Before Israel and Palestine
Between the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 and the United Nations partition vote of November 1947, a modest province of the Ottoman Empire became the most contested territory on earth. This paper reconstructs how that happened. It argues that the conflict over Palestine cannot be adequately explained as the aggression of one people against another, nor as the innocent collision of two equally powerless communities. It was produced by the intersection of three forces: two modern national movements that emerged in the same decades and made overlapping claims on the same territory; a set of imperial powers that treated the land as a strategic asset and repeatedly subordinated both populations to their own interests; and a European catastrophe , the Holocaust , whose moral weight was discharged onto a population that had played no part in causing it.
The paper distinguishes carefully between what the documentary record establishes, what remains genuinely contested among serious historians, and what is asserted primarily for political effect. It treats the historiography itself as part of the subject, since the arguments scholars have had about this period are inseparable from the arguments the two peoples continue to have about their present. It concludes that the failure of 1880–1947 was not principally a failure of goodwill among ordinary people but a structural one: sovereignty was framed as indivisible, demography as a race, and the arena of decision was located in London, Geneva, Washington, and Lake Success rather than in Jerusalem or Jaffa.
A note on terminology, method, and sources
Almost every word available for describing this history carries a claim.
“Palestine” is used here in its ordinary geographic and administrative sense: the territory west of the Jordan River administered by Britain under League of Nations mandate from 1920 to 1948, and the late Ottoman districts that preceded it.
“Palestinian” and “Palestinian Arab” are used interchangeably for the Arabic-speaking Muslim, Christian, and Druze population of that territory. The paper does not use “Arabs of Palestine” as a way of implying the absence of a national identity, nor does it project a fully formed Palestinian nationalism backward into the 1880s. Section 5 addresses this dating question directly, because it is a real historiographical dispute and not merely a semantic one.
“Jewish people” rather than “the Jews” is used for the collective noun, and “Yishuv” for the Jewish community in Palestine (the “Old Yishuv” being the pre-Zionist religious communities, the “New Yishuv” the Zionist settlement project). “Zionist” describes adherents of the movement for Jewish national self-determination in the Land of Israel; it is not a synonym for “Jewish,” and a substantial portion of world Jewry opposed or ignored Zionism until well into the 1930s.
“Eretz Israel” (Land of Israel) and “Filastin” are the two communities’ own names for the same ground, and their non-identity is itself a fact about the conflict.
On method: this is a synthesis of the published secondary literature, of the principal British and United Nations documents of the period, and of the standard demographic and land-tenure statistics. It makes no claim to archival novelty. Where scholars disagree, the paper names the disagreement and the parties to it rather than adjudicating silently. Where a figure is uncertain , and many of the most-cited figures in this history are , the paper gives the range and the reason for the uncertainty rather than a false precision. Appendix D discusses the statistical problems in more detail.
The aim is not neutrality. Neutrality, taken seriously, would require pretending that all claims are equally supported, and they are not. The aim is accuracy: to state what is documented, to mark what is disputed, to give each side’s argument in the strongest form its own advocates would recognize, and to leave the reader equipped to reason independently.
1. Introduction: Against the Search for a Villain
1.1 The problem
Most people come to this history looking for the moment of original sin , the act that started it, the party that bears responsibility, the side whose claim should have won. The demand is understandable. It is also, on the evidence, unanswerable in the form it is usually posed, and the attempt to answer it has generated a century of scholarship that is often more forensic than explanatory: each side assembling a brief rather than an account.
The difficulty is not that the record is empty. It is unusually rich. The difficulty is that the record supports two propositions simultaneously, and most participants in the argument want only one of them.
The first proposition: the Zionist movement arose from a real and accurately perceived danger. Jewish communities in Europe had spent centuries as a tolerated minority whose tolerance was revocable without notice , expelled from England in 1290, from Spain in 1492, from city after city across the continent; confined in the Russian Empire to the Pale of Settlement and subjected to recurrent pogroms; and then, in the very countries where legal emancipation had seemed to promise acceptance, confronted with a new racial antisemitism that emancipation had not dissolved. The conclusion that Jewish safety could not be permanently entrusted to other people’s governments was not a paranoid inference. It was an empirical one, and it was confirmed in the most catastrophic way possible within the lifetimes of the people who drew it.
The second proposition: the Palestinian Arab population had done nothing to earn what happened to it. They had not conducted the Inquisition, the pogroms, or the Holocaust. Most had never met a European Jew. They were an agrarian and urban society with its own deep attachment to the land, its own emerging political consciousness, and its own claim to self-determination under the same principles the victors of the First World War had proclaimed. Their country was nonetheless designated, by powers in which they had no representation, as the site where Europe’s Jewish problem would be resolved. In 1948 roughly 700,000–750,000 of them , the large majority of the Arab population of the territory that became Israel , lost their homes and were barred from returning. Roughly six million of their descendants are registered as refugees with UNRWA today.
These two propositions do not cancel out each other. Neither justifies what was done in its name. The structure of the tragedy is that the most morally comprehensible project imaginable , a persecuted people seeking a refuge from annihilation , was realizable only on ground where another people already lived, and therefore arrived for that other people as the destruction of their world.
