The Palestine Mandate:Background

HIST 4339

Outline

• Zionism• Arab nationalism• Britain’s conflicting promises• Structure of empire• Post-WWI events

Palestine Region Before World War I

• 80% Muslim• 10% Christian• 8% Jewish

Zionism

• Modern political movement for Jewish state in Palestine

• Reaction to European anti-Semitism —1880s pogroms in Russia >>>Bilu Manifesto —1894 Dreyfus Affairs in France >>>Herzl’s The Jewish State (1896)

Zionism

• Jewish disillusionment with assimilation, conviction of need for own homeland

Arab Nationalism

• George Antonius as scholar-advocate– Favored pan-Arabism over pan-Islam– The Arab Awakening (1938)

• 1916: Arab uprising against Ottoman rule

Britain’s Conflicting Promises

• 1915-16 McMahon-Hussein Correspondence• 1917 Balfour Declaration• British attempt to play both sides?

Structure of Empire

• Result of imperial structure? (IO, CO, FO, Cabinet, PM)

—Antonius (397): “the British right hand was sometimes completely ignorant of what the left hand had done or was about to do.”

Focus of British Empire in West Asia

• Effort to resolve conflicting promises• Exacerbation of existing religious/ethnic

tensions

Postwar Events

• 1919: Feisal-Weizmann Agreement• 1920: Jewish-Arab violence in Palestine

Postwar Events

• Churchill’s post-Cairo Conference attempts to allay Arab fears: Jewish national home in Palestine would be “good for the world, good for the Jews, good for the British Empire, but also good for the Arabs who dwell in Palestine . . . They shall share in the benefits and progress of Zionism.”