces the “Deal of the Century”

2021

Upsurge in violence in East Jerusalem and Gaza

Netanyahu replaced as prime minister

2022

Killing of Shireen Abu Aklah, Palestinian American journalist

Netanyahu reelected as prime minister

2023

October 7: Hamas attack on Israel kills more than 1,300 people and takes more than 150 hostages

October 8: Israel formally declares war on Hamas

Israel’s retaliatory bombardment of Gaza kills more than 2,600 people in the following week

CHAPTER 1

The Origins of the Conflict

• Why did European Jews migrate to Palestine?

• What was the impact of Zionism on the Arabs in Palestine?

Palestine before the First World War

The land of Palestine, a strip of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, was conquered by Arab Muslims in the seventh century following the emergence of the religion of Islam in what today is Saudi Arabia. Over time, most of the population adopted Arabic as its language and Islam as its religion, although a substantial Christian community and a small Jewish one remained. Then, in the sixteenth century, Palestine was conquered by the Ottomans (a Turkish dynasty named after its founder, Osman). The Ottomans were Muslims but not Arab speaking. They went on to conquer most of the Arab lands of the Middle East and thus came into possession of the three most holy sites for Muslims: Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem.

In the Ottoman Middle East, there was no officially designated area called “Palestine,” as such. Instead, the area to the west of the Jordan River and south of Beirut made up the three administrative districts of Jerusalem, Nablus, and Acre. However, the region was generally referred to as Palestine (Filastin in Arabic).

The population of late nineteenth-century Palestine was 85 percent Muslim and about 10 percent Christian. It was largely rural and most of the population were fellahin, or peasant farmers. Palestinian society and politics were dominated by a small number of urban families. These “notables,” as they were often referred to, were landowners, often with commercial interests. They acted as intermediaries between the Ottoman government and the local population. Some were elected as members of the Ottoman parliament in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire. Many held senior government posts and religious positions. They collected taxes for the Ottoman authorities.

A family of Arab fellahin, or peasant, farmers

In the late nineteenth century, Palestine came into increasing contact with European traders and its farmers began to grow more cotton, cereals, olives, and oranges for export. The port city of Jaffa increased the value of its agricultural exports from roughly $120,000 in 1850 to $1,875,000 by 1914 and its population quadrupled in size between 1880 and 1914.1 It was not only trade that brought Palestine into closer contact with the European world: increasing numbers of Christian pilgrims came by steamship to visit the biblical sites of the Holy Land. They contributed funds for church building and stimulated the development of a tourist industry.

Most Palestinian Arabs were loyal to the Ottoman state, participating in elections to the parliament in Istanbul and in local government, as well as sending their children to the growing number of state schools. However, a change of government in Istanbul in 1908 led to insistence on the use of Turkish, as opposed to Arabic, in schools, law courts, and government offices in Palestine. This aroused criticism in Palestine’s Arabic press and contributed to the emergence of a nascent Arab nationalism. Yet it was the issue of Jewish immigration that increasingly exercised Arab opinion in Palestine and led to calls for preventive action by the Ottoman government.

Zionism and Jewish Communities in Palestine

The Jews had lived in what is today Israel and Palestine from about 1500 BCE. In 64 BCE the Romans conquered Jerusalem and Palestine became part of the Roman Empire. Then, in 135 CE, after a series of revolts against Roman imperial rule, the Jews were finally dispersed. A minority remained but the majority settled in Europe and other parts of the Arab world.

By the late nineteenth century, most Jews lived in the European parts of the Russian Empire. Many were forced to live in specially designated areas in the Russian Pale of Settlement and were subject to severe restrictions, the result of a policy designed to exclude them from the life of Christians in the Russian Empire. After the assassination of the Russian Tsar Alexander II in 1881, for which the Jews were widely blamed, a series of pogroms, officially approved riots, and campaigns of persecution were launched. Jews increasingly became the targets of anti-Semitism, verbal and often physical abuse directed at them because they were Jews. This experience had the effect of strengthening the belief among many Jews that they shared an identity, history, and culture, regardless of whether they were religiously observant or not. But it also persuaded many to flee. Between 1882 and 1914, 2.5 million Jews left Russia, the vast majority to the US and Europe to the west of Russia. However, a small number, about fifty-five thousand, made their way to Palestine, their ancestral home.

