Britain, Palestine and Empire: The Mandate Years

Rory Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754668084
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317172321
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du Moyen-Orient

In 1948, Britain withdrew from Palestine, bringing to an end its 30 years of rule in the territory. What followed has been well-documented and is perhaps one of the most intractable problems of the post-imperial age. However, the long-standing connection between Britain and Palestine before May 1948 is also a fascinating story. This volume takes a fresh look at the years of the British mandate for Palestine; its politics, economics, and culture. Contributors address themes such as religion, mandatory administration, economic development, policy and counter-insurgency, violence, art and culture, and decolonization. This book will be valuable to scholars of the British mandate, but also more broadly to those interested in imperial history and the history of the West's involvement in the Middle East.

Chapter 1Flawed Foundations: The Balfour Declaration and the Palestine Mandate^*

James Renton

DOI: 10.4324/9781315570006-2

On 2 November 1917 A.J. Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, wrote to Lord Rothschild, the Anglo-Jewish figurehead, to inform him of the Cabinet's declaration of sympathy with Zionist aspirations. The British Government, Balfour stated, ‘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’. This statement was followed by the caveat, ‘it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities’.

The Balfour Declaration has long been seen as a watershed in the history of Zionism and Palestine. It often has been assumed that the Declaration was a profession of genuine support for the aims of political Zionism. Many Jews at the time believed that the British Government intended that it would lead to the establishment of a Jewish State. This view was echoed in the public pronouncements of certain British politicians just after the War, and in the assessment of some historians.¹ Even though many have not gone so far, the presiding view over the years has been that the Declaration was the beginning, and for some the high point, of an intimate alliance between Britain and Zionism, and was of tremendous significance.²

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* This chapter is based on a paper that was given at the Near and Middle East History Seminar at SOAS. I would like to thank the participants for their comments and questions. For their help, I am also most grateful to Monica Gonzalez-Correa, Anthony Grant, Keith Neilson and Jacob Norris.

¹ Isaiah Friedman, The Question of Palestine: British-Jewish-Arab Relations: 1914–1918 (New Brunswick, NJ, 2nd edn, 1992), pp. 311–32; Jon Kimche, The Unromantics: The Great Powers and the Balfour Declaration (London, 1968), p. 48.

² Malcolm Yapp, ‘The Making of the Palestine Mandate’, Middle Eastern Lectures, 1 (1995), pp. 10–12. For an exception, see the nuanced assessment in David Vital, Zionism: The Crucial Phase (Oxford, 1987), pp. 293, 301, 367.

Recently, however, the importance of the Balfour Declaration has been called into question. It has been argued that Balfour's letter did not legally commit the British Government to anything, and could have been revoked as a basis for policy in Palestine before the Mandate came into force in September 1923.³ The real achievement for the Zionists, it has been suggested, was obtaining the pro-Zionist terms of the Mandate, to which the British Government was obliged to adhere.⁴

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³ Sahar Huneidi, A Broken Trust: Herbert Samuel, Zionism and the Palestinians (London, 2001), ch. 3.

⁴ Yapp, ‘The Making of the Palestine Mandate’, pp. 9–27.

Not only was the Mandate a legally binding document, but its commitments to Zionism were more far-reaching than those expressed in the Declaration. The preamble stated that the Mandatory was responsible for putting the Declaration into effect. Going beyond the Declaration, the text then went on to recognise the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine, along with the ‘grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country’. The articles of the Mandate specified that Britain had to secure—not facilitate as per the Declaration—the establishment of ‘the Jewish national home’ (Article 2); be advised by and cooperate with the Zionist organisation to that end (Article 4); and ‘facilitate’ Jewish immigration and ‘encourage’ settlement (Article 6).⁵ These articles gave the Zionist movement a legal framework that enabled it to build the foundations for statehood. The Mandatory was also responsible, however, for developing self-governing institutions for the whole population of Palestine, not just Jews, and for ‘safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine’ (Article 2).⁶

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⁵ The League of Nations. Mandate for Palestine, together with a Note by the Secretary-General relating to its application to the Territory known as Trans-Jordan, under the provisions of Article 25, Cmd. 1785 (1923).

⁶ Ibid.

The Mandate was undoubtedly a more important achievement for the Zionists than the Balfour Declaration. Nonetheless, the Mandate did not surpass the Declaration;⁷ it built upon it. This is a crucial distinction. The concepts that were enunciated in the Declaration—the ‘national home’ and the protection of the civil and religious rights of the ‘non-Jewish communities’—lay at the very heart of the Mandate for Palestine. The problem, however, was that neither the Declaration nor the Mandate defined the ‘national home’. Similarly, the rights of the ‘non-Jewish’ population, how they might be affected by the creation of the ‘national home’, and how they were to be ‘safeguarded’, were not specified. Without any definitions, these loose terms did not provide clear guidelines as to how the country should be governed, or its essential purpose. This ambiguity was a fundamental deficiency of the text of the Mandate, which was inherited from the Balfour Declaration.

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⁷ This has been argued by Yapp, ‘The Making of the Palestine Mandate’, p. 9.

This underlying problem stemmed from the fact that the Declaration was not designed to be the basis for British rule in Palestine; it was not a blueprint, or even a sketch, of principles for governance. Instead, the Balfour Declaration was intended principally as a piece of wartime propaganda, the aims of which had little to do with the Holy Land and its future. The reality that faced British policy-makers in Palestine was that their founding text—the Balfour Declaration—which they had to interpret, had no clear meaning in the first place.⁸ The Declaration was, in short, not fit for the purpose with which it was eventually ascribed.

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⁸ For similar views, see John J. McTague, British Policy in Palestine, 1917–1922 (Lanham, NY, 1983), p. 240; Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration (Jerusalem and London, 1961), p. 552; Yapp, ‘The Making of the Palestine Mandate’, p. 9.

As the Zionist leader, Nahum Sokolow, was attempting to compose the first draft of the Declaration in July 1917 he explained its purpose to a Zionist colleague. It was not, he wrote, an agreement, nor was it a ‘full programme’. Rather, the goal for the Zionists was to obtain a ‘general approval’ of their aims that would be very short, but ‘as pregnant as possible’. It was important, Sokolow believed, that the Zionists did not ask for more than the Government would be willing to give. But once a ‘sympathetic declaration’ was in hand, he hoped that they would ‘gradually get more and more’.⁹ In contrast to Sokolow's hopes for the future, however, the British War Cabinet only intended to give a very qualified and limited assurance of sympathy for Zionism, which, in the end, was even more circumscribed than the Zionist leader had imagined.

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⁹ Nahum Sokolow to Harry Sacher, 10 July 1917, London Zionist Bureau Papers, Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem (hereafter, CZA) Z4/120.

For the British, the principal aim of the Balfour Declaration was to win the allegiance of world Jewry to the Allied cause, especially in the United States and Russia. American financial and material support had been critical to the war effort since 1914. Following the entrance of the United States into the conflict in April 1917, the need to maximise its engagement with the War only grew in significance. With regard to Russia, Britain was faced with the threat of her falling out of the War completely. Since the March revolution, Whitehall was increasingly concerned with the spread of pacifis...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• About the Contributors
• Introduction: Britain, Palestine and Empire: The Mandate Years
• 1 Flawed Foundations: The Balfour Declaration and the Palestine Mandate
• 2 The Impact of League Oversight on British Policy in Palestine
• 3 ‘Our Jerusalem’: Bertha Spafford Vester and Christianity in Palestine during the British Mandate
• 4 Views of Palestine in British Art in Wartime and Peacetime, 1914–1948
• 5 No Holy Statistics for the Holy Land: The Fallacy of Growth in the Palestinian Rural Economy, 1920s–1930s
• 6 The Peel Commission and Partition, 1936–1938
• 7 Lawlessness was the Law: British Armed Forces, the Legal System and the Repression of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–1939
• 8 ‘An Oriental Ireland’: Thinking about Palestine in Terms of the Irish Question during the Mandatory Era
• 9 Palestine, 1945–1948: a View from the High Commissioner’s Office
• Index