The ambiguity of Basel was rhetorical, a text that avoided the word State so as to close no door. Balfour’s is legal, sixty-seven words that promise a national home for the Jewish people in the same sentence in which they promise to harm no one, and which London signed barely two years after having promised, in writing, Arab independence in exchange for a revolt against the Ottoman Empire. Between 1917 and 1948 that original contradiction was never resolved, it was administered. A League of Nations mandate, a Zionist high commissioner at the head of an Arab-majority territory, and thirty years of organised immigration turned a private letter addressed to a lord into the demographic infrastructure of a State that did not yet exist. Jabotinsky, in the previous episode, imagined an iron wall built by the settlers themselves. Before that wall was built with rifles, an imperial power built it with archives, censuses and commissions of inquiry. At the moment Balfour signed, Jews made up barely six per cent of Palestine’s population, a proportion the mandate would spend three decades quietly rearranging.
Two Promises London Signed at Once
In July 1915, in the middle of the war against the Ottoman Empire, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Henry McMahon, began an exchange of ten letters with Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca, that would run until March 1916. In exchange for an Arab revolt against Istanbul, McMahon promised, with territorial reservations worded as imprecisely as the Basel Programme itself would later be, recognition of Arab independence across a wide swathe of the Near East. The Arab Revolt broke out in June 1916. Thomas Edward Lawrence only joined as a British liaison officer on the ground in October of that same year, several months after the outbreak, not at its origin as the popular account later simplified it. A month earlier, in May 1916, two diplomats, the Briton Mark Sykes and the Frenchman François Georges-Picot, had secretly signed an agreement carving up that same territory between London and Paris, without mentioning any Arab independence. Russia knew of the agreement, the Arabs did not. When the Bolsheviks published it in November 1917, weeks after Balfour, the coincidence finished exposing the pattern, every British promise of those years rested on the assumption that the other parties would never compare the texts with one another.
The declaration that Arthur Balfour, the Foreign Secretary, signed on 2 November 1917 belongs to that same logic of parallel promises, though its origin was less diplomatic improvisation than deliberate wartime calculation. The British War Cabinet discussed the text for months, with Lord Milner and Leo Amery among its drafters, and approved it on 31 October 1917 before Balfour sent it, a day later, to Lionel Walter Rothschild, second Baron Rothschild and president of the British Zionist Federation. Historians disagree on what weighed most in that decision. A century-old version attributes the declaration to British gratitude towards Chaim Weizmann for his contribution to the industrial synthesis of acetone for wartime explosives production, a story Weizmann himself encouraged in his memoirs and which later historians, Tom Segev among them, have downgraded to a founding myth more persuasive than verifiable. The explanations that academic historiography holds with firmer documentary grounding point elsewhere, the declaration’s value as propaganda aimed at Jewish opinion in the United States and in a Russia not yet Bolshevik, two powers whose continued participation in the war worried London in the autumn of 1917, and the imperial strategic interest in securing, after the war, control of a territorial corridor between the Suez Canal and the rest of the empire. Those War Cabinet minutes remained classified for more than fifty years, released only in the 1970s, long after the men who drafted them had died and long after the version built around Weizmann’s acetone had already hardened into public memory.
The decision was not unanimous even within the Cabinet itself. Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India since July 1917 and the only Jewish member of the British government at that time, though not of the restricted five-man War Cabinet that materially drafted the text, opposed the project with a harshness his Christian colleagues did not expect, and in August 1917 submitted a memorandum titled The Anti-Semitism of the Present Government, in which he argued that turning Jews into a nationality apart, with a home of their own in Palestine, amounted to denying them full citizenship in the countries where they already lived, Britain included. Montagu managed to delay the text’s final approval by several weeks. He did not manage to stop it. Lloyd George himself, prime minister since December 1916, had known Weizmann since 1914 thanks to an introduction by Charles Prestwich Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian and an early Zionist ally, a contact that would prove more decisive to the final outcome than any internal objection.
“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.” (Balfour Declaration, 2 November 1917, text as preserved at the National Archives of the United Kingdom)
San Remo and the Letter that Became International Law
A letter of intent does not govern a territory. That required another step, one less cited than Balfour but more decisive in legal terms. Between 19 and 26 April 1920, the Supreme Council of the Allied powers met at San Remo and assigned Britain the mandate over Palestine, incorporating the language of the 1917 declaration literally into the instrument that would make it enforceable. The Council of the League of Nations approved the mandate’s final text on 24 July 1922, and it entered into force on 29 September 1923, once the borders with the French mandates in Syria and Lebanon had been settled. That same covenant, in its Article 22, spoke, for the territories detached from the Ottoman Empire, of a sacred trust of civilisation on behalf of peoples not yet able to stand by themselves. The Palestine mandate was the only one of the class A mandates to incorporate, beyond that generic tutelary formula, the explicit commitment to a national colonisation project belonging to a community that at the time made up less than a tenth of the territory’s population. The historian Susan Pedersen, who has examined the mandate system’s archive in the greatest detail, notes that this double function, tutelage of a majority population and simultaneous sponsorship of a minority national project, had no precedent or parallel in any other territory under League of Nations supervision, a legal anomaly the Council itself never resolved on the merits over the twenty-five years the mandate lasted. Its twenty-eight articles went further still, Article 4 obliged Britain to recognise an appropriate Jewish agency as a public body advising and co-operating with the administration, a clause with no equivalent granted to the territory’s Arab majority in any of the instrument’s other articles.
Herbert Samuel, a British Liberal politician and a declared Zionist, took office in 1920 as the first High Commissioner of Palestine, a post he held until 1925. His appointment aroused immediate suspicion among the Arab population, who saw in him a judge unable to arbitrate neutrally a conflict in which his own community was an interested party. Samuel’s administration proved, in practice, more cautious than his fellow Zionists expected, especially after the 1921 riots, when he temporarily restricted Jewish immigration. The paradox was not resolved by his departure. For the rest of the mandate, the British administration in Jerusalem would have to govern, at once, as a neutral colonial power facing two rival communities and as the legal guarantor of a national project only one of those two communities claimed as its own.
Thirty Years of Demographic Engineering
The 1922 British census recorded a little over seven hundred and fifty thousand people in Palestine, of whom Jews barely exceeded ten per cent. The 1931 census already showed a Jewish community close to seventeen per cent of a population of one million thirty-five thousand. By 1947, on the eve of the mandate’s end, the total population stood at around two million, with a Jewish community approaching a third of the whole. That leap was not the result of spontaneous demographic dynamics, it was the administered product of successive waves of migration that the mandate itself allowed and, at certain periods, restricted with the same discretionary power. The Third Aliyah, between 1919 and 1923, brought mostly young socialist pioneers from the collapsed Russian Empire. Between 1924 and 1929, the Fourth Aliyah brought in a Polish middle class hit by new economic restrictions. The Fifth Aliyah, from 1929 until the outbreak of war in 1939, absorbed tens of thousands of Jews from Germany and central Europe fleeing, with growing urgency after 1933, a regime whose intentions most European chancelleries still preferred not to name in full. A mandate-administration survey completed in 1946 counted just over six hundred thousand Jewish residents against roughly one million two hundred thousand Arabs on the eve of partition, a ratio the founders of the Yishuv, thirty years earlier, would have regarded as a triumph rather than a shortfall.
The Jewish National Fund, founded at the fifth Zionist Congress in 1901, financed much of the systematic land purchases that accompanied those waves, through a legal mechanism, the land acquired became inalienable, leased permanently to Jewish settlers, never resold to Arab owners. According to the land surveys the mandate administration itself completed towards the end of the period, Jewish-owned land never exceeded seven per cent of Palestine’s total territory by 1947, a low figure that nonetheless sufficed to displace an undetermined number of Arab tenant farmers whose land changed hands without their having any say in the matter. That accumulated holding amounted, by the mandate’s end, to close to a million and a half dunams out of a total territory of a little over twenty-six million, concentrated mostly on the coastal plain and in the Jezreel Valley, the country’s two most fertile agricultural regions, and precisely the ones the 1947 partition would end up assigning almost entirely to the future Jewish State.
The best-documented case of that mechanism took place in the Jezreel Valley, where between 1921 and 1925 the Palestine Land Development Company, financed by the Jewish National Fund, bought roughly two hundred thousand dunams from the Sursock family, Lebanese Christian landowners who had never lived in the valley. The operation displaced a number of Arab tenant farmers that historians still dispute, from several thousand according to Stein to considerably higher figures according to Kamen, a pattern both nonetheless document as the most effective, and least visible, mechanism of the entire mandatory colonisation.