A print of an attack on a Jew in late nineteenth-century Russia

Jews had dreamed of returning to Eretz Israel, the biblical “Land of Israel,” and had prayed for “Next Year in Jerusalem” for hundreds of years. Now, especially with the development of the steamship in the nineteenth century, it became a more practical proposition for some of them. Those who emigrated to Palestine were motivated by the desire to escape persecution and find a safe haven, but, for many, that wish was combined with a desire for a national homeland.

Palestine had been home to a small number of Jews for hundreds of years, half of them living in Jerusalem, largely in harmony with their Palestinian Arab neighbours. They were made up of both Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews. The former, mostly considered to be the descendants of Jews from Spain and North Africa, were predominantly Arabic speaking and some held positions in the Ottoman government. The latter had often come from Europe in preceding decades and tended to speak Yiddish (the language of most Eastern European Jews, derived primarily from German and Hebrew). Most of these so-called Ottoman Jews living in Palestine, whether Sephardic or Ashkenazi, were highly religious and eager to preserve and develop their Jewish identity within the Ottoman Empire. In contrast with those who were fleeing Russia, very few sought a separate, national homeland, let alone an independent Jewish state.

The Jewish settlers who arrived in the First Aliyah (Hebrew for “ascent”) from 1882 onward were mostly farmers. Many found their new life very harsh and departed after a short time, usually to Western Europe or the US, while those who acquired land and survived often only managed to do so with the help of cheap Arab labour. Although most of the settlers who arrived in the 1880s came from Russia, particularly from what is present-day Poland, their ideology and political organisation, and that of their supporters, was to be formulated not by a Russian Jew but one from Vienna.

Theodor Herzl, a lawyer and journalist, wrote a book titled The Jewish State, which was published in 1896. He called for the Jews to form a single nation-state like that of France or Germany. Echoing the sentiments of other European colonisers at the time, he claimed that the Jewish state could also be an “an outpost of civilization,” a defence against the perceived barbarism of “Asia.”2

Theodor Herzl

In 1897, Herzl organised a congress in Switzerland in which the World Zionist Organization (WZO) was formed. Though it was not the first time that the term had been used, the delegates at the congress now defined Zionism as the belief in “the creation of a home for the Jewish people in Palestine.”3 Herzl’s political priority was to secure the diplomatic support of a great power in Europe and financial backing from European and American Jewry, some of whose members had acquired considerable wealth. The Jewish National Fund (JNF) was set up in 1901 to buy land in Palestine. Today, most of the land of Israel is held in trust for the world’s Jews by the JNF. It cannot be sold to non-Jews.

The Jewish immigrants of the Second Aliyah from 1904 onward also came mostly from the Polish lands of the Russian Empire. However, they were much more ideologically driven, and keen to implement Herzl’s ideas. After centuries of persecution, they stressed the importance of using the biblical language of Hebrew as a sign of their rebirth in what they saw as their Jewish homeland. Many of them displayed the characteristics of the pioneer – tough and self-reliant – and were determined to show how different they were from the image of the weak, helpless Jews of the Russian Pale. They developed the concepts of the Conquest of Land and the Conquest of Labor.

The Conquest of Land emphasised the importance of colonizing, irrigating, and cultivating the land. The Conquest of Labor articulated the belief that the Jews’ rebirth as a nation was best achieved through becoming economically independent and reliant on Jewish-only labour.

Many Jews living in Jerusalem, especially those who had been resident for many generations, were far from enthusiastic. Similarly, only a minority of Jews in Europe supported the Zionist project: for example, the more assimilated ones feared that their loyalty to the states in which they lived might be questioned and that the Zionist project would make Jews less welcome to stay in Europe.

