Origins of Palestinian Nationalism

Palestinian nationalism is the national movement of the Palestinian people for self-determination in and sovereignty over Palestine.{{{de Waart, 1994, p. 223. Referencing Article 9 of The Palestinian National Charter of 1968.}}}

Before the development of modern nationalism, loyalty tended to focus on a city or a particular leader. The term “Nationalismus”, translated as nationalism, and coined by Johann Gottfried Herder in the late 1770s, was a modern concept that originated in Europe.

Some nationalists (primordialists) argue that

“the nation was always there, indeed it is part of the natural order, even when it was submerged in the hearts of its members.”{{{Smith, Anthony D. “Gastronomy or geology? The role of nationalism in the reconstruction of nations.” Nations and Nationalism 1, no.1 (1994): 3–23. p. 18.}}}

In keeping with this philosophy, Al-Quds University states that although

“Palestine was conquered in times past by ancient Egyptians, Hittites, Philistines, Israelites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Romans, Muslim Arabs, Mamlukes, Ottomans, the British, the Zionists… the population remained constant—and is now still Palestinian.”{{{Jerusalem, the Old City: An Introduction, Al-Quds University homepage.}}}

Genesis:

Israeli historian Haim Gerber, a professor of Islamic History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, traces Arab nationalism back to a 17th-century religious leader, Mufti Khayr al-Din al-Ramli (1585–1671) who was born and lived in Al-Ramla in Ottoman Palestine. He claims that Khayr al-Din al-Ramli’s religious edicts (fatwa, plural fatawa), collected into final form in 1670 under the name al-Fatawa al-Khayriyah, attest to territorial awareness:

“These fatawa are a contemporary record of the time, and also give a complex view of agrarian relations.”

The 1670 collection mentions the concepts Filastin, biladuna (our country), al-Sham (Syria), Misr (Egypt), and diyar (country), in senses that appear to go beyond objective geography.{{{Gerber, Haim (1998). “Palestine” and Other Territorial Concepts in the 17th Century”. International Journal of Middle East Studies. 30 (4): 563–572.}}}

Zahir al-Umar al-Zaydani, alternatively spelled Daher al-Omar or Dahir al-Umar (Arabic: ظاهر العمر الزيداني‎, romanized: Ẓāhir al-ʿUmar az-Zaydānī, 1689/90 – 21 or 22 August 1775) was the autonomous Arab ruler of northern Palestine in the mid-18th century.{{{Philipp, ed. Bosworth, “Ẓāhir al- ʿUmar al-Zaydānī”.}}}

Zahir’s founding of a virtually autonomous state in Palestine has made him a national hero among Palestinians today.{{{Joudah, Ahmad (2015). “Zahir al-‘Umar and the First Autonomous Regime in Ottoman Palestine (1744-1775)”. Jerusalem Quarterly. Institute for Palestine Studies (63–64): 84–85.)}}}

Artistic representation of Zahir al-Umar by Ziad Daher Zedani, 1990

Zahir and Ali Bey, which had brought together Egypt and Palestine politically and economically in a way that had not occurred since the early 16th century. While their attempts to unite their territories economically and politically were unsuccessful, their rule posed the most serious domestic challenge to Ottoman rule in the 18th century.{{{D. Crecelius: “Egypt’s Reawakening Interest in Palestine During the Regimes of Ali Bey al-Kabir and Muhammad Bey Abu al-Dahab: 1760–1775”. In Kushner, 1986, pp. 247-248.}}}

Zahir was the de facto ruler over Palestine.{{{Philipp, 2001, pp. 42–43.}}}

Zahir al-Umar’s autonomous sheikhdom in 1774

Before Zahir consolidated power, the villages of northern Palestine were prone to Bedouin raids and robberies and the roads were under constant threat from highway robbers and Bedouin attacks. Although following the looting raids, the inhabitants of these agrarian villages were left destitute, the Ottoman provincial government would nonetheless attempt to collect from them the miri (hajj tax). To avoid punitive measures for not paying the miri, the inhabitants would abandon their villages for safety in the larger towns or the desert. This situation hurt the economy of the region as the raids sharply reduced the villages’ agricultural output, the government-appointed mutasallims (tax farmers) could not collect their impositions, and trade could not be safely conducted due to insecurity on the roads.{{{Joudah, 1987, pp. 37-38, p. 123.}}}

By 1746, however, Zahir had established order in the lands he ruled. He managed to co-opt the dominant Bedouin tribe of the region, the Bani Saqr, which greatly contributed to the establishment of security in northern Palestine.{{{Joudah, 1987, pp. 37-38, p. 123.}}}{{{Philipp, 1992, pp. 38, 94.}}}

Moreover, Zahir charged the sheikhs of the towns and villages of northern Palestine with ensuring the safety of the roads in their respective vicinity and required them to compensate anyone who was robbed of his/her property. General security reached a level whereby ” an old woman with gold in her hand could travel from one place to another without fear or danger”, according to biographer Mikhail Sabbagh.{{{Joudah, 1987, pp. 37-38, p. 123.}}}

In addition to providing security, Zahir and his local deputies adopted a policy of aiding the Palestinian peasants cultivate and harvest their farmlands to further guarantee the steady supply of agricultural products for export. These benefits included loans to peasants and the distribution of free seeds.{{{Philipp, 1992, pp. 38, 94.}}}

Financial burdens on the peasants were also reduced as Zahir offered tax relief during drought seasons or when the harvest seasons were poor.{{{Joudah, 1987, pp. 37-38, p. 123.}}}{{{Philipp, 1992, pp. 38, 94.}}}

When Zahir conquered Acre, he transformed it from a decaying village into a fortified market hub for Palestinian products, including silk, wheat, olive oil, tobacco, and cotton, which he exported to Europe.{{{Hitti, 1951, p. 688.}}}{{{Lehmann, 2014, p. 31.}}}

Zahir’s designation of prices for the local cash crops also prevented “exploitation” of the Palestinian peasants and local merchants by European merchants and their “manipulation of the prices”, according to Joudah.{{{Joudah, 1987, pp. 38-39.}}}

Zahir further encouraged trade by offering local merchants interest-free loans, maintained tolerant policies, and encouraged the involvement of religious minorities in the local economy.{{{Joudah, 1987, pp. 38-39.}}}{{{Barnay, 1992, p. 15.}}}

In the late 19th century, the Palestine Exploration Fund’s Claude Reignier Conder wrote that the Ottomans had successfully destroyed the power of Palestine’s indigenous ruling families who ” had practically been their own masters” but had been “ruined so that there is no longer any spirit left in them”. Among these families was the ” proud race” of Zahir, which was still held in high esteem, but was powerless and poor.{{{Scholch, 1984, p. 474.}}}

Zahir’s modern-day Palestinian descendants in Galilee use the surname “Dhawahri” or “al-Zawahirah” in Zahir’s honor. The Dhawahri clan constitute one of the traditional elite Muslim clans of Palestine in Nazareth, alongside the Fahum, Zu’bi, and ‘Onallas families.{{{Srouji, 2003, p. 187.}}}

Other Palestinian villages in Galilee where descendants of Zahir’s clan live are Bi’ina and Kafr Manda and, prior to its 1948 destruction, al-Damun. Many of the inhabitants of modern-day northern Israel, particularly the Palestinian towns and villages where Zahir or his family left an architectural legacy, hold Zahir in high regard.{{{Joudah, 1987, p. 118.}}}

Family tree (in Arabic) from Zahir up to his modern-day Palestinian descendants

Although he was mostly overlooked by historians of the Middle East, some scholars view Zahir’s rule as a forerunner to Palestinian nationalism.{{{Baram, 2007, p. 28.}}} Among these scholars is Karl Sabbagh, who asserts the latter view in his book Palestine: A Personal History, which was widely reviewed in the British press in 2010.{{{LeBor, Adam (2006-06-02). “Land of My Father”. The Guardian.}}} Zahir was gradually integrated into Palestinian historiography.{{{Philipp, 2001, p. 39.}}}

In Murad Mustafa Dabbagh’s Biladuna Filastin (1965), a multi-volume work about Palestine’s history, Zahir is referred to as the “greatest Palestinian appearing in the eighteenth century”. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) radio station, Voice of Palestine, broadcast a series about Zahir in 1966, praising him as a Palestinian national hero who fought against Ottoman imperialism.{{{Joudah,1987, p. 118.}}}

Zahir is considered by many Arab nationalists as a pioneer of Arab liberation from foreign occupation.{{{Moammar, 1990, preface.}}}According to Joudah:

However historians may look at Shaykh Zahir al-‘Umar and his movement, he is highly respected by the Arabs of the East. In particular, the Palestinians consider him a national hero who struggled against Ottoman authority for the welfare of his people. This praise is reflected in the recent academic, cultural, and literary renaissance within Palestinian society that has elevated Zahir and his legacy to near-iconic status. These re-readings are not always bound to historical objectivity but are largely inspired by the ongoing consequences of the Nakba. Still, it is precise to say that Shaykh Zahir had successfully established an autonomous state, or a “little Kingdom,” as Albert Hourani called it, in most of Palestine for over a quarter of a century.{{{Joudah, Ahmad (2015). “Zahir al-‘Umar and the First Autonomous Regime in Ottoman Palestine (1744-1775)”Jerusalem Quarterly. Institute for Palestine Studies (63–64): 84–85.}}}

Israeli academic Baruch Kimmerling and historian Joel S. Migdal discuss that the foundational moment in the development of Palestinian nationalism and national consciousness manifested in the Arab Revolt in Palestine of 1834 CE, in which Palestinian Arab clans revolted against the Ottoman rule of Palestine.{{{Kimmerling, Baruch, and Migdal, Joel S, (2003) The Palestinian People: A History, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, pp. 6–11.}}}

Zachary J. Foster argued in a 2015 Foreign Affairs article that “based on hundreds of manuscripts, Islamic court records, books, magazines, and newspapers from the Ottoman period (1516–1918), it seems that the first Arab to use the term “Palestinian” was Farid Georges Kassab, a Beirut-based Orthodox Christian.” He explained further that Kassab’s 1909 book Palestine, Hellenism, and Clericalism noted in passing that “the Orthodox Palestinian Ottomans call themselves Arabs, and are in fact Arabs“, despite describing the Arabic speakers of Palestine as Palestinians throughout the rest of the book.”{{{Zachary Foster, “What’s a Palestinian, Foreign Affairs,’ 11 March 2015.}}}

Foster later revised his view in a 2016 piece published in Palestine Square, arguing that already in 1898 Khalil Beidas used the term “Palestinian” to describe the region’s Arab inhabitants in the preface to a book he translated from Russian to Arabic.{{{Zachary Foster,“Who Was The First Palestinian in Modern History” Archived 2016-02-29 at the Wayback Machine The Palestine Square 18 February 2016.}}}

In the book, Akim Olesnitsky’s A Description of the Holy Land, Beidas explained that the summer agricultural work in Palestine began in May with the wheat and barley harvest. After enduring the entire summer with no rain at all—leaving the water cisterns depleted and the rivers and springs dry—” the Palestinian peasant waits impatiently for winter to come, for the season’s rain to moisten his fossilized fields.”Foster explained that this is the first instance in modern history where the term ‘ Palestinian’ or ‘Filastini’ appears in Arabic. He added, though, that the term Palestinian had already been used decades earlier in Western languages by the 1846-1863  British  Consul  in  Jerusalem, James Finn; the German Lutheran missionary Johann Ludwig Schneller (1820–1896), founder of the Syrian Orphanage; and the American James Wells.{{{Zachary Foster,“Who Was The First Palestinian in Modern History” Archived 2016-02-29 at the Wayback Machine The Palestine Square 18 February 2016.}}}

Khalil Beidas’s 1898 use of the word “Palestinians” in the preface to his translation of Akim Olesnitsky’s A Description of the Holy Land

In his 1997 book, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, historian Rashid Khalidi notes that the archaeological strata that denote the history of Palestine—encompassing the Biblical, Roman, Byzantine, Umayyad, Fatimid, Crusader, Ayyubid, Mamluk and Ottoman periods—form part of the identity of the modern-day Palestinian people, as they have come to understand it over the last century, but derides the efforts of some Palestinian nationalists to attempt to “anachronistically” read back into history a nationalist consciousness that is in fact “relatively modern.” Khalidi stresses that Palestinian identity has never been an exclusive one, with “Arabism, religion, and local loyalties” playing an important role.{{{Rashid Khalidi (1997) Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, Columbia University Press pp. 18-21, 32, 149.}}}

He argues that the modern national identity of Palestinians has its roots in nationalist discourses that emerged among the peoples of the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th century which sharpened following the demarcation of modern nation-state boundaries in the Middle East after World War I.{{{Rashid Khalidi (1997) Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, Columbia University Press pp. 18-21, 32, 149.}}}

He acknowledges that Zionism played a role in shaping this identity, though “it is a serious mistake to suggest that Palestinian identity emerged mainly as a response to Zionism.”{{{Rashid Khalidi (1997) Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, Columbia University Press pp. 18-21, 32, 149.}}}

Khalidi describes the Arab population of British Mandatory Palestine as having “overlapping identities”, with some or many expressing loyalties to villages, regions, a projected nation of Palestine, an alternative of inclusion in a Greater Syria, an Arab national project, as well as to Islam.{{{Provence, Michael (2005) The Great Syrian Revolt and the Rise of Arab Nationalism, University of Texas Press, p. 158.}}}

A 1930 protest in Jerusalem against the British Mandate by Palestinian women. The sign reads “No dialogue, no negotiations until termination [of the Mandate]”

Brief summary before the establishment of the Zionist state:

In the 19th and 20th centuries, Palestinian society was introduced to the powerful defining concept: the nation. American missionaries contributed to the spread of nationalist concepts in the Middle East. The educated elite in Palestine, along with the rest of the Arab world, digested these ideas and developed a genuine national ideology. This prompted them to demand autonomy within the Ottoman Empire, and eventually independence from it. (Ilan Pappe, Ten Myths about Israel, p. 7.).

In the 19th century, the Ottoman intellectual and political elite embraced romantic nationalist and secular ideas that associated Ottomanism with Turkishness. This aided in the alienation of Istanbul’s non-Turkish subjects, the majority of whom were Arabs, from the Ottoman Empire.

Secularization was also a component of the Arab world’s nationalization process. Unsurprisingly, minorities, particularly Christians, enthusiastically embraced the concept of a secular national identity based on shared territory, language, history, and culture. Christians who engaged in nationalism found eager allies among the Muslim elite in Palestine, resulting in the mushrooming of Muslim-Christian societies throughout the country near the end of World War I. Jews became involved in these types of alliances between activists of various religions in the Arab world. The same would have occurred in Palestine had Zionism not insisted on complete loyalty from the country’s veteran Jewish community. (Ilan Pappe, Ten Myths about Israel, p. 7.).

Prior to 1882, both elite and non-elite segments of Palestinian society contributed to the development of a national movement and sentiment. Patriotic feelings, local allegiances, Arabism, religious sentiments, and increased levels of education and literacy were the new nationalism’s primary constituents. It was only later that anti-Zionism resistance became essential in shaping Palestinian nationalism.{{{Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010, and Muhammad Muslih,The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism}}}

Modernization, the Ottoman Empire’s fall, and Europe’s greedy mission for Middle Eastern territories all contributed to the consolidation of Palestinian nationalism before Zionism formed its mark in Palestine in 1917 with the British promise of a Jewish homeland. One of the clearest manifestations of this new self-definition was the reference in the country to Palestine as a geographical and cultural entity, and later as a political one. Despite the absence of a Palestinian state, Palestine’s cultural location was crystal clear.There was a pervasive sense of belonging present. The newspaper Filastin represented the way the people named their country at the turn of the twentieth century. Palestinians spoke their own dialect, practiced their own traditions and customs, and were depicted as living in a country named Palestine on world maps.{{{Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010}}}

Palestine, like its neighboring regions, became more clearly defined as a geopolitical unit during the 19th century as a result of administrative reforms introduced by Istanbul, the Ottoman Empire’s capital. As a result, the local Palestinian elite began to advocate for self-determination within a united Syria, or even a united Arab state (a bit like the United States of America). This pan-Arabist national movement, dubbed qawmiyya in Arabic, gained popularity in Palestine and the rest of the Arab world. (Ilan Pappe, Ten Myths about Israel, p. 8.).

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire was accompanied by an increasing sense of Arab identity in the Empire’s Arab provinces, most notably Syria, considered to include both northern Palestine and Lebanon.{{{Gudrun Krämer and Graham Harman (2008) A history of Palestine: from the ottoman conquest to the founding of the state of Israel Princeton University Press, p. 123.}}}

This development is often seen as connected to the wider reformist trend known as al-Nahda (“awakening”, sometimes called “the Arab renaissance”), which in the late 19th century brought about a redefinition of Arab cultural and political identities with the unifying feature of Arabic.{{{Gudrun Krämer and Graham Harman (2008) A history of Palestine: from the ottoman conquest to the founding of the state of Israel Princeton University Press, p. 123.}}}

Under the Ottomans, Palestine’s Arab population mostly saw themselves as Ottoman subjects. In the 1830s however, Palestine was occupied by the Egyptian vassal of the Ottomans, Muhammad Ali and his son Ibrahim Pasha.{{{Kimmerling, Baruch, and Migdal, Joel S, (2003) The Palestinian People: A History, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, pp. 6–11.}}}

The Palestinian Arab revolt was precipitated by popular resistance against heavy demands for conscripts, as poor Palestinian peasants were well aware that conscription was little more than a death sentence. Starting in May 1834 the rebels took many cities, among them Jerusalem, Hebron, and Nablus. In response, Ibrahim Pasha sent in an army, finally defeating the last rebels on 4 August in Hebron.{{{Kimmerling, Baruch, and Migdal, Joel S, (2003) The Palestinian People: A History, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, pp. 6–11.}}}

The flag of the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire is a prominent symbol of Arab nationalism. Its design and colors are the basis of many of the Arab states’ flags

The programmes of four Palestinian nationalist societies jamyyat al-Ikha’ wal-‘Afaf (Brotherhood and Purity), al-jam’iyya al-Khayriyya al-Islamiyya (Islamic Charitable Society), Shirkat al-Iqtissad al-Falastini al-Arabi (lit. Arab Palestinian Economic Association), and Shirkat al-Tijara al-Wataniyya al-Iqtisadiyya (lit. National Economic Trade Association) were reported in the newspaper Filastin in June 1914 by a letter from R. Abu al-Sal’ud.

The four societies have similarities in function and ideals; the promotion of patriotism, educational aspirations, and support for national industries.{{{Kayyālī,ʻAbd al-Wahhāb (1978) Palestine: a modern history Routledge, p. 33.}}}

Following the famous, or rather infamous, Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France in 1916, the two colonial powers split the region into new nation states. As the region became segmented, a new sentiment evolved: a more localized form of nationalism called wataniyya in Arabic. As a result, Palestine developed a sense of self-identification as an independent Arab state. Without the arrival of Zionism on its doorstep, Palestine would definitely have followed Lebanon, Jordan, or Syria in adopting a process of modernization and growth.{{{The alternative modernization of Palestine is superbly explored in the collection of articles by Salim Tamari, The Mountain Against the Sea: Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.}}}

Indeed, this had begun in 1916, as a result of late-nineteenth-century Ottoman policies. When the Istanbul government established the Sanjak (administrative province) of Jerusalem in 1872, it established a cogent geopolitical space in Palestine. For a brief moment, the powers in Istanbul considered expanding the Sanjak, which would have included the majority of modern-day Palestine, as well as the sub-provinces of Nablus and Acre. If they had done so, the Ottomans would have established a geographical unit, as Egypt did, in which a distinct nationalism might have developed even earlier.{{{Butrus Abu-Manneh, “The Rise of the Sanjaq of Jerusalem in the Nineteenth Century,” in Ilan Pappe (ed.), The Israel/Palestine Question, London and New York: Routledge, 2007, pp. 40–50.}}}

Despite its administrative division into the north (ruled by Beirut) and south (ruled by Jerusalem), this shift elevated Palestine as a whole above its prior peripheral status as a collection of small regional sub-provinces. With the establishment of British rule in 1918, the north and south divisions merged into a single unit. Similarly, and in the same year, the British laid the groundwork for modern Iraq by uniting the three Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra into a single modern nation-state. In Palestine, unlike in Iraq, familial ties and geographical boundaries (the Mediterranean Sea in the west the Litani River in the north, and the Jordan River in the east) combined to unite the three sub-provinces of South Beirut, Nablus, and Jerusalem. This geopolitical zone possessed its major dialect, as well as its own customs, folklore, traditions, and rituals.{{{Ilan Pappe, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 14–60.}}}

By the end of World War I, European armies had occupied Palestine and a large portion of the Arab world. They were faced with the unsettling prospect of alien rule and the rapid decline of Ottoman control, which had been the only known system of government for more than twenty generations. It was during this period of turmoil , as one era finished and another began, against a grim scenery of misery, deterioration, and deprivation, that Palestinians did learn about the Balfour Declaration :

Foreign Office

November 2nd, 1917

Dear Lord Rothschild,

I have much pleasure in conveying to you. on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet

“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice 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.”

I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.

Yours,

Arthur James Balfour

If many foresighted Palestinians began to consider the Zionist movement as a threat prior to World War I, the Balfour Declaration added a new and frightening dimension. With its vague phrase endorsing “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” the declaration successfully committed Britain’s assistance for Theodor Herzl’s goals of Jewish statehood, sovereignty, and immigration control in all of Palestine.

Notably, Balfour made no reference of the vast Arab majority of the populace (approximately 94% at the time), except in a backhanded way as the “existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” They were defined in terms of what they were not, and most definitely not as a nation or a people—the terms “Palestinian” and “Arab” are absent from the declaration’s sixty-seven words. This great majority was promised only “civil and religious rights,” not political or national rights. By contrast, Balfour bestowed national rights to what he referred to as “the Jewish people,” who constituted a tiny minority in 1917, accounting for approximately 6% of the country’s population.

Prior to acquiring British support, the Zionist movement was a colonizing enterprise seeking a great-power benefactor. After failing to find a sponsor in the Ottoman Empire, Wilhelmine Germany, and elsewhere, Theodor Herzl’s successor Chaim Weizmann and his associates did succeed in gaining the support of the wartime British cabinet led by David Lloyd George. The Palestinians now encountered a far more formidable foe than ever before, with British troops advancing northward and occupying their country at the time, and troops serving a government committed to implanting a “national home” through unlimited immigration to cultivate a future Jewish majority.

Over the last century, the British government’s motives and goals have been thoroughly investigated.{{{For British goals and ambitions, see Jonathan Schneer, The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (London: Bloomsbury, 2010); Henry Laurens, La question de Palestine, vol. 1, 1799–1922: L’invention de la Terre sainte (Paris: Fayard, 1999); and James Renton, The Zionist Masquerade: The Birth of the Anglo-Zionist Alliance, 1914–1918 (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007). See also A. L. Tibawi, Anglo-Arab Relations and the Question of Palestine, 1914–1921 (London: Luzac, 1977), 196-239; Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration (London: Valentine, Mitchell, 1961); and Mayir Vereté, “The Balfour Declaration and Its Makers,” Middle Eastern Studies 6 (1970): 416–42.}}} Among its numerous motivations were a romantic, religiously inspired philo-Semitic compulsion to “return” the Hebrews to the land of the Bible, and an anti-Semitic desire to decrease Jewish immigration to Britain, attached to a belief that “world Jewry” possessed the ability to keep newly revolutionary Russia fighting and to draw the United States into the conflict. Apart from those impulses, Britain sought control of Palestine primarily for geopolitical strategic reasons that predated World War I, and were reinforced by wartime events.{{{British Policy Towards Syria and Palestine, 1906–1914: A Study of the Antecedents of the Husayn-McMahon Correspondence, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and the Balfour Declaration, St.Antony’s College Middle East Monographs (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 1980).}}} Regardless of the importance of the other intentions, this was the primary one: the British Empire was never driven by benevolence. Britain’s strategic interests were perfectly served by sponsoring the Zionist project, just as they were served by a variety of regional wartime endeavors. Among them were commitments made in 1915 and 1916 promising independence to the Arabs led by Sharif Husayn of Mecca (embodied in the Husayn-McMahon correspondence) and a secret 1916 deal with France: the Sykes-Picot Agreement, in which the two colonial powers decided to partition the eastern Arab countries.{{{The statement of Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik commissar for Foreign Affairs, after he had opened up the Tsarist diplomatic archives and revealed these secret wartime Anglo-French-Russian arrangements on this occasion, is reproduced in Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, 1917–1924, ed. Jane Degras, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951).}}}

The Zionist movement’s objectives were transparent: total sovereignty and control over Palestine. With Britain’s unwavering support, these goals became suddenly attainable. Some prominent British politicians expressed support for Zionism in ways that went beyond the declaration’s carefully phrased text. In 1922, at a dinner at Balfour’s residence, three of the era’s most renowned statesmen: Lloyd George, Balfour, and Secretary of State for the Colonies Winston Churchill, assured Weizmann that the concept “Jewish national home” , “always meant an eventual Jewish state.” Lloyd George persuaded the Zionist leader that Britain would never permit a representative government in Palestine for this purpose. Neither did it.{{{Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Statesman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 356–57.}}}

For Zionists, their enterprise was now bolstered by an indispensable “iron wall” of British military might, as Ze’ev Jabotinksy put it. Balfour’s precise, calculated prose was, in effect, a gun aimed directly at their heads, a declaration of war by the British Empire on the indigenous Palestinian population. The majority now faces the threat of being outnumbered by unrestricted Jewish immigration to a country whose population and culture were almost entirely Arab. Whether intentionally or not, the declaration precipitated a full-fledged colonial conflict, a century-long attack on the Palestinian people with the objective of promoting an exclusiveist “national home” at their expense.

Palestinian reaction to Balfour’s declaration was late and relatively muted. The British pronouncement quickly spread throughout the rest of the world. Local newspapers, on the other hand, were closed in Palestine since the war began, due to both government censorship and a shortage of newsprint caused by an Allied naval blockade of Ottoman ports. Following the occupation of Jerusalem by British troops in December 1917, the military regime prohibited publication of news of the declaration.{{{Ronald Storrs, Orientations (London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1937). The memoirs of Ronald Storrs, the first British military governor of Jerusalem, mention the strict control the British exercised over the press and over all forms of Arab political activity in Palestine: 327ff. Storrs had previously worked as Oriental secretary to the British high commissioner in Egypt, where he served as censor of the local press.}}} Indeed, for nearly two years, British authorities prohibited newspapers from reappearing in Palestine. When news of the Balfour Declaration finally reached Palestine, it did so slowly, first through word of mouth and then via prints of Egyptian newspapers carried by travelers from Cairo.

In December 1918, 33 exiled Palestinians (including al-Isa) who had recently arrived in Damascus from Anatolia (where their access to news was unrestricted) sent an advance protest letter to the Versailles peace conference and the British Foreign Office. They emphasized that “this country is our country” and expressed horror at the Zionist claim that “Palestine would be turned into a national home for them.”{{{Al-Kayyali, Watha’iq al-muqawama al-filistiniyya al-‘arabiyya did al-ihtilal al-britani wal-sihyuniyya 1918-1939 [Documents of the Palestinian Arab resistance to the British occupation and to Zionism, 1918-1939] (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1968), 1–3.}}}

Such possibilities may have seemed improbable to many Palestinians when the Balfour Declaration was authorised, at a time when Jews were a minuscule minority of the population. Nonetheless, some foresighted individuals, including Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, recognized Zionism’s threat early on. In 1914 ‘Isa al-‘Isa wrote, in an astute editorial in Filastin, of “a nation threatened with disappearance by the Zionist tide in this Palestinian land,… a nation which is threatened in its very being with expulsion from its homeland.”{{{Special issue of Filastin, May 19, 1914, 1.}}} Those who expressed concern about the Zionist movement’s incursion were alarmed by the movement’s ability to acquire large tracts of fertile land from which indigenous peasants were removed, as well as by its success in increasing Jewish immigration.

Indeed, between 1909 and 1914, approximately 40,000 Jewish immigrants arrived (although some departed shortly afterwards), and the Zionist movement established eighteen new colonies (of a total of fifty-two in 1914) on land acquired primarily from absentee landlords. The recent concentration of private land ownership enabled these land purchases significantly. The impact on Palestinians was particularly severe in agricultural communities located in areas of intense Zionist colonization, including the coastal plain and the fertile Marj Ibn’Amer and Huleh valleys in the north. Numerous peasants living in villages adjacent to the new colonies have lost their land as a consequence of the land sales. Some had also been wounded in armed encounters with the European Jewish settlers’ first paramilitary units. {{{For details of these land purchases and the resulting armed clashes, see R. Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 89–117. See also Shafir, Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.}}} Their trepidation was shared by Arab city dwellers in Haifa, Jaffa, and Jerusalem, the primary centers of the Jewish population at the time and now, who watched with growing alarm the stream of Jewish immigrants in the years preceding the war. Following the Balfour Declaration’s publication, the catastrophic implications for Palestine’s future became increasingly clear to all.

-A few months before the peace conference convened at Versailles in early 1919, Ben Gurion expressed his opinion of future Jewish and Arab relations:

“Everybody sees the problem in the relations between the Jews and the [Palestinian] Arabs. But not everybody sees that there’s no solution to it. There is no solution! . . . The conflict between the interests of the Jews and the interests of the [Palestinian] Arabs in Palestine cannot be resolved by sophisms. I don’t know any Arabs who would agree to Palestine being ours—even if we learn Arabic . . .and I have no need to learn Arabic. On the other hand, I don’t see why ‘Mustafa’ should learn Hebrew. . . . There’s a national question here. We want the country to be ours. The Arabs want the country to be theirs.” (Segev, One Palestine Complete, p. 116)

Beyond demographic and other changes, World War I and its aftermath boosted the shift in Palestinian national sentiment away from love of country and familial and regional allegiances toward a thoroughly modern form of nationalism.{{{For more details, see R. Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, especially chapter 7, 145–76.}}}

Prior to the war, political identities in Palestine had undoubtedly evolved in keeping with global shifts and the Ottoman state’s evolution. This occurred, however, gradually, within the restrictions of the religiously, dynastic, and transnational legitimate empire. Prior to 1914, the mental map of the majority of its subjects was constrained by the fact that they had been governed by this political system for so long that it was difficult for them to conceive of not living under Ottoman rule. As they entered the postwar world, traumatized collectively, the Palestinian people were confronted with a radically new reality: they were to be colonized by Britain, and their country had been promised to others as a “national home.” Against this could be set their hopes for the possibility of Arab independence and self-determination, promised to Sharif Husayn by the British in 1916. A promise that was repeated in multiple public declarations thereafter, including an Anglo-French declaration in 1918, before being embodied in the Covenant of the newly formed League of Nations in 1919. (Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, p. 28.)

The Palestinian press is a critical window into Palestinians’ perceptions of themselves and their comprehension of occurrences between the wars. Two newspapers, Filastin, published by ‘Isa al-‘Isa in Jaffa, and al-Karmil, published by Najib Nassar in Haifa, were beacons of local patriotism and critics of the Zionist-British allied powers and the threats it posed to Palestine’s Arab majority. They were among the most visible proponents of Palestinian identity. Other newspapers echoed and expanded on the same themes, placing emphasis on the burgeoning, largely closed Jewish economy and other institutions created and backed by the Zionist state-building project. (Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, pp. 28-29.)

Isa al-‘Isa wrote an alarming editorial in Filastin following his attendance at the ceremonial opening of a new rail line connecting Tel Aviv to the Jewish settlements and Arab villages to the south in 1929. Throughout the route, he wrote, Jewish settlers took advantage of British officials’ presence to make new demands, while Palestinians remained unnoticeable. “There was only one tarbush,” he said, “among so many hats.” The message was obvious : the wataniyin, “the people of the country,” were poorly organized, while al-qawm, “this nation,” exploited every opportunity offered them. The title of the editorial summed up the gravity of al-‘Isa’s warning: “Strangers in Our Own Land: Our Drowsiness and Their Alertness.”{{{“Ghuraba ’fi biladina: Ghaflatuna wa yaqthatuhum” [Strangers in our own land: Our drowsiness and their alertness], Filastin, March 5, 1929, 1.}}}

This was also presented by the increasing number of Palestinian memoirs published. The majority are written in Arabic and express the concerns of their upper- and middle-class authors.{{{Since 2005, the Institute for Palestine Studies has published a total of 9 autobiographical memoirs and diaries in Arabic.: Muhammad ‘Abd al-Hadi Sharruf, 2017; Mahmud al-Atrash, 2016; Gabby Baramki, 2015; Hanna Naqqara, 2011; Turjuman and Fasih, 2008; Khalil Sakakini, 8 vols., 2005–2010; Rashid Hajj Ibrahim, 2005; Wasif Jawhariyya, 2005. The institute also published the memoirs of Reja-i Busailah in English in 2017. Among them, those of Sharruf, a policeman; al-Maghribi, a worker and communist organizer; and Turjuman and Fasih, enlisted men in the Ottoman army in World War I, represent non-elite points of view. Additionally, see the significant memoirs of a central Mandate-era political figure., Muhammad ‘Izzat Darwaza, Mudhakkirat, 1887-1984 (Beirut: Dar al-Gharb al-Islami, 1993).}}}

Many Zionist leaders thought that Zionism was the primary motive behind the Palestinian nationalist movement, however, publicly they always stated that the movement was organized by a few who did not represent the political aims of the ordinary Palestinian. Kalvaryski, a Zionist Official, put it in May 1921:

“It is pointless to consider this [referring to the Palestinian national movement] a question only of effendis [land owners]. . . This may be fine as a tactic, but, between ourselves, we should realize that we have to reckon with an [Palestinian] Arab national movement. We ourselves—our own [movement]—are speeding the development of the [Palestinian] Arab movement.”(Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p.104.)

Even a brief scan of the press, memoirs, and other sources generated by Palestinians reveals a history that contradicts the popular mythology of the conflict, which is based on their nonexistence or lack of collective consciousness. Indeed, Palestinian identity and nationalism are frequently viewed as recent manifestations of an irrational (if not fanatical) opposition to Jewish national self-determination. However, Palestinian identity, like Zionism, emerged in response to a variety of stimuli and nearly simultaneously with modern political Zionism. Zionism’s threat was only one of these stimuli, just as anti-Semitism was only one of the factors that fueled Zionism. As newspapers such as Filastin and al-Karmil demonstrate, this identity encompassed patriotism, a desire to improve society, religious attachment to Palestine, and resistance to European control. Following the war, the emphasis on Palestine as a central locus of identity grew out of widespread frustration with the suffocating dominance of European colonial powers over Arab aspirations in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East. Thus, this identity is comparable to the other Arab nation-state identities that emerged in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq around the period.

Indeed, all neighboring Arab peoples developed modern national identities very similar to those of the Palestinians, and did so without the impact of the emergence of Zionist colonialism in their midst. Similarly to Zionism, Palestinian and other Arab national identities were modern and contingent, products of late 19th and 20th century circumstances, rather than eternal and immutable. The denial of an authentic, independent Palestinian identity is consistent with Herzl’s colonialist views on the alleged benefits of Zionism to the indigenous population, and is a critical component of the Balfour Declaration and its sequels’ erasure of their national rights and peoplehood. (Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, pp. 30-31.)

Following World War I, Palestinians organized politically in resistance to both British rule and the implantation of the Zionist movement as the British partner. Petitioning the British, the Paris Peace Conference, and the newly formed League of Nations were among the Palestinian efforts. Their most prominent effort was a series of seven Palestine Arab congresses organized from 1919 to 1928 by a countrywide network of Muslim-Christian societies. These congresses advanced a consistent set of demands, including recognition of Arab Palestine as an independent state, rejection of the Balfour Declaration, support for majority rule, and an end to unrestricted Jewish immigration and land purchases. The congresses formed an Arab executive that met with British officials in Jerusalem and London on numerous occasions, though with no success. It was a dialogue of the deaf. The British refused to recognize the congresses’ or their leaders’ representative authority and insisted on Arab acceptance of the Balfour Declaration and the terms of the subsequent Mandate, the antithesis of every substantive Arab demand, as a precondition for discussion. For over a decade and a half, the Palestinian leadership pursued this fruitless legalistic strategy.

In contrast to these elite-led initiatives, popular discontent with British support for Zionist aspirations erupted into demonstrations, strikes, and riots, with violence erupting particularly in 1920, 1921, and 1929, each episode becoming more intense than the previous one. In each case, these were spontaneous eruptions, frequently sparked by Zionist groups flexing their muscles, just as of what occurred in the 1929 disturbance.

In 1928, the Palestinian leadership agreed to allow Jewish settlers equal representation in the state’s future bodies, despite the wishes of the overwhelming majority of their people. The Zionist leadership supported the idea only as long as it anticipated Palestinian rejection. Shared representation contradicted everything Zionism stood for. As a result, when the Palestinian party accepted the proposal, the Zionists rejected it.

Several hundred Zionists marched to the Al-buraq/Western wall, shouting “the Wall and land are ours,” while raising the Jewish National flag, singing the Jewish anthem, and chanting threatening and racist remarks toward Palestinian Arabs. The group was led by Jeremiah Halpern and included members of Vladimir Jabotinsky’s revisionist Zionist movement, Betar youth organization. This precipitated the 1929 Palestinian revolt, which reached the Jews in Hebron and resulted in a significantly higher death toll among the Palestinian community. However, there were other reasons for the wave of violence, the most severe since the Mandate’s inception was the dispossession of Palestinian tenants from land purchased by the Jewish National Fund from absentee landlords and local notables. The tenants had lived on the land for centuries, but were now thrown in slums in the towns. (Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, pp. 31-32.)

In July 1922, after the Palestinian Arab commercial strike, Ben Gurion acknowledged privately that a Palestinian national movement is evolving. He wrote in his diary:

“The success of the [Palestinian] Arabs in organizing the closure of shops shows that we are dealing here with a national movement. For the [Palestinian] Arabs, this is an important education step.” (BEN-GURION and the Palestinian Arabs, Shabtai Teveth, p. 80.).

In 1929, Ben Gurion wrote about the Palestinian political national movement:

“It is true that the Arab national movement has no positive content. The leaders of the movement are unconcerned with betterment of the people and provision of their essential needs. They do not aid the fellah; to the contrary, the leaders suck his blood and exploit the popular awakening for private gain. But we err if we measure the [Palestinian] Arabs and their movement by our standards. Every people is worthy of its national movement. The obvious characteristic of a political movement is that it knows how to mobilize the masses. From this prospective there is no doubt that we are facing a political movement, and we should not underestimate it.”

“A national movement mobilizes masses, and that is the main thing. The [Palestinian] Arab is not one of revival, and its moral value is dubious. But in a political sense, this is a national movement.” (BEN-GURION and the Palestinian Arabs, Shabtai Teveth, p. 83.).

In the context of the 1929 disturbance, Ben Gurion spoke of the emerging Palestinian nationalism and the main goal of Zionism (where Palestine’s population becomes a “Jewish majority”) to the secretariat of the major Zionist groupings. He said:

“The debate as to whether or not an Arab national movement exists is a pointless verbal exercise; the main thing for us is that the movement attracts the masses. We do not regard it as a resurgence movement and its moral worth is dubious. But politically speaking it is a national movement . . . . The Arab must not and cannot be a Zionist. He could never wish the Jews to become a majority. This is the true antagonism between us and the Arabs. We both want to be the majority.”(Nur Masalha, Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 18.).

It should be noted that Palestinians were already the majority, and owned most of Palestine. The only way for Zionism to be fulfilled was through the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, as of what occurred.

The British silenced peaceful protests and outbreaks of violence with equally harsh severity, but popular discontent in the Arab world persisted. By the early 1930s, impatient with the elite’s conciliatory approach, younger, educated lower-middle- and middle-class elements started to introduce more radical measures and arrange more militant groups. In one of those slums, an activist network led by a Haifa-based itinerant preacher of Syrian origin named Shaykh Iz al-Din al-Qassam was covertly preparing for a revolt, as was the Istiqlal (“independence”) Party, whose name explains it goals (Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, p. 32.), (Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, pp. 29–39.), (Ilan Pappe, Ten Myths about Israel, p. 46.).

All of these efforts began under the shadow of a harsh British military regime that persisted until 1920 (one of the congresses was held in Damascus since the British had prohibited Palestinian political activity),and thereafter under a series of British Mandatory high commissioners. Sir Herbert Samuel was the first of them, a devout Zionist and a previous cabinet minister who laid the groundwork for much of what pursued, ably advancing Zionist goals while foiling Palestinian ones.

Well-informed Palestinians were conscious of what Zionists preached both overseas and in Hebrew in Palestine to their adherents: that unrestricted immigration would result in a Jewish majority, allowing for the country’s takeover. They had been following Zionist leaders’ actions and statements through extensive coverage in the Arabic press before the war.(R. Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, chapter 6, 119–44).

In March 1918 in the City of Jerusalem, Chaim Weizmann had told several prominent Arabs at a dinner party in:

“To beware treacherous insinuations that Zionists were seeking political power.”{{{Storrs, Orientations, 341. Among those present were both the mufti and the mayor of Jerusalem , as well as several other prominent Palestinian political and religious figures.}}}

Most recognized that such statements were strategic and intended to conceal the Zionists’ true goals. Indeed, while Zionist leaders understood that “under no circumstances should they talk as though the Zionist program required the expulsion of the Arabs, because that would cause the Jews to lose the world’s sympathy,” but knowledgeable Palestinians were not deceived(Tom segev, One Palestine, Complete, p. 404.).

While readers of the press, members of the elite, and villagers and city-dwellers who were in direct contact with the Jewish settlers were aware of the threat, such knowledge was far from universal. Similarly, the evolution of the Palestinians’ sense of self was uneven. While the majority wanted Palestinian independence, some hoped that it could be achieved as part of a larger Arab state (similar to the US). In 1919, a newspaper called Suriyya al-Janubiyya, or Southern Syria, was shortly published in Jerusalem by ‘Arif al-‘Arif and yet another political figure, Muhammad Hasan al-Budayri. (The British swiftly silenced the publication.) In 1918, Amir Faysal, the son of Sharif Husayn, established a government in Damascus, and many Palestinians hoped their country would become the southern wing of this nascent state. However, on the basis of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, France claimed Syria for itself, and in July 1920, French troops occupied the country, eliminating the newborn Arab state. As Arab countries subjected to European mandates or other forms of direct or indirect Colonial rule became burdened with their very own narrow issues, an increasing number of Palestinians came to realize they would have to rely on themselves. Arabism and a feeling of belonging to the larger Arab world have always been strong, but Palestinian identity has been constantly reinforced by Britain in favor of the burgeoning Zionist project. (Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, p. 33.)

Whether Palestinians were pan-Arabists, or local patriots, or hoped to be part of Greater Syria, the Palestinians were united in their wish not to be part of a Jewish state. Their leaders objected to any political solution that would hand any part of the small country to the settler community. As they clearly declared in their negotiations with the British at the end of the 1920s, they were willing to share with those who had already arrived, but could accept no more. The Palestinians’ collective voice was cemented in the executive body of the Palestinian National Conference, which met annually for a decade, beginning in 1919. This body represented the Palestinians in their negotiations with both the British government and the Zionist movement.(A History of Modern Palestine, pp. 109–16.) and (Ilan Pappe, Ten Myths about Israel, pp. 45-46.).

