War and Game

British rule in Palestine was formalized when the League of Nations approved a British mandate for this former Ottoman possession in July 1922. The key clauses of the Balfour Declaration were incorporated into the mandate. This allowed the Yishuv to develop extensive educational and welfare services and to acquire large parcels of land from Arab landowners, absentee landlords, and peasants. Landmark institutions, such as the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, were opened and the Histadrut, the General Federation of Hebrew Workers in Palestine, was established. This body played a central role in rapidly developing the construction, industrial, and agricultural sectors in a period of rising Jewish immigration. A 1922 census estimated the total population of Palestine at 752,048, of which Muslims numbered 589,177 (78 percent of the population) and Jews numbered 83,790 (11 percent of the population). By 1947 the Jews comprised 31 percent of a total population of over 1.7 million.

This rise in the Jewish population was largely a result of an influx of Jews escaping Nazi persecution in Europe. However, Palestine’s Arabs viewed Jewish immigration into Palestine as a political rather than a humanitarian issue. In 1921, 1930, and 1936 Palestinian Arab delegations visited London to express opposition to Zionism and continued immigration. There were also riots in 1920 and 1921 and a violent attack on Hebron’s Jewish residents in 1929.

Haj Amin (Amin al-Husayni; 1893–1974), a member of a leading Palestinian Arab family, dominated Palestinian Arab politics during this period. Appointed grand mufti (expounder of Muslim law) by the British in 1921, he also headed the Arab higher committee, the de facto Arab leadership in Palestine. He played a key role in the Arab revolt against British rule that began in 1936. He also led Arab opposition to the July 1937 recommendation of the royal commission on Palestine (the Peel Commission) that called for the abrogation of the mandate and the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states with a permanent mandate for Jerusalem.

In November 1938 the Woodhead Commission, set up to examine the feasibility of partition, rejected the Peel proposals as unworkable. In May 1939 the British government introduced the Palestine White Paper. This document severely restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine to a maximum of seventy-five thousand between April 1939 and 1944, after which time ‘‘no further Jewish immigration will be permitted unless the Arabs of Palestine are prepared to acquiesce in it.’’

Following the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, the Palestinian Arab community showed little interest in opposing the Nazi menace and the mufti’s position as Arab Palestine’s most popular political leader was not diminished by his cooperation with Nazi Germany during the war. The Yishuv contributed greatly to the struggle against Nazism, but the war years saw a severe breakdown in relations between the Zionists and the British government over the White Paper policy, which was viewed as a subversion of the Jewish national revival in Palestine and the abandonment of European Jewry to their Nazi persecutor.

As such, in May 1942 the mainstream Zionist leadership for the first time officially endorsed the call for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, as opposed to a Jewish national home. At the same time extremist Jewish groups like the Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Stern Gang increased their attacks against British targets in Palestine, the most notorious of which was the 1946 bombing of the British military headquarters at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem that killed ninety-one people.

In 1947, in the face of Jewish insurgency and Arab hostility, Britain turned the Palestine problem over to the United Nations. On 29 November 1947 the United Nations approved (by 33 votes to 13 with 10 abstentions) a plan calling for the partition of Palestine into two independent states—one Jewish, the other Arab—linked in an economic union, with Jerusalem placed under an international regime.