Arabs and Jews in Palestine – Neighbours or Enemies?

Many Zionists, especially those living abroad, believed that Palestine was, in the words made famous by the writer Israel Zangwill, “a land without a people for a people without a land.”4 Or, at the very least, that it was a desolate, sparsely populated country.

Large areas were, indeed, thinly populated, particularly in the desert regions of the south. However, as many early Jewish settlers acknowledged, much of its land was cultivated and many of its Arab inhabitants were opposed to Jewish settlement. As early as 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, a former mayor of Jerusalem, sent a message to Theodore Herzl in which he recognised the historic rights of Jews in Palestine but pleaded, “In the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.”5 Herzl replied that Jewish settlers intended no harm and that Jewish wealth would bring benefits.

In the early years of Jewish settlement, some Arabs did, undoubtedly, gain jobs and income working on Jewish farms and in Jewish businesses. But many Arab tenant farmers were evicted from the land they had worked for generations after their Arab landowners, often absentees living in cities like Jerusalem or Beirut, sold it to Jewish newcomers. The farmers’ cause was taken up by the Arabic press: the newspaper Filastin appealed to fellow Arabs not to sell land to Jewish immigrants. Increasing reference was made, both in the press and by notables, to the terms “Palestine” and “Palestinian.” A sense of Palestinian identity was coming to be shared by an increasing number of Palestinian Arabs.

Some Jews employed Arabs to work on the farms, plantations, and in factories they owned and some of them lived in mixed, Jewish and Arab, neighbourhoods. They saw themselves not as foreign colonisers but as people “returning” to their homeland, hoping to live in harmony with their Arab neighbours. However, many of the more recent immigrants of the Second Aliyah were determined to live and work separately. They wished to replace Arab labourers with Jewish ones, even if they were less skillful and had to be paid higher wages. For them, “Hebrew labor” was more important than economic efficiency. Furthermore, the WZO was prepared to subsidise them with funds channeled through the JNF.

Fear of eviction and dispossession undoubtedly fueled the growth of anti-Zionist sentiment in Palestine. Urban notables and the Arabic press called on the Ottoman government to halt immigration and land purchases, and, occasionally, restrictions were imposed by the Ottoman authorities in Palestine. However, immigration and settlement activity intensified in the early twentieth century, and in 1907, the WZO founded the Palestine Office in Jaffa to coordinate land purchase and organise the building of Jewish settlements.

The institutional foundations of the Yishuv, as the Jewish community in Palestine was known, were laid in the decades leading up to the outbreak of war in 1914. Yet the Jewish population, at about seventy-five thousand, still only made up about 7 percent of the population, and not all were Zionists.

Few Arabs came into direct contact with Jewish colonists. However, there was friction, sometimes violence, in and around Jewish settlements. Disputes over land led to attacks on Jewish property, and fighting resulted in a small but increasing number of fatalities.

By 1914, two emerging national communities were beginning to collide in their desire for the same land. The Arabs sought to maintain their position as the owners, while the Zionists sought to buy as much land as possible and turn it into a Jewish homeland.

When the First World War ended, in 1918, the Ottoman Empire, and its rule over Palestine, had collapsed. Another major power was to have a far more decisive impact on both the Arab and the Jewish communities in Palestine.

Personal Testimony

A Late Nineteenth-Century Jewish Immigrant

Herbert Bentwich was an unusual Zionist. Most Zionist immigrants were poor Eastern Europeans fleeing from persecution in Tsarist Russia. Bentwich, however, was an affluent British Jew of the professional class.

His great-grandson, Ari Shavit, an Israeli citizen, has read his great-grandfather’s memoirs. Shavit wonders why his ancestor “does not see the land as it is,” and he strives to understand why his great-grandfather is oblivious of the Arab villages:

Riding in the elegant carriage from Jaffa to Mikveh Yisrael, he did not see the Palestinian village of Abu Kabir. Traveling from Mikveh Yisrael to Rishon LeZion, he did not see the Palestinian village of Yazur. On his way from Rishon LeZion to Ramleh he did not see the Palestinian village of Sarafand. And in Ramleh he did not really see that Ramleh is a Palestinian town. Now, standing atop the white tower, he does not see the nearby Palestinian town of Lydda …

How is it possible that my great-grandfather does not see?

There are more than half a million Arabs, Bedouins, and Druze in Palestine in 1897. There are twenty cities and towns, and hundreds of villages. So how can the pedantic Bentwich not notice them? How can the hawk-eyed Bentwich not see from the tower of Ramleh that the Land is taken? That there is another people now occupying the land of his ancestors?

I am not critical or judgmental. On the contrary, I realize that the Land of Israel on his mind is a vast hundred thousand square kilometers, which includes today’s Kingdom of Jordan. And in this vast land there are fewer than a million inhabitants. There is enough room there for the Jewish survivors of anti-Semitic Europe. Greater Palestine can be home to both Jew and Arab …

He might easily persuade himself that the Jews who will come from Europe will only better the lives of the local population, that European Jews will cure the natives, educate them, cultivate them. That they will live side by side with them in an honorable and dignified manner. But there is a far stronger argument: in April 1897 there is no Palestinian people. There is no real sense of Palestinian self-determination, and there is no Palestinian national movement to speak of …

As I observe the blindness of Herbert Bentwich as he surveys the Land from the top of the tower, I understand him perfectly. My great-grandfather does not see because he is motivated by the need not to see. He does not see because if he does, he will have to turn back. But my great-grandfather cannot turn back. So that he can carry on, my great-grandfather chooses not to see.6

CHAPTER 2

The First World War and the British Mandate

After the First World War, Britain took control of and ruled Palestine.

•Why was the Balfour Declaration of 1917 so significant?

• How did Britain govern Palestine under the mandate?

• How did the Jewish community in Palestine develop?

Palestine in the First World War

In August 1914, Germany and Austria-Hungary (the Central Powers) went to war with Britain, France, and Russia (the Allies). Three months later, the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers. Thousands of Palestinian Arabs were drafted into the Ottoman Army. Most of them remained loyal to the Ottomans, even if wishing for greater autonomy within the Empire. Meanwhile, the Jewish community was cut off from Europe as the flow of immigrants and money dried up.

As the war continued, more and more Palestinian men were conscripted, and increased amounts of crops and cattle were seized to feed them. The rule of the Ottoman military governor in the region, Jamal Pasha, became increasingly harsh, particularly so after British troops took control of Sinai to the south and threatened Ottoman control of Palestine. Many of the politically active Palestinian Arabs, even if they were not working for an Ottoman defeat, were arrested and imprisoned. Some were deported and dozens executed. Yet there was no uprising against Ottoman rule, and many Palestinian Arabs, together with a small number of Jews, continued to fight in the Ottoman Army. In late 1917, the Ottoman forces in Palestine were defeated by the British, and in December 1917, General Edmund Allenby led his troops into Jerusalem. He promised as little disruption to “lawful business” as possible. However, the First World War was to end four hundred years of Ottoman rule in the Middle East and produce changes that are still felt, by both Arabs and Jews, in what is today Israel and Palestine.

British Intervention during the War

During the war, as it attempted to secure its strategic and geopolitical interests, Britain made a series of agreements that conflicted with and contradicted each other. Three significant agreements affected Palestine, yet British concern was primarily focused on winning the war, and the spoils of war, not about the people of Palestine.

The first of these agreements was made in 1915. It consisted of a series of letters exchanged by Henry McMahon, the British high commissioner in Egypt, and Hussein, the sharif of Mecca and the leader of the Hashemite Dynasty. Hussein was guardian of Mecca and Medina, the two most holy sites of Islam (in what is today Saudi Arabia), and he oversaw the annual hajj (or pilgrimage) to Mecca. As such, he was considered by many to be the most important Arab Muslim leader.

McMahon knew that Hussein was fearful of the Ottoman government encroaching on his power and he promised Hussein that if the Arabs fought against the Ottoman Army, the British would support “the independence of the Arab countries,” on condition that the Arabs sought British advice about how to establish their government.

The British were eager to protect the Suez Canal, Britain’s route to the oil of Persia (today’s Iran) and to its empire in India, from any Ottoman or subsequent threat. An Arab army could help to allay British fears. When Hussein sought clarity on the issue of the borders of a new Arab state, McMahon was deliberately ambiguous about the status of Palestine and whether it was to be included in the new Arab state.1

Hussein was promised gold and guns by the British, and in 1916, an Arab army was raised and led by Emir (Prince) Faisal, Hussein’s son. In what became known as the Arab Revolt, the army blew up Turkish trains, disrupted the flow of military supplies to the Turkish soldiers, and helped to push the Turks out of Jordan and Syria. The activities of this Arab army are well known, because an English Army intelligence officer, Major T. E. Lawrence, later known in Britain as “Lawrence of Arabia,” fought with the Arabs.

Made in secret in 1916, the second agreement is known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement after the British and French politicians who signed it. They looked ahead to the eventual defeat of the Ottoman Empire and decided that the liberated Arab lands would be allocated to distinct French and British spheres of influence. In other words, the “independent” state that had been promised to Hussein (about which the French were kept in the dark) would be overlaid with some degree of European control. Syria, including what is today Lebanon, would go to the French, while the area from the Sinai to Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) would go to the British. Most of Palestine, which both countries desired, was to be under some sort of international control.

When they found out about this deal at the end of the war, Arab leaders felt betrayed. Were they simply to exchange Ottoman for European masters? It seemed that Britain and France were determined to maintain and extend their power and influence in the Middle East and had decided to carve up the Arab lands between themselves.

The Balfour Declaration, 1917

The third agreement that the British made, and which proved to have the most far-reaching consequences of all, was the Balfour Declaration of November 1917. It took the form of a letter, written by the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, to Lord Rothschild, a leading British Jew, in which he expressed support for a national home for the Jews in Palestine. The pledge made by the British government was only sixty-five words long:

His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. The Government will make every effort to help bring this about. It is clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may harm the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

The British were very careful with the wording of the declaration. It affirmed their support for a Jewish homeland, a deliberately vague concept, not a state with its own borders and independent government. However, for the next thirty years, many Jews regarded the declaration as a promise from the British government to help set up a Jewish state. The declaration contained no sense of Palestine as an Arab land. The Arabs, who made up 90 percent of the population, were simply referred to as “non-Jewish communities” whose “civil and religious rights” were to be protected.

Why Did Britain Issue the Balfour Declaration?

The Balfour Declaration was, first and foremost, a product of the exigencies of war. When it was issued in November 1917, Britain was bogged down fighting on the Western Front. The United States had entered the First World War but, as yet, to little effect. In Russia, the faction of Communists known as Bolsheviks threatened to take power and drop out of the war. Some members of the British government thought that winning the support of influential Jews, whether American capitalists or Russian Bolsheviks, for the Allied cause might strengthen their commitment to the war effort. This view may have been based on an inflated assessment of the power of international Jewry. However, it was a view that Chaim Weizmann, the British leader of the WZO, was happy to cultivate in the minds of British policy makers if it led them to lend their support to the Zionist cause.

Such military and diplomatic considerations also shaped Britain’s longer-term imperial thinking about the importance of Palestine. Palestine stood astride the overland route to the oil reserves of Iraq, and Britain was planning to build a pipeline from Iraq to the port of Haifa in Palestine, from where it could be shipped to Britain. Above all, Palestine was only a hundred miles north of the Suez Canal (see map on p. 26).

The Suez Canal was of huge commercial and strategic importance: it constituted the main route to India and Britain’s other colonies in the Far East and was the route through which most of Britain’s oil, now so vital for the navy, was transported. British control of Palestine, increasingly seen as preferable to the internationalisation envisaged in the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, would provide a buffer zone. Many Cabinet members were persuaded that a significant Jewish entity in Palestine would constitute a reliable European ally in what they saw as a backward, corrupt, and volatile Arab world. Thus, support for Zionism was motivated by both wartime and longer-term imperial goals.

Strong Personalities

Religious beliefs also had some impact on Prime Minister David Lloyd George and Foreign Secretary Balfour. Both had come under the influence of C. P. Scott and of his close ally, Chaim Weizmann. Scott was editor of the Manchester Guardian, a newspaper of international renown, and Weizmann was the most prominent Zionist in Britain and later became first president of the State of Israel. During the war, Weizmann carried out important scientific research for the British government at the University of Manchester. Both Scott and Weizmann appealed to the Christian Zionist in Lloyd George and Balfour and cited the biblical reasons, with which both men would have been familiar, for supporting a Jewish return to Palestine.2

Chaim Weizmann

The persuasive powers of Scott and Weizmann and, in particular, the charm and charisma of the latter (“an irresistible political seducer,” according to the philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin), were of considerable significance in convincing Balfour, Lloyd George, and other British leaders that British and Zionist interests in Palestine were closely aligned and that a growing Jewish population in Palestine would have every reason to be supportive of British interests. Religious or cultural views undoubtedly complemented more hard-headed political reasons for supporting the development of a more significant Jewish presence in Palestine.

Whatever the prime reasons for British policy, the Balfour Declaration, issued by the preeminent power in the Middle East at the end of the war, made the survival of the Zionist project far more likely.

The British Mandate for Palestine

Weizmann headed the Zionist delegation at the postwar Paris Peace Conference, determined to ensure the declaration was incorporated into the peace settlement. When asked what was meant by a Jewish national home, he replied, “To make Palestine as Jewish as England is English.” However, he was careful not to speak openly of a Jewish “state,” so as not to be accused of trying to make the Jewish minority become the masters of the Arab majority. He knew there was a limit to how far he could push the British. As president of the WZO, he was aware that if the Jewish national home was to survive it needed the continued support of the British.

Balfour himself did not need much persuading. In fact, he was explicit in dismissing any concern for the interests of the “non-Jewish communities” in Palestine. In the summer of 1919, he said, “We are dealing not with the wishes of an existing community but are consciously seeking to reconstitute a new community and definitely building for a numerical [Jewish] majority in the future,” and in a note to Lord Curzon, his successor as foreign secretary, he wrote that Zionism was “of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land” and Arab claims to Palestine were “infinitely weaker than those of the Jews.”3

In 1920, at an international conference in San Remo, in Italy, both Britain and France acquired mandates over the Arab lands that were taken from the defeated Ottomans. This meant that the European powers were ordered “to govern until such time as they [the Arab countries] are able to stand alone.” France was given control of Syria and Lebanon, and Britain was allocated Iraq, Palestine, and what became known as Transjordan.

The awards were formally recognised by the League of Nations in 1923. Under Article 22 of the League’s Covenant, the mandatory powers, Britain and France, were responsible for preparing the countries for self-government. The well-being and development of those peoples was to form “a sacred trust of civilisation.” This meant preparing the peoples of the mandated territories for independence.

In the case of Palestine, the Balfour Declaration was written into the British Mandate, and it was made even more explicitly pro-Zionist: the British were authorised to liaise with a “Jewish Agency,” a body representing the Jewish community in Palestine (and not with a corresponding Arab one); to “facilitate Jewish immigration”; and to encourage the “close settlement by Jews on the land.” Yet again, “the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine” were to be safeguarded but there was no reference to the Arabs as a people or any explicit acknowledgement of their right to self-determination. For Palestinian Arabs, the mandate was colonial rule in its crudest form, only under a new guise.

The Middle East after the First World War

Under the League of Nations mandate, Britain was given responsibility for “the development of self-governing institutions,” yet the colonial secretary, Winston Churchill, made it clear in 1921 that no representative bodies would be permitted in Palestine if they interfered with the idea of a “Jewish national home.” In other words, self-government would only be granted if the Arabs accepted the Balfour Declaration. This they refused to do.