1.2 The argument of this paper
The paper advances four connected claims.
First, the two national movements did not develop independently and then collide by accident. From an early stage each defined itself partly against the other. Zionist settlement generated Palestinian national consciousness in its modern form; Palestinian resistance hardened Zionist convictions about the necessity of self-reliance and force. The conflict was in significant part self-constituting, which is one reason it proved so resistant to resolution.
Second, the imperial dimension is not background but mechanism. Britain did not merely fail to manage a pre-existing quarrel; British decisions , the Balfour Declaration, the terms of the Mandate, the recognition of the Jewish Agency without an Arab counterpart, the suppression of the 1936–39 revolt, the 1939 White Paper , structured the field in which the two communities acted. Each of those decisions was taken primarily for reasons of imperial interest. Each shifted the balance, and the cumulative effect was to arm one side politically in the 1920s and militarily by the 1940s while shattering the other’s leadership at the decisive moment.
Third, the Holocaust changed the moral and political mathematics absolutely, and it did so asymmetrically. It made the Zionist case overwhelming to most of the Western world while leaving entirely unanswered the Palestinian objection that the debt was Europe’s and the payment was theirs. That unanswered objection is not a rhetorical flourish; it is the load-bearing element of Palestinian political memory.
Fourth, the failure of 1880–1947 was structural rather than merely personal. There were bad actors and bad decisions in abundance, on all three sides , Zionist, Palestinian, and British , and the paper names them. But the deeper problem was that the parties were arguing about sovereignty, which in the political vocabulary available to them was indivisible; that the demographic balance was changing fast enough to make delay costly to one side and urgent to the other; and that no bilateral forum existed in which the two communities could have bargained with each other rather than each with the empire.
1.3 Structure
Section 2 surveys the historiography, which is unusually contentious and which the reader needs in order to evaluate everything after it. Section 3 describes late Ottoman Palestine. Sections 4 and 5 treat the two national movements. Section 6 covers the First World War and Britain’s contradictory commitments. Sections 7 and 8 cover the Mandate period through the 1936–39 revolt. Section 9 addresses the Holocaust. Section 10 covers 1947. Section 11 offers a structural analysis of the failure. Appendices provide a catalogue of disputed points, a chronology, a glossary, a note on statistics, and a bibliography organized by perspective.
2. Historiography: Four Libraries and a Contested Archive
There is no neutral literature on this subject. There is, however, a literature whose claims can be checked, and it is worth understanding its structure before relying on any part of it.
2.1 The traditional Israeli narrative
The dominant Israeli account, established in the first decades of statehood and still widely held, presents Zionism as a national liberation movement returning a persecuted people to its ancestral homeland; portrays Jewish settlement as largely a matter of legal purchase and land improvement that brought economic benefit to the Arab population; emphasizes repeated Zionist acceptance of compromise (Peel in 1937, partition in 1947) against consistent Arab rejection; and attributes the violence primarily to Arab intransigence and incitement, with the mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini’s wartime collaboration with Nazi Germany as a recurring emblem. Its representative works are institutional histories and the writings of figures close to the founding generation.
Its strengths are real. The chronology of acceptance and rejection at the two great partition moments is accurate on the face of it. The economic and demographic record of the Mandate period is genuinely complicated in ways that pure dispossession narratives elide. Its characteristic weakness is a tendency to treat the outcome for the Palestinian population as an unintended by-product of a war the Arabs began, and to leave the imperial scaffolding of the project largely unexamined.
2.2 The Palestinian narrative
The Palestinian account, articulated systematically from the 1960s onward, presents the period as one of colonial expropriation: a European settlement movement, backed by an imperial patron, progressively displacing an indigenous population and culminating in the mass expulsion of 1948. It emphasizes that Palestinians were never consulted about the Balfour Declaration or the Mandate; that the Mandate’s institutional structure recognized a Jewish national claim while denying an Arab one; that land purchase, however legal, transferred permanent and inalienable holdings out of the reach of the majority; and that the rejection of partition in 1947 was the entirely rational response of a majority population asked to cede more than half its country to a minority.
Its foundational works , Walid Khalidi’s documentary collections and village survey, Yehoshua Porath’s two volumes on the national movement (an Israeli historian whose work is nonetheless indispensable here), Rashid Khalidi’s studies of identity and of Palestinian political failure, Nur Masalha on transfer , established a factual record that was for decades simply absent from Western accounts. Its characteristic weakness, acknowledged by its most rigorous practitioners, is a reluctance to examine Palestinian leadership failure with the same severity applied to Zionist and British action. Rashid Khalidi’s The Iron Cage is notable precisely because it does so.
2.3 The New Historians and the archival turn
The declassification of Israeli state and Zionist archives beginning in the late 1970s, under a thirty-year rule, made possible a body of Israeli scholarship that revised central elements of the national story. Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappé, Tom Segev, and Simha Flapan , never a school, and increasingly divergent politically , established on documentary grounds that the Palestinian refugee exodus of 1948 involved substantial expulsion and not only voluntary flight; that the military balance in 1948 was not the David-and-Goliath contest of popular memory; that a tacit understanding existed between the Jewish Agency and Emir Abdullah of Transjordan; and that “transfer” of the Arab population had been discussed within the Zionist leadership more extensively than had been acknowledged.
