Conflicting Interests in the British Mandate, c1920–45
Why Did Britain End Up Running Palestine?
When the First World War broke out in 1914, Palestine was a province of the Ottoman Empire. By 1920 the Ottomans were defeated and Britain held a League of Nations Mandate over the territory. Britain had won the right to govern Palestine, but it had also made three wartime promises that pulled in different directions. The McMahon-Hussein correspondence of 1915–16 had encouraged Sharif Hussein of Mecca to lead an Arab revolt against the Ottomans by hinting at independence for the Arab lands afterwards. The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 secretly carved up the same Arab lands between Britain and France. The Balfour Declaration of November 1917 then committed Britain to support ‘a national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine.
Britain made three contradictory wartime promises about the Middle East: McMahon-Hussein (1915–16) to Arab leaders, Sykes-Picot (1916) to France, and the Balfour Declaration (1917) to Zionist leaders. The Mandate over Palestine, awarded in 1920 and confirmed in 1922, locked these promises into one ungovernable territory.
Zionism and the Demand for a Jewish Homeland
Zionism was the political movement, founded by Theodor Herzl in 1897, that argued the Jewish people needed their own state to be safe from antisemitism. Pogroms in the Russian Empire and the Dreyfus Affair in France had convinced Herzl that assimilation in Europe would never protect Jewish communities. The First Zionist Congress at Basel in 1897 set Palestine as the target. From the 1880s onwards waves of aliyah brought Jewish immigrants to Palestine. They bought land, drained marshes, founded the city of Tel Aviv in 1909 and built the kibbutz movement — collective farms run on socialist lines. By 1939 the Yishuv — the Jewish community in Palestine — had grown to roughly 450,000 people, around 30 per cent of the population.
Palestinian Arab Nationalism
For the Arab population of Palestine, who in 1920 made up about 90 per cent of inhabitants, the Mandate was experienced as a betrayal. Their leaders had taken Britain’s wartime hints to mean independence. Instead they found Jewish immigration accelerating and land being sold to Zionist settlers, often by absentee landlords living in Beirut or Damascus. Palestinian Arab nationalism developed through institutions such as the Arab Higher Committee under the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini. Riots broke out in 1920, 1921 and 1929, and an open Arab revolt against British rule and Jewish immigration ran from 1936 to 1939. Britain crushed the revolt with around 25,000 troops, but the violence forced policymakers in London to rethink whether the Balfour promise was even achievable.
Top-band answers do not collapse the Mandate dispute into a religious quarrel. The Arab population of Palestine included Christians as well as Muslims, and the conflict was driven by competing nationalisms over the same land. Zionism was a modern political movement responding to European antisemitism; Palestinian Arab nationalism grew out of the wider Arab demand for self-determination after Ottoman rule. Religion mattered — Jerusalem is sacred to Jews, Christians and Muslims — but the central question was who would govern, not whose prayers were correct.
Nazi Persecution and the 1939 White Paper
From 1933 the Nazi seizure of power in Germany triggered a new wave of Jewish refugees seeking entry to Palestine. By 1939 around 60,000 had arrived from Germany alone. Arab leaders feared that a continued flow on this scale would soon turn them into a minority in their own country. Faced with the 1936–39 revolt and the prospect of war with Germany, Britain switched policy. The May 1939 White Paper capped Jewish immigration at 75,000 over the next five years — about 1,500 per month — and promised an independent Palestinian state within ten years.
The 1939 White Paper satisfied no one. Arab leaders rejected it because it allowed any further Jewish immigration. Zionists denounced it as a betrayal at the very moment the Holocaust was beginning — David Ben-Gurion famously declared the Yishuv would ‘fight the war as if there were no White Paper, and fight the White Paper as if there were no war’. As news of Nazi extermination camps reached Palestine, Zionist patience with Britain collapsed.
The 1939 White Paper capped Jewish immigration at 75,000 over five years (1,500 per month) and promised Palestinian independence in ten years. Arabs rejected it because it permitted any further Jewish immigration. Zionists rejected it as a betrayal during the Holocaust.
1945: The Biltmore Programme and a Britain Out of Options
The 1942 Biltmore Conference in New York was a turning point. Until then, mainstream Zionism had pursued a Jewish ‘national home’ that could exist within a British framework. Biltmore demanded an outright Jewish state, unlimited immigration and a Jewish army. By 1945 this position had hardened further: the Holocaust had killed roughly six million European Jews, and the survivors crowded in displaced-persons camps had nowhere to go. Britain emerged from the Second World War economically exhausted, dependent on US loans, and lacking the troops or the will to enforce the 1939 immigration cap. President Truman publicly pressed London to admit 100,000 Holocaust survivors immediately. Britain refused, and Jewish armed groups in Palestine — Haganah, Irgun and Lehi — began a campaign of attacks on British targets that would dominate the next three years.
It is tempting to begin the story in May 1948 when Israel declared independence. An answer on the importance of the end of the Mandate needs pre-1948 material — the Holocaust, the 1942 Biltmore conference, the Arab fear that Jewish immigration would make them a minority, and Britain’s post-war economic exhaustion. The 1948 war did not start on a blank slate. By 1945 the Yishuv was politically organised, militarily armed and convinced Britain would never deliver a Jewish state. Arab leaders were equally convinced any Jewish state would be imposed on the indigenous majority. Both sides had lost faith in the Mandate years before the British finally walked out.