In 1923, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the father of the Israeli political Right wrote of how Palestinians felt about their attachment to Palestine:

“They [Palestinians] look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true favor that Aztecs looked upon Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. Palestine will remain for the Palestinians, not a borderland, but their birthplace, the center, and basis of their own national existence.” (Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 36).

Similarly, Ze’ev Jabotinsky also wrote in 1923:

“The [Palestinian] Arabs loved their country as much as the Jews did. Instinctively, they understood Zionist aspirations very well, and their decision to resist them was only natural ….. There was not misunderstanding between Jew and Arab, but a natural conflict. …. No Agreement was possible with the Palestinian Arab; they would accept Zionism only when they found themselves up against an ‘iron wall,’ when they realize they had no alternative but to accept Jewish settlement.”(John Mulhall, America And The Founding of Israel , p. 90).

In 1922, the new League of Nations issued its Mandate for Palestine, which formalized Britain’s governance of the country. The Mandate, in an extraordinary gift to the Zionist movement, not only integrated the Balfour Declaration’s text verbatim, but also significantly expanded the declaration’s commitments. The document starts with a reference to Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, which states that for *“certain communities … their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized.” * It proceeds by pledging an international commitment to uphold the Balfour Declaration’s provisions. This sequence clearly implies that only one people in Palestine is to be recognized as having national rights: the Jewish people. This was in contrast to every other Middle Eastern mandated territory, where Article 22 of the covenant was applied to the entire population and was ultimately intended to eventually grant some measure of independence. (Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, p. 34.)

In the 3rd paragraph of the Mandate’s preamble, the Jewish people, and only the Jewish people, are defined as having a historic linkage to Palestine. According to the drafters, the country’s entire 2000 year old built environment, including villages, shrines, castles, mosques, churches, and monuments from the Ottoman, Mameluke, Ayyubid, Crusader, Abbasid, Umayyad, Byzantine, and earlier periods, belonged to no people at all, or only to amorphous religious groups. There were people there, without a doubt, but they had no history or collective existence, and could therefore be ignored. The roots of what the Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling called the “politicide” of the Palestinian people are on full display in the Mandate’s preamble. The most effective method to eradicate a people’s right to their land is to deny their historical ties to it.

There is no mention of the Palestinians as a people with national or political rights in the subsequent twenty-eight articles of the Mandate. Indeed, as was the case with the Balfour Declaration, the terms “Arab” and “Palestinian” are ignored. For the overwhelming bulk of Palestine’s population, the only safeguards envisaged were personal and religious rights and the maintenance of the status quo at holy sites. In contrast, the Mandate outlined the critical steps for creating and expanding the Jewish people’s national home, which, according to its drafters, the Zionist movement was “reconstituting.”

7 of the 28 articles of the Mandate are committed to the privileges and facilities to be extended to the Zionist movement in order to carry out national home policy. The Zionist movement, in the form of the Jewish Agency in Palestine, was explicitly defined as the country’s official representative of the Jewish population, despite the fact that prior to the mass immigration of committed European Zionists, the Jewish community consisted primarily of religious or mizrahi Jews who were largely non-Zionist or even rejected Zionism. Of course, no such official representative for the unnamed Arab majority was designated.

Article 2 of the Mandate offered for self-governing institutions; nevertheless, the context demonstrates that this provision was applied only to the yishuv, what Palestine’s Jewish population was referred to, while the Palestinian majority was continuously refused entry to such institutions. (Subsequent concessions on representation, such as the British proposal for an Arab Agency, were conditional on equal representation for the tiny minority and the large majority, as well as Palestinian acceptance of the terms of the Mandate, which clearly neutralised their existence.) Representative institutions for the entire country on a democratic basis and endowed with real power were never offered ( in keeping with Lloyd George’s private assurance to Weizmann), naturally because the Palestinian majority would have voted to end the Zionist movement’s privileged position in their country.

One of the Mandate’s central provisions was Article 4, which granted the Jewish Agency quasi-governmental status as a “public body” with broad economic and social authority powers, and the ability “to assist and take part in the development of the country” in its entirety.

Apart from establishing the Jewish Agency as a partner of the mandatory government, this provision enabled it to obtain international diplomatic status, allowing it to represent Zionist interests formally before the League of Nations and elsewhere. Normally, such representation was associated with sovereignty, and the Zionist movement made extensive use of it to enhance its international standing and function as a para-state. Again, despite repeated demands, no such powers were granted to the Palestinian majority during the entire 3 decades of the Mandate. (Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, p. 35.)

The 6th article obliged the mandatory power to aid Jewish immigration and promote “close settlement by Jews on the land”, a important provision given the importance of demographics and land ownership over the century of conflict between Zionism and the Palestinians. This provision laid the groundwork for major Jewish population growth and the acquisition of strategically positioned lands that allowed the country’s geographical backbone to be controlled along the coast, in eastern Galilee, and in the vast fertile Marj Ibn ‘Amer valley that connected them.

The 7th article established a nationality law to make it easier for Jews to get Palestinian citizenship. This similar law was used to prohibit Palestinians seeking to return to their homeland who had moved to the Americas during the Ottoman Empire. {{{2 great articles in the Journal of Palestine Studies 46, no. 2 (Winter 2017) deal with this topic: Lauren Banko, “Claiming Identities in Palestine: Migration and Nationality Under the Mandate,” 26–43; and Nadim Bawalsa, “Legislating Exclusion: Palestinian Migrants and Interwar Citizenship,” 44–59.}}} Thus, regardless of their origins, Jewish immigrants were able to get Palestinian citizenship, although native Palestinian Arabs who were overseas during the time of the British occupation were denied it.

Finally, other articles gave the Jewish Agency the power to take over or establish public works, let each town to maintain schools in its own language (which gave the Jewish Agency authority over much of the yishuv’s school system), and proclaimed Hebrew the country’s official language.

In summary, the Mandate essentially permitted the establishment of a Zionist administration analogous to that of the British mandatory government, which was charged with cultivating and supporting it. This parallel body was intended to perform many of the functions of a sovereign state for a segment of the population, including democratic representation and control over health, public works, education, and international diplomacy. This entity lacked only military force in order to enjoy all of the attributes of sovereignty. That would occur in due course.

To fully grasp the devastation the mandate caused to Palestinians, it is worth returning to Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations and looking at a confidential memo written by Lord Balfour in September 1919. For areas formerly part of the Ottoman Empire, Article 22 (“provisionally”) recognized their “existence as independent nations.” The context for this article in regards to the Middle East involves repeated British promises of independence to all Arabs in Ottoman domains in exchange for their support against the Ottomans during World War I, as well as Woodrow Wilson’s proclamation of self-determination. Indeed, every other mandated territory in the Middle East eventually achieved independence. (Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, p. 37.)

Only the Palestinians were denied these benefits, while the Jewish population in Palestine obtained representative institutions and advanced toward self-rule as a result of Article 22 of the covenant. For decades, British officials maintained disingenuously and staunchly that Palestine to be excluded from wartime pledges of Arab independence. However, when relevant excerpts from the Husayn-McMahon correspondence were made public for the first time in 1938, the British government was forced to acknowledge that the language used was at best ambiguous.{{{George Antonius, in The Arab Awakening (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1938), was the 1st to divulge the specifics of Britain’s wartime promises to the Arabs, as well as the documents that contained them. As a result, the British government was obligated to disclose the full communication.: Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers, Cmd. 5974, Report of a Committee Set Up to Consider Certain Correspondence Between Sir Henry McMahon [His Majesty’s High Commissioner in Egypt] and the Sharif of Mecca in 1915 and 1916 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1939).}}}

As previously stated, one of the officials most directly involved in denying Palestinians of their rights was Lord Arthur Balfour, Britain’s foreign secretary. He was a diffident, worldly patrician and former prime minister, as well as the nephew of long-serving Tory Prime Minister Lord Salisbury. He served for five years as Britain’s chief secretary in Ireland, the empire’s oldest colony, where he earned the label “Bloody Balfour.” {{{Balfour’s appointment to the senior post of chief secretary for Ireland, second only to the lord lieutenant, was widely attributed to his familial ties to the prime minister, Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury, which led directly to the famous expression “Bob’s your uncle.”}}} Amusingly, it was his government that enacted the 1905 Aliens Act, which was intended to keep destitute Jews escaping tsarist pogroms out of the United Kingdom. Although he was a confirmed cynic, he held a few convictions, one of which was Zionism’s usefulness to the British Empire and its proclaimed moral rightness, for which he was recruited by Chaim Weizmann. Despite of this notion, Balfour was insightful about the consequences of his government’s actions, which others preferred to ignore.

Balfour laid out for the cabinet his assessment of the complications Britain had formed in the Middle East as a consequence of its conflicting promises in a confidential memo in September 1919 (it was not made public until it was published over 3 decades later in a compilation of interwar period documents {{{E. L. Woodward and R. Butler, eds., Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919–1939, first series, 1919–1929 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1952), 340–48.}}}). Balfour was scathing in his assessment of the Allies’ various conflicting commitments—including those represented in the Husayn-McMahon correspondence, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and the League of Nations Covenant. After outlining Britain’s incoherent policy in Syria and Mesopotamia, he delivered an unflinching assessment of the situation in Palestine:

The contradiction between the letter of the Covenant and the policy of the Allies 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.… The four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.

In my opinion that is right. What I have never been able to understand is how it can be harmonised with the declaration, the Covenant, or the instructions to the Commission of Enquiry.

I do not think that Zionism will hurt the Arabs; but they will never say they want it. Whatever be the future of Palestine it is not now an “independent nation,” nor is it yet on the way to become one. Whatever deference should be paid to the views of those who live there, the Powers in their selection of a mandatory do not propose, as I understand the matter, to consult them. In short, so far as Palestine is concerned, the Powers have made no statement of fact which is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which, at least in the letter, they have not always intended to violate.

In this brutally frank summary, Balfour set the high-minded “age-long traditions,” “present needs,” and “future hopes” embodied in Zionism against the mere “desires and prejudices” of the Arabs in Palestine, “who now inhabit that ancient land,” implying that its population was no more than transient. Echoing Herzl, Balfour airily claimed that Zionism would not hurt the Arabs, yet he had no qualms about recognizing the bad faith and deceit that characterized British and Allied policy in Palestine. But this is of no matter. The remainder of the memo is a bland set of proposals for how to surmount the obstacles created by this tangle of hypocrisy and contradictory commitments. The only two fixed points in Balfour’s summary are a concern for British imperial interests and a commitment to provide opportunities for the Zionist movement. His motivations were of a piece with those of most other senior British officials involved in crafting Palestine policy; none of them were as honest about the implications of their actions. (Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, pp. 38-39.).