Two points about this literature are frequently lost. The first is that its members disagree profoundly with one another: Morris concluded from the same archives that expulsion occurred and that, in his later judgment, it was strategically necessary , a position that made him anathema to those who had cited him; Pappé concluded that 1948 was a premeditated ethnic cleansing operation, a reading Morris rejects as unsupported. Shlaim occupies a middle position focused on the diplomatic record. The second point is that the New Historians largely wrote about 1948 and after; their revisions bear on the pre-1948 period mainly through the transfer debate and the study of Zionist strategic planning.
2.4 The neo-traditionalist response
A vigorous critique, associated principally with Efraim Karsh, has charged the revisionists with misuse of sources, selective quotation, and mistranslation, and has restated the case that no expulsion policy existed, that Arab leaders bear primary responsibility, and that the archival record has been read tendentiously. Some specific criticisms have found their mark; the broader claim that the revisionist project as a whole rests on fabrication has not been accepted by most of the field. Readers evaluating any strong claim about Zionist intentions should be aware that the underlying Hebrew documents , particularly Ben-Gurion’s diaries and the June 1938 Jewish Agency Executive discussions , are contested in their translation and in what elisions in published editions signify.
2.5 Social history and the settler-colonial paradigm
Two further currents matter for the pre-1948 period specifically.
Social and economic historians , Beshara Doumani on Ottoman Nablus, Gershon Shafir on the labor market origins of Zionist practice, Zachary Lockman on Arab and Jewish workers, Salim Tamari on urban Palestinian society, Michelle Campos on shared Ottoman citizenship in the late imperial period , have replaced the earlier picture of two hermetically separate communities with something more interesting: overlapping economies, real intercommunal contact, and a separation that was produced by policy rather than given by nature. Shafir’s argument in particular is important: that the distinctive institutions of Labor Zionism (exclusively Jewish labor, inalienable national land) were not derived from ideology alone but were responses to the practical impossibility of competing with cheaper Arab labor in a plantation economy.
The settler-colonial framework, drawing on Patrick Wolfe’s comparative work and applied to Palestine by Rashid Khalidi, Pappé, Lorenzo Veracini and others, analyzes Zionism as one instance of a general type: a movement of population transfer that seeks to replace rather than exploit an indigenous population. Its analytical yield is genuine , it explains the emphasis on demographic majority, land inalienability, and exclusive labor better than a purely national-conflict model. Its contested point is whether a category built from the Australian, North American, and Algerian cases can accommodate a movement of refugees fleeing genocide, with an ancient religious and historical connection to the specific territory, and no metropole to return to or act on behalf of. Defenders of the framework answer that motive does not alter structure; critics answer that a category which cannot distinguish the Pilgrims from Holocaust survivors is doing political rather than analytical work. Both objections deserve to be taken seriously, and the reader should know that a great deal of contemporary argument is a proxy fight over this classification.
2.6 On the “two tragedies” framing used in this paper
The interpretive stance adopted here , that this is a collision of two genuine claims and two genuine victimhoods , is itself contested, and honesty requires saying from which directions.
From one side, the objection is that symmetry is a form of evasion. The two parties were not equally powerful, and a framing that balances their suffering obscures the fact that one movement was building a state with imperial sponsorship while the other was being progressively dispossessed. On this view, “both sides suffered” functions to make an asymmetric process appear tragic rather than caused.
From the other side, the objection runs opposite: that a tragic framing removes agency, and that decisions , the Arab Higher Committee’s rejection of the 1937 and 1947 partition proposals, the mufti’s alignment with the Axis, the initiation of hostilities in December 1947 , were choices with foreseeable consequences, not the operation of impersonal fate.
Both objections have force, and the paper attempts to meet them by keeping asymmetry of power explicit throughout and by treating leadership decisions on all sides as decisions. The tragic frame is offered as a description of the situation, not as an amnesty for the actors within it.
3. The Land and Its People, c. 1880
3.1 Administration
There was no political unit called Palestine in the late Ottoman Empire, and this fact has been made to carry more argumentative weight than it can bear. The territory was divided among the independent sanjak (district) of Jerusalem, which reported directly to Istanbul owing to its international sensitivity, and the sanjaks of Nablus and Acre, attached to the province of Beirut. The absence of an administrative unit named Palestine no more demonstrates the absence of a people than the absence of a unified Germany before 1871 demonstrates the absence of Germans. Conversely, the existence of a regional identity , and Arabic writers used Filastin as a geographic term throughout , does not by itself establish a modern nationalism. Both inferences are routinely made and both are invalid.
The population lived under a system in which religious communities (millets) administered their own personal-status law, in which Muslim primacy was legally assumed, and in which Jewish and Christian minorities held the subordinate but protected status of dhimmi. This was not equality in the modern sense. It was also not the sustained persecution that characterