The British Mandate

On 2 November 1917, before the war in the Middle East had even finished, the British government issued a short letter. Written by Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, it read in part that the government would "view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people," while adding that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine." At the time, those "existing non-Jewish communities" made up roughly 90 percent of the population.

The Balfour Declaration was not a treaty and not, in any formal sense, Britain's to make: Palestine was still Ottoman territory when it was written. But once Britain took control, first as a military occupier and then, from 1922, under a League of Nations Mandate, the declaration became the guiding document of British policy. The Mandate's own text incorporated Balfour's promise almost word for word, obliging Britain to facilitate Jewish immigration while also "safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion." Political rights were mentioned only for one side. Palestinian Arabs read that omission correctly, and objected to it from the start.

Two promises that did not fit together

Historians still debate how much Britain's wartime promises to Arab leaders (made through the McMahon-Hussein correspondence of 1915–16, which discussed Arab independence in exchange for revolt against the Ottomans) overlapped with Palestine. What is not in serious dispute is that Britain spent the Mandate years trying to govern a population that had been promised, in effect, two incompatible futures. Palestinian Arabs wanted the self-determination that had been extended to other former Ottoman territories, such as Iraq and Transjordan. Zionist leaders wanted continued, and increasing, Jewish immigration and land purchase, building toward a Jewish state.

Immigration rose steadily and then sharply. The Jewish population of Palestine grew from around 60,000 in 1918 to roughly 175,000 by 1931 and close to 630,000 by 1946, driven above all by the catastrophe engulfing European Jewry: Nazi persecution from 1933 and, from 1941, the Holocaust. Zionist land-purchasing organisations, principally the Jewish National Fund, continued to buy land from absentee and local owners, and in many cases the Arab tenant farmers who had worked that land for generations were evicted once it changed hands, since British law protected the letter of ownership more than the fact of long tenancy.

The Arab Revolt

Palestinian Arab frustration built through the 1920s and erupted repeatedly: riots in Jerusalem in 1920 and 1921, and a much larger uprising around the Western Wall in 1929 that left over 250 people dead, Arab and Jewish. It reached its height in the Great Arab Revolt of 1936–39, a sustained rebellion against both British rule and Jewish immigration that began with a six-month general strike and grew into an armed insurgency across the hill country.

Britain crushed the revolt with considerable force (mass arrests, demolitions of homes, the execution or exile of Palestinian political leadership), at a cost estimated at around 5,000 Arab dead, alongside roughly 400 Jewish and 200 British deaths. The revolt's suppression is often described as having broken the back of organised Palestinian Arab leadership on the eve of the crisis that mattered most: the years immediately before and after 1948, when that leadership was severely weakened compared to the increasingly well-organised and armed Jewish community (the Yishuv), which had spent the same years building the paramilitary and administrative institutions of a state-in-waiting.

Britain tries, and fails, to find a way out

Alarmed by the revolt, Britain's Peel Commission proposed partition into Arab and Jewish states as early as 1937, the first official partition proposal, and one both sides rejected, for opposite reasons. The 1939 White Paper then swung policy the other way, capping Jewish immigration at 75,000 over five years and envisioning an independent, Arab-majority Palestine within a decade. Zionist leaders saw the White Paper as a betrayal, arriving just as European Jews desperately needed refuge. Palestinian Arab leaders, still reeling from the revolt's suppression, were in no position to capitalise on a policy that, on paper, favoured them.

By 1947, with the horror of the Holocaust newly and fully known, with a Jewish community in Palestine that was armed, organised and increasingly in open revolt against British rule itself (through groups such as the Irgun and Lehi), and with an exhausted Britain unable to govern the territory or reconcile its own contradictory promises, London handed the problem to the newly formed United Nations. It was a Mandate that had lasted three decades and satisfied almost no one.