What did these conflicting British and Allied pledges, as well as a mandate system tailored to the Zionist project’s requirements, produce for the Arabs of Palestine in the interwar years? The Palestinians were treated with the same contemptuous condescension as other subject peoples from Hong Kong to Jamaica. Their officials monopolized the Mandate government’s top positions and excluded qualified Arabs;{{{George Antonius’s case was one of numerous egregious examples of this. Although he was clearly qualified and educated at Cambridge, he was repeatedly passed over for high office in the mandate administration in favor of mediocre British officials.: See Susan Boyle, Betrayal of Palestine: The Story of George Antonius (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001); and Sahar Huneidi, A Broken Trust: Sir Herbert Samuel, Zionism, and the Palestinians (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), 2.}}} they censored newspapers, prohibited political activity when it inconvenienced them, and generally ran the most frugal administration possible given their commitments. As was the case in Egypt and India, they made little progress in education, as colonial conventional wisdom held that too much education produced “natives” who were unaware of their proper place. Firsthand accounts from the era are replete with examples of colonial officials’ racist attitudes toward those they regarded as inferiors, even when dealing with knowledgeable professionals who spoke perfect English.

Palestine’s experience was distinct from that of the majority of other colonized peoples during this era in that the Mandate carried an influx of foreign settlers whose intent is taking over the country. During the crucial years from 1917 until 1939, Jewish immigration and the “close settlement by Jews on the land”enjoined by the Mandate proceeded apace. The colonies founded by the Zionist movement along Palestine’s coast and in other fertile and strategically located areas served to ensure control of a territorial springboard for supremacy (and eventually conquest) of the country once the demographic, economic, and military balances shifted sufficiently in favor of the yishuv.{{{Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 210–11.}}} In a short period of time, the Jewish population tripled as a percentage of the total population, rising from about 6% at the end of World War I to about 18% by 1926.

Despite the Zionist movement’s extraordinary capacity to mobilize and invest capital in Palestine (financial inflows to an increasingly self-segregated Jewish economy were 41.5 percent greater than its net domestic product in the 1920s, an astounding level {{{The ratio of capital inflow to Net Domestic Product (NDP) “ did not fall below 33 percent in any of the pre-world war 2 years.” Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel, p. 217.}}}), between 1926 and 1932, the Jewish population as a proportion of the country’s population ceased to grow, stagnating between 17 and 18.5%.{{{Walid Khalidi, ed., From Haven to Conquest, appendix 1, pp. 842–43.}}} Several of these years coincided with the global depression, during which more Jews left Palestine than arrived, and capital inflows plummeted significantly. At the time, it appeared as though the Zionist project would never achieve the critical demographic mass required to make Palestine “as Jewish as England is English,” as Weizmann stated.{{{Speech to the English Zionist Federation, September 19, 1919, cited in Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948 (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992), p. 41.}}}

Everything changed in 1933, when the Nazis took control of Germany and immediately began persecuting and expelling the Jewish community. Many German Jews had nowhere to go but Palestine as a result of discriminatory immigration laws in the United Kingdom, the United States, and other countries. Hitler’s ascension proved to be a watershed moment in the modern history of Palestine and Zionism. In 1935 alone, over 60000 Jewish immigrants arrived in Palestine, more than the total Jewish population of the country in 1917. The majority of these refugees were educated and skilled, primarily from Germany but also from neighboring countries. German Jews were permitted to bring in assets worth $100 million under the terms of a Transfer Agreement reached between the Nazi government and the Zionist movement in exchange for the end of the Jewish boycott of Germany.{{{Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement: The untold story of the secret agreement between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine.}}}

The Jewish economy in Palestine overtook the Arab sector for the first time in the 1930s, and by 1939, the Jewish population had increased to more than 30% of the total population. With rapid economic growth and this rapid population shift occurring over a seven-year period, combined with the significant expansion of the Zionist movement’s military capabilities, it became clear to its leaders that the demographic, economic, territorial, and military nucleus necessary for achieving supremacy over the entire country, or at least the majority of it, would be in place soon. As Ben-Gurion put it at the time, *”immigration at the rate of 60,000 a year means a Jewish state in all Palestine.” (BEN-GURION and the Palestinian Arabs, Shabtai Teveth, pp. 166-168.).

Numerous Palestinians came to the same conclusion. Palestinians now recognized that, as ‘Isa al-‘Isa had warned in desperate tones in 1929, they were inevitably transforming into foreigners in their own land. Throughout the first 2 decades of British occupation, the Palestinians’ growing opposition to the Zionist movement’s increasing dominance manifested itself in periodic outbreaks of violence, despite the Palestinian leadership’s commitment to the British to keep their followers in line. In rural areas, sporadic attacks, frequently referred to as “banditry” by the British and Zionists, reflected popular outrage over Zionist land acquisitions, which frequently resulted in the expulsion of peasants from lands they considered to be theirs and which provided their livelihood. Demonstrations in cities against British rule and the expansion of the Zionist parastate grew larger and more militant in the early 1930s.

To maintain control of the situation, the elite notables organized a pan-Islamic conference, sending several delegations to London and organizing various forms of protest. However, unwilling to confront the British directly, these leaders resisted Palestinian calls for a complete boycott of the British government and a tax strike. They remained blind to the fact that their timid diplomatic approach could never persuade any British government to abandon Zionism or to accept Palestinian demands. As a result, these elite efforts failed to halt the Zionist project or advance the Palestinian cause in any meaningful way. Nonetheless, in response to growing Palestinian agitation, and particularly in the aftermath of outbreaks of violent unrest, successive British governments were compelled to reconsider their policies toward Palestine. As a result, a number of commissions of inquiry and white papers were established. Notable ones include:

1. The Hayward Commission (established in 1920)
2. The Churchill White Paper (established in 1922)
3. The Hayward Commission (established in 1920)
4. The Churchill White Paper (established in 1922)
5. The Shaw Commission (established in 1929)
6. The Hope-Simpson Report (established in 1930)
7. The Passfield White Paper (established in 1930)
8. The Peel Commission (established in 1937)
9. The Woodhead Commission (established in 1938)

However, these policy papers either recommended only limited measures to appease the Palestinians (the majority of which were rescinded by the British government in response to Zionist pressure) or proposed a course of action that exacerbated their profound sense of injustice. As a result, Palestine experienced an unprecedented, country-wide violent explosion beginning in 1936.

In the early 1930’s, Ben-Gurion finally admitted the mistake of trying to bribe or buy the Palestinian national movement, rather than working with it, he stated in a Mapai forum:

“We have erred for ten years now . . . the crux is not cooperation with the English, but with the [Palestinian] Arabs.” By this, he meant not merely a relationship of friendship and mutual aid, but political cooperation, which he called the “cornerstone” of the “Arab-Jewish-English rule in Palestine. Let’s not deceive ourselves and think that when we approach the [Palestinian] Arabs and tell them ‘We’ll build schools and better your economic conditions,’ that we have succeeded. Let’s not think that the [Palestinian] Arabs by nature are different from us.”

In the heat of the argument, Ben Gurion said to one of his critics and asked:“Do you think that, by extending economic favors to the [Palestinian] Arabs, you can make them forget their political rights in Palestine?”

Did Mapai believe that by aiding the Palestinian Arabs to secure decent housing and grow bumper crops they could persuade the Palestinian Arabs to regard themselves “as complete stranger in the land which is theirs?” (BEN-GURION and the Palestinian Arabs, Shabtai Teveth, p. 104.).

In a book Ben-Gurion published in 1931 (titled: We and Our Neighbors), he admitted that Palestinian Arabs had the same rights as Jews to exist in Palestine. He stated:

“The Arab community in Palestine is an organic, inseparable part of the landscape. It is embedded in the country. The [Palestinian] Arabs work the land, and will remain.”

Ben-Gurion even held that the Palestinian Arabs had full rights in Palestine, ” since the only right by which a people can claim to possess a land indefinitely is the right conferred by willingness to work.” They had the same opportunity to establish that right as the Zionists did. (BEN-GURION and the Palestinian Arabs, Shabtai Teveth, pp. 5-6.).

On May 27, 1931, Ben Gurion recognized that the “Arab question” is a:

“Tragic question of fate” that arose only as a consequence of Zionism, and so was a “question of Zionist fulfillment in the light of Arab reality.” In other words, this was a Zionist rather than an Arab question, posed to Zionists who were perplexed about how they could fulfill their aspirations in a land already inhabited by a Palestinian Arab majority. (BEN-GURION and the Palestinian Arabs, Shabtai Teveth, p. XII, preface.).

As the number of Jews in Palestine (Yishuv) doubled between 1931-1935, the Palestinian people became threatened with being dispossessed and for Jews becoming their masters. The Palestinian political movement was becoming more vocal and organized, which surprised Ben Gurion. In his opinion, the demonstrations represented a “turning point” important enough to warrant Zionist concern. As he told Mapai comrades :

“. . . They [referring to Palestinians] showed new power and remarkable discipline. Many of them were killed . . . this time not murderers and rioters, but political demonstrators. Despite the tremendous unrest, the order not to harm Jews was obeyed. This shows exceptional political discipline. There is no doubt that these events will leave a profound imprint on the [Palestinian] Arab movement. This time we have seen a political movement that must evoke the respect of the world. (BEN-GURION and the Palestinian Arabs, Shabtai Teveth, p. 126.).

The Palestinian people’s frustration with their leadership’s ineffective response after fifteen years of congresses, demonstrations, and fruitless meetings with obstinate British officials culminated in a massive grassroots uprising. This began with a six-month general strike, one of the longest in colonial history, which was initiated spontaneously throughout the country by groups of young urban middle-class militants (many of whom were members of the Istiqlal Party). The strike eventually culminated in the great 1936–39 revolt, which was the defining event of Palestine’s interwar period. (Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, pp. 41-42.)

For Ben-Gurion as for others, the Palestinians were not a distinct people but merely “ Arabs”-the “Arab population’‘or “Arab community” that happened to reside in the country, and he denied their political rights. As a justification, Ben-Gurion stated in 1936:

“There is no conflict between Jewish and Arab nationalism because the Jewish nation is not in Palestine and the Palestinians are not a nation.” (Nur Masalha, Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 19).

Ben-Gurion was impressed by Izz al-Din al-Qassam’s heroism in the mid-1930s, and he predicted Qassam’s example would have a far-reaching effect on the Palestinian national movement. Ben-Gurion stated two weeks after Qassam’s fateful battle with the British occupation nearby Ya’bad-Jenin:

“This is the event’s importance. We would have educated our youth without Tel-Hai [an encounter with Palestinians in the Galilee in the early 1920s] because we have other important values, but the [Palestinian] Arab organizers have had less to work with. The [Palestinian] Arabs have no respect for any leader. They know that every single one is prepared to sell out the Arab people for his personal gain, and so the Arabs have no self-esteem. Now, for the first time, the [Palestinian] Arabs have seen someone offer his life for the cause. This will give the [Palestinian] Arabs the moral strength which they lack.”

Ben-Gurion also stressed that:

“This is not Nashashibi and not the Mufti. This is not the motivation out of career or greed. In Shaykh Qassam, we have a fanatic figure prepared to sacrifice his life in martyrdom. Now there are not one but dozens, hundreds, if not thousands like him. And the Arab people stand behind them.” (BEN-GURION and the Palestinian Arabs, Shabtai Teveth, p. 126.).