Palestine’s Jewish community did not simply grow, it organised itself as a State in miniature inside the mandatory State. The Vaad Leumi, an elected national council, was formed in 1920 as an interlocutor recognised by London, the Histadrut, the labour federation and economic engine of Labour Zionism, was founded that same December, and the Haganah, a self-defence militia, was born in June 1920 as a direct response to the Nabi Musa riots. In 1929, at the mandate text’s own insistence, the Jewish Agency was reorganised to bring in non-Zionist Jewish organisations, widening its international legitimacy without ceding political control to the Labour leadership. When the mandate ended in 1948, that parallel apparatus did not have to invent a State, it only had to announce one.
Between the 1922 census and the estimates preceding the 1947 partition, the Jewish share of Palestine’s population rose from a little over ten per cent to close to a third of the total, while Jewish-owned land stayed below seven per cent of the country’s surface area. (Government of Palestine censuses, 1922 and 1931; Survey of Palestine, 1946)
The Revolts, the Commissions and the Partition No One Signed
Arab resistance to that process did not wait until 1936. The Nabi Musa riots of April 1920 and the Jaffa riots of May 1921 had already left dozens dead on both sides and produced a first generation of British commissions of inquiry, the Palin and the Haycraft, whose reports recommended moderating the pace of immigration without London ever applying them with any consequence. In August 1929, a dispute over access to the Western Wall escalated into a week of violence that left a hundred and thirty-three Jews dead, sixty-seven of them in the Hebron massacre, and a hundred and sixteen Arabs dead, most at the hands of the British forces that put down the riots. The Shaw Commission that investigated those events identified, for the first time with official recognition, the displacement of Arab tenant farmers as a structural cause of the unrest, a finding the 1930 Passfield White Paper translated into a proposal to restrict immigration and land purchases. Weeks of pressure from the World Zionist Organisation, together with Weizmann’s public resignation as a gesture of protest, forced Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald to deactivate those restrictions through a February 1931 letter the Arab press immediately dubbed the black letter.
The Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939 was of another order altogether, a six-month general strike followed by a sustained armed insurgency the British administration put down with a harshness whose exact toll remains disputed. Colonial records of the time speak of around two thousand Arab combatants killed in direct clashes, while historians such as Rashid Khalidi, adding executions, reprisals and out-of-combat deaths those records never counted, put the figure at around five thousand, among them much of a generation’s political and military leadership, alongside roughly three hundred Jews and more than two hundred British soldiers and police officers. In July 1937, in the midst of that violence, the Peel Commission presented the first official proposal to partition Palestine, a Jewish State confined to the coastal plain and Galilee, an Arab State united with Transjordan, and a British-controlled corridor linking Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Jaffa. The Jewish Agency accepted it as a basis for negotiation at the twentieth Zionist Congress in Zurich, in August 1937, by a narrow vote and over the outright opposition of Jabotinsky’s Revisionists, faithful to their doctrine of both banks of the Jordan. The Arab Higher Committee, led by the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, rejected it without qualification. Neither side signed anything, and the proposal died unapplied. The repression that put the revolt down relied heavily on collective measures, house demolitions, administrative detention without trial and the destruction of entire neighbourhoods in Jaffa’s old city, tactics the historian Rashid Khalidi has traced directly into the British counter-insurgency doctrine later exported to other colonial theatres.
What was applied, two years later, was the opposite. The White Paper of May 1939, signed by Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald, capped Jewish immigration at seventy-five thousand people spread over five years, thereafter subject to Arab consent, and restricted land sales to Jews across most of the territory. The Zionist movement denounced it as an open betrayal of Balfour, precisely as central Europe was beginning to close in on its Jewish population. Four months later, in September 1939, the war broke out that would turn that restriction, set down on paper as a mere adjustment of colonial policy, into the exact borderline between survival and extermination for a number of people no one in London, in 1939, yet dared to calculate…
G.S.
Sources
- The Balfour Declaration, 1917 (text and facsimile)
- The Mandate for Palestine, 1922, Council of the League of Nations (full text)
- The Sykes-Picot Agreement, 1916 (text)
- The Hussein-McMahon Correspondence, 1915-1916
- Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate (Henry Holt, 2000)
- Jonathan Schneer, The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Random House, 2010)
- Kenneth W. Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939 (University of North Carolina Press, 1984)
- Charles Kamen, Little Common Ground: Arab Agriculture and Jewish Settlement in Palestine, 1920-1948 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991)
- Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (Metropolitan Books, 2020)
- Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford University Press, 2015)
- Peel Commission Report, 1937 (summary and findings), Jewish Virtual Library
- The MacDonald White Paper, 1939 (text)
- A Survey of Palestine, 1946 (Government of Palestine, census and land ownership data)