After Ben-Gurion’s encounter with George Antonius in May 1936, he was willing to concede the existence of a conflict, between the Palestinian Arabs and Jewish nationalism, for the first time in public. He stated:

“There is a conflict, a great conflict.” not in the economic but the political realm. “There is a fundamental conflict. We and they want the same thing: We both want Palestine. And that is the fundamental conflict.” (BEN-GURION and the Palestinian Arabs, Shabtai Teveth, p. 166).

 

“I now say something which contradicts the theory which once had on this question. At one time, I thought an agreement [with Palestinians] was possible.”

Ben-Gurion attached some reservations to this statement. A settlement might be possible between both peoples in the widest sense, between the entire “Jewish people” and the entire Arab people. But such an agreement could be achieved ” once they despair of preventing a Jewish Palestine.” (BEN-GURION and the Palestinian Arabs, Shabtai Teveth, p. 171).

It should be noted that this statement signaled a shift in Ben-Gurion’s mindset. Ironically, his conclusion is in complete agreement with Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s IRON WALL doctrine. When Jabotinsky first came out with his famous doctrine in the early 1920s, Ben Gurion and many other Zionists in the Labor movement branded him as a “racist”. As the previous quote demonstrates, Ben-Gurion finally recognized that Zionism had to rely on the IRON WALL doctrine for it to become a reality.

Unfortunately for the Palestinian people, according to Ben-Gurion that was a matter of “life or death” for Zionism and Jews.

Over no issue was the conflict so severe as the question of immigration:

“Arab leaders see no value in the economic dimension of the country’s development, and while they will concede that our immigration has brought material blessings to Palestine [where exclusively Jewish labor was always the rule], they nevertheless contend—and from the [Palestinian] Arab point of view, they are right—that they want neither the honey nor the bee sting.” (BEN-GURION and the Palestinian Arabs, Shabtai Teveth, p. 166).

In 1936 (soon after the outbreak of the First Palestinian Intifada/Great Palestinian revolt, not to be confused with the 1st intifada that started in 1987), Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary:

“The [Palestinian] Arabs fear of our power is intensifying, [Palestinian Arabs] see exactly the opposite of what we see. It doesn’t matter whether or not their view is correct…. They see [Jewish] immigration on a giant scale …. they see the Jews fortify themselves economically .. They see the best lands passing into our hands. They see England identify with Zionism. ….. [Palestinian Arabs are] fighting dispossession… The fear is not of losing the land, but of losing the homeland of the Arab people, which others want to turn into the homeland of the Jewish people. There is a fundamental conflict. We and they want the same thing: We both want Palestine ….. By our very presence and progress here, [we] have matured the [Arab] movement.” (Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 136).

He also stated in a meeting with his Mapai party:

” …. the [Palestinian Arabs] fear is not of losing land, but of losing the homeland of the Arab people, which others want to turn into the homeland of the Jewish people. The [Palestinian] Arab is fighting a war that cannot be ignored. He goes out on strike, he is killed, he makes great sacrifices.” (Nur Masalha, Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 18).

-In 1936, Moshe Sharett spoke in a similar vein:

“Fear is the main factor in [Palestinian] Arab politics. . . . There is no Arab who is not harmed by Jews’ entry into Palestine.”(Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 136).

In the 2 decades following 1917, the Palestinians were unable to establish an overall strategy for their national movement comparable to Egypt’s Wafd, India’s Congress Party, or Ireland’s Sinn Fein. Nor did they appear to maintain a united national front, as some other peoples resisting colonialism did. Their efforts were thwarted by the hierarchical, conservative, and split nature of Palestinian society and politics, which is characteristic of many in the region, and exacerbated by the mandatory authorities’ sophisticated policy of divide and rule, which was facilitated by the Jewish Agency. After hundreds of years of maturation in Ireland, India, and Egypt, this colonial strategy may have reached its pinnacle of perfection in Palestine.

British policies aimed at dividing the Palestinians included co-opting factions of their elite, pitting members of the same family, such as the Husaynis, against one another, and fabricating baseless “traditional institutions” and other posts to serve their purposes. (For more details, see R. Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 54–62. The “job interview” is discussed on pp. 59–60.).

Although divide and rule tactics were relatively successful until the mid-1930s, the six-month general strike of 1936 was a popular and spontaneous eruption from the bottom up that surprised the British, Zionists, and the elite Palestinian leadership, compelling the latter to put aside its divisions. As a result, the Arab Higher Committee was established to lead and represent the entire Arab majority, despite the fact that the British never recognised the AHC as representative. The committee was entirely composed of men, all of whom were wealthy, and all of whom were members of the Palestinian elite in its service, landowning, and merchant wing. The AHC attempted to take control of the general strike, but their most significant accomplishment was brokering its end in the fall of 1936 at the request of several Arab rulers acting essentially at the behest of their British patrons. They assured the Palestinian leadership that the British would compensate them for their losses.

The intervention’s disappointing outcome came in July 1937, when a Royal Commission appointed by Lord Peel to investigate the unrest in Palestine proposed partitioning the country, creating a small Jewish state on approximately 17% of the territory from which over 200 thousand Arabs would be expelled (expulsion was euphemistically referred to as “transfer”). The remainder of the country was to remain under British control or be handed over to Britain’s client, Amir ‘Abdullah of Transjordan, which amounted to much the same thing from a Palestinian perspective. Once again, Palestinians were treated as though they lacked a national identity and collective rights.

The Peel Commission’s achievement of fundamental Zionist goals of statehood and expulsion of Palestinians, albeit not in all of Palestine, combined with its denial of the Palestinians’ fervently desired goal of self-determination, pushed the Palestinians into a much more militant stage of their uprising. The October 1937 armed revolt swept the country. It was only two years later that it was brought under control through a massive use of force, just in time for British military units (there were a hundred thousand troops in Palestine at the time, one for every four adult Palestinian men) to be redeployed to fight World War II. While the revolt achieved remarkable temporary victories, it ultimately had a debilitating effect on Palestinians. (Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, pp. 43-44.)

It should be noted that in August 1937, the 20th Zionist Congress rejected the Peel Commission proposed partition plan because the area allotted to the “Jewish state” was smaller than expected by Zionists. On the other hand, the concept of partitioning Palestine into two states was accepted as a launching pad for future Zionist expansions, and to secure unlimited Jewish immigrations.

As the first Intifada erupted/Palestinian Arab revolt in 1936, many Zionists complained that the British Mandate was not doing enough to stop Palestinian resistance (which often was referred to by “terror”). In that regard, Ben-Gurion argued:

“No government in the world can prevent individual terror. . . when a people is fighting for its land, it is not easy to prevent such acts.”

Nor did he criticize the so-called British display of leniency:

“I see why the government feels the need to show leniency towards the [Palestinian] Arabs . . . it is not easy to suppress a popular movement strictly by the use of force.” (BEN-GURION and the Palestinian Arabs, Shabtai Teveth, p. 166).

The leniency of the British colonialism Ben-Gurion talked about, paved the way for the rise and dominion of Zionist colonialism.

Of all the services provided by Britain to the Zionist movement prior to 1939, the armed suppression of Palestinian resistance in the form of the revolt was probably the most valuable. The bloody war waged against the country’s majority, which resulted in the death, imprisonment, or exile of 10% of the adult male Arab population,(Walid Khalidi, From haven to conquest appendix 4, 846–49.) was the best illustration of Jabotinsky’s unvarnished truths about the necessity of using force to achieve the Zionist project’s success. To put an end to the uprising, the British Empire deployed two additional divisions of troops, bomber squadrons, and all the repressive apparatus it had honed over decades of colonial wars.{{{For details of this repression, see Matthew Hughes, “The Banality of Brutality: British Armed Forces and the Repression of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–39,” English Historical Review 124, no. 507 (April 2009), 313–54.}}}

The level of callousness and cruelty displayed extended well beyond summary executions. Shaykh Farhan al-Sadi, an 81 year old rebel leader, was executed in 1937 for possessing a single bullet. That single bullet was sufficient to justify capital punishment under the martial law in effect at the time, even more so for an accomplished guerrilla fighter like al-Sadi.{{{Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, The Palestinian People: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 119.}}}

Numerous such sentences of execution have been handed down following summary trials before military tribunals, with many more Palestinians being executed on the spot by British troops.{{{Segev, One Palestine, Complete, 429–32, contains a chilling account of arbitrary summary executions of Palestinians by mixed units of British soldiers and Zionist militiamen under the command of Orde Wingate. Segev portrays Wingate as a murderous psychopath; he adds that some of his men privately considered him insane. Later, the Israeli Ministry of Defense stated about him: “The teaching of Orde Charles Wingate, his character and leadership were a cornerstone for many of the Haganah’s commanders, and his influence can be seen in the Israel Defense Force’s combat doctrine.”}}}

Infuriated by rebels ambushing their convoys and blowing up their trains, the British resorted to tying Palestinian prisoners to the front of armored cars and locomotives to ward off rebel attack, a tactic they pioneered in an unsuccessful attempt to crush Irish resistance during their war of independence from 1919 to 1921 by using them as human shields.{{{Segev, One Palestine, Complete, 425–26. Numerous Irish campaign veterans, including members of the infamous Black and Tans, were recruited into the British security forces in Palestine. See Richard Cahill, “‘Going Berserk’: ‘Black and Tans’ in Palestine,” Jerusalem Quarterly 38 (Summer 2009), 59–68.}}}

Collective punishment and home demolitions of imprisoned or executed rebels, or presumed rebels or their relatives, were commonplace, another tactic borrowed from the British playbook developed in Ireland. Two additional imperial practices that were widely used to repress the Palestinians were the detention of thousands without charge or trial and the exile of dissident leaders. Some were imprisoned, generally without trial, in over a dozen of what the British dubbed “concentration camps,” the most infamous of which was in Sarafand. (Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, p. 45.).

Following British refusal to meet Palestinian demands, exile of prominent figures, and mass arrests of others, the revolt entered its most violent phase. To put an end to the Palestinian uprising, it took the full might of the British Empire, which could not be unleashed until additional troops became available following the Munich Agreement in September 1938, and nearly another year of fierce fighting.

Despite the sacrifices made, as evidenced by the vast number of Palestinians killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled, and the revolt’s brief success, the Palestinians faced almost entirely negative consequences. By the time the revolt was crushed in the summer of 1939, the brutal British repression, the death and exile of so many leaders, and internal conflict within their ranks had left the Palestinians divided, without direction, and with a crippled economy. This left the Palestinians in an extremely vulnerable position to confront the newly resurgent Zionist movement, which had grown in strength throughout the revolt, obtaining an exorbitant amount of arms and training from the British to assist them in suppressing the uprising .{{{For details on the vast Zionist-British collaboration during the revolt, see Segev, One Palestine, Complete, 381, 42632.}}}

In February 1937, Ben Gurion was on the brink of a far-reaching conclusion, that the Arabs of Palestine were a separate people, distinct from other Arabs and deserving of self-determination. He stated:

“The right which the Arabs in Palestine have is one due to the inhabitants of any country . . . because they live here, and not because they are Arabs . . . The Arab inhabitants of Palestine should enjoy all the rights of citizens and all political rights, not only as individuals but as a national community, just like the Jews.”(BEN-GURION and the Palestinian Arabs, Shabtai Teveth, p. 170.).

Peculiarly, Ben-Gurion empathised with the Palestinian people. He stated in a letter to Moshe Sharett in 1937:

“Were I an Arab, and Arab with nationalist political consciousness . . . I would rise up against an immigration liable in the future to hand the country and all of its [Palestinian] Arab inhabitants over to Jewish rule. What [Palestinian] Arab cannot do his math and understand what [Jewish] immigration at the rate of 60,000 a year means a Jewish state in all of Palestine.” (BEN-GURION and the Palestinian Arabs, Shabtai Teveth, pp. 171-172.).

Ironically, In 1938, Ben-Gurion also stated against the backdrop of the First Palestinian Intifada:

“When we say that the Arabs are the aggressors and we defend ourselves —- that is ONLY half the truth. As regards our security and life we defend ourselves. . . . But the fighting is only one aspect of the conflict, which is in its essence a political one. And politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves.” (Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 652).

The purported foundational mythology of the state of Israel actively denies Palestinians any iota of moral justification for resisting the Zionist conquest and colonization of their homes and lands that began with the First Aliyah in 1882. From its inception, Palestinian resistance has been demonized and portrayed as being uniquely motivated by anti-Semitism. It was long accused of promoting a non-ending anti-Semitic terror campaign that manifested itself with the arrival of the first settlers and has been pervasive until the establishment of the state of Israel.

Zionist leaders referred to Palestinian nationalism, especially as of the mid-1930s during the Palestinian Arab revolt, as German Nazism. Thus Yitzhak Tabenkin, one of the most important Labor leaders of the Yishuv and a leading ideologue of the kibbutz movement, described the Palestinian national movement in his May Day speech of 1936 as a “Nazi” movement, with which there was no possibility of compromise.(Yitzhak Tabenkin, Deuarim [Speeches], Vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: 1972), p.264.)

A few months later. Berl Katznelson, one of the three most important Labor leaders of the Yishuv (along with Ben-Gurion and Tabenkin) referred to Palestinian nationalism in a speech to Mapai members as “Nazism,” and spoke of “typical Arab bloodlust. (“Berl Katznelson, “Self-restraint and Defense,” a speech dated 28 August 1936, in Ketauim [Writings], Vol. 8 (Tel Aviv: 1948), pp.209-26.)

On another occasion, in January 1937, he spoke of “Arab fascism and imperialism and Arab Hitlerism.“ (A speech at the Mapai Council, Haifa, 23 January 1937, cited in Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs, 1882-/948, p.253.)

As war clouds gathered over Europe in 1939, however, significant new global challenges to the British Empire combined with the Arab Revolt to precipitate a significant shift in London’s policy away from its previous unwavering support for Zionism. While Zionists had cheered Britain’s decisive crushing of Palestinian resistance, this new development placed their leaders in a precarious position. As Europe slid inexorably toward another world war, the British recognized that, like the previous one, this one would be fought in part on Arab soil. It was now critical for imperial core strategic interests to improve Britain’s image and defuse the fury in Arab countries and the Islamic world over the Great Revolt’s forcible repression, all the more so as these areas were inundated with Axis propaganda about British atrocities in Palestine. A January 1939 cabinet report, recommending a course correction in Palestine, emphasized the critical nature of “winning the confidence of Egypt and the neighbouring Arab states.”{{{British National Archives, Cabinet Papers, CAB 24/283, “Committee on Palestine: Report,” January 30, 1939, 24.}}} The report included a comment from India’s secretary of state, who stated that “the Palestine problem is not merely an Arabian problem, but is fast becoming a Pan-Islamic problem”; he warned that if the “problem” was not addressed properly, “serious trouble in India must be apprehended.”{{{Ibid., 27. }}} A spring 1939 conference in London’s St. James’s Palace involving representatives of Palestinians, Zionists, and Arab states resulted in abject failure; thus, in an attempt to appease outraged Palestinian, Arab, and Indian Muslim opinion, Neville Chamberlain’s government issued a White Paper. This document advocated for a significant reduction in Britain’s ties to the Zionist movement. It proposed severe restrictions on Jewish immigration and land sales (two major Arab demands) and committed to establishing representative institutions within five years and self-determination within ten (the most important demands). While immigration was indeed restricted, none of the other provisions were ever implemented.{{{This was Dr. Husayn’s bitter conclusion after the fact, as he recounted Britain’s broken promises in his memoir, Mada’ahd al-mujamalat, vol. 1, 280}}} Furthermore, representative institutions and self-determination were made conditional on the agreement of all parties, which the Jewish Agency would never consent to for an arrangement that would preclude the establishment of a Jewish state. The minutes of the February 23, 1939, cabinet meeting make it abundantly clear that Britain intended to withhold the substance of these two critical concessions from the Palestinians, as the Zionist movement was to have an effective veto power, which it would undoubtedly exercise.{{{Boyle, Betrayal of Palestine, 13.}}}

In any case, it was already past the point of no return. When the Chamberlain government issued the White Paper, it had only a few months remaining in office; Britain was soon at war; and Winston Churchill, who succeeded Chamberlain as Prime Minister, was perhaps the most ardent Zionist in British public life. More importantly, as World War II grew into a truly global conflict as a result of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and the United States’ entry into the conflict following Pearl Harbor, a new world was about to be born in which Britain would be a second-class power at best. Palestine’s fate would be no longer in its hands. Britain had already exceeded its obligations to its Zionist protege. (Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, p. 49.).

Even if British officials in Palestine became convinced of the unsustainable multiplication of costs associated with maintaining the iron wall to protect the Zionist project (whose leaders were frequently ungrateful for everything done for them), their recommendations were almost always rejected in London. Until 1939, Zionists were able to position their supporters, and occasionally their leaders, such as the formidable Chaim Weizmann, at the elbow of key British decisionmakers in Whitehall, many of whom were also devoutly Zionist. (Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, p. 50.).

Two additional points must be made in conclusion regarding the revolt and Britain’s suppression of it. The first is that it established Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s foresight and the self-delusion of numerous British officials. The colonial enterprise of the Zionists, which aimed to take over the country, was inevitably going to generate resistance. “If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living,” Jabotinsky wrote in 1925, “you must find a garrison for the land, or find a benefactor who will provide a garrison on your behalf.… Zionism is a colonizing venture and, therefore, it stands or falls on the question of armed forces.” (Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians, p. 45.) At least initially, only the armed forces supplied by Britain could overcome the colonized people’s natural resistance.

Much earlier, President Woodrow Wilson’s King-Crane Commission, established in 1919 to ascertain the wishes of the region’s peoples, had reached similar conclusions to those of Jabotinsky. After being informed by representatives of the Zionist movement that it “looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine” in the process of transforming Palestine into a Jewish state, the commissioners reported that none of the military experts they consulted “believed that the Zionist program could be carried out except by force of arms,” and that a force of “not less than 50,000 soldiers would be required” to accheive this goal. In the end, it took more than double that number of troops for the British to defeat the Palestinians from 1936 to 1939. The commissioners forewarned Wilson in a cover letter that “if the American government decided to support the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, they are committing the American people to the use of force in that area, since only by force can a Jewish state in Palestine be established or maintained.”{{{(“The King-Crane Commission Report, August 28, 1919,” http://www.hri.org/docs/king-crane/syria-recomm.html.)}}}Thus, the commission accurately predicted the subsequent century’s course.

The 2nd point is that both the revolt and its repression, as well as the subsequent successful implementation of the Zionist project, were direct, inescapable consequences of the Balfour Declaration’s policies and the belated implementation of the declaration of war contained in Balfour’s words. Balfour did “not think that Zionism will hurt the Arabs,” and initially appeared to believe that there would be little reaction to the Zionists seizing control of their country.

However, as George Orwell put it, “sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield,”{{{George Orwell, “In Front of Your Nose,” Tribune, March 22, 1946, reprinted in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 4, In Front of Your Nose, 1945–50, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968), 124.}}} which is precisely what happened on the battlefield during the Great Revolt, to the lasting detriment of the Palestinians.

After 1917, the Palestinians were caught in a triple bind that may have been unprecedented in the history of resistance to colonial-settler movements. Unlike the majority of other colonized peoples, they had to contend not only with the colonial power in the metropole, in this case London, but also with a unique colonial-settler movement that, while dependent on Britain, was self-sufficient, had its own national mission, a seductive biblical justification, and an established international base and financing. According to a British official in charge of “Migration and Statistics,” the British government was not “the colonizing power here; the Jewish people are the colonizing power.”{{{The official was E. Mills, who was cited in Leila Parson for his secret testimony to the Peel Commission, “The Secret Testimony to the Peel Commission: A Preliminary Analysis,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 49, no. 1 (Fall 2019)}}} Making matters worse, Britain did not rule Palestine directly; it did so as a League of Nations mandatory power. It was thus bound not only by the Balfour Declaration, but also by the international commitment embodied in the 1922 Palestine Mandate.

Protests and disturbances have repeatedly prompted British administrators on the ground and in London to recommend policy changes. However, Palestine was not a crown colony or other type of colonial possession in which the British government exercised complete autonomy. If it appeared as though Palestinian pressure would compel Britain to violate the letter or spirit of the Mandate, there was intense lobbying in the League’s Permanent Mandates Commission in Geneva to remind the League of its overarching obligations to the Zionists.{{{The most comprehensive examination of the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission’s supervision of the Palestine Mandate is Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).}}} Due to Britain’s adherence to these obligations, it was too late to reverse the country’s transformation or to alter the lopsided balance of forces that had developed between the two sides by the end of the 1930s.

The Palestinians’ great initial disadvantage was exacerbated by the Zionist organization’s massive capital investments, strenuous labor, sophisticated legal maneuvers, intensive lobbying, effective propaganda, and covert and overt military means. Armed units of the Jewish colonists developed semi-secretly until the British permitted the Zionist movement to operate military formations openly in response to the Arab revolt.The Jewish Agency’s collusion with the mandatory authorities reached a zenith at this point. Objective historians agree that this collusion, facilitated by the League of Nations, severely undermined the Palestinians’ struggle for representative institutions, self-determination, and independence.{{{Segev debunks the myth that the British were pro-Arab throughout the Mandate period, a myth cherished by Zionist historiography in One Palestine, Complete.}}}

When the British withdrew from Palestine in 1948, there was no need to re-establish the apparatus of a Jewish state. Indeed, that apparatus had been operating under British auspices for decades. All that remained to fulfill Herzl’s foresight was for this pre-existing para-state to flex its military muscle against the weakened Palestinians while achieving formal sovereignty, which it did in May 1948. Thus, the fate of Palestine had been decided thirty years earlier, though the denouement did not occur until the end of the Mandate, when the indigenous Palestinian majority was finally ejected by force and only Jews were granted access to the land and its resources. (Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, pp. 53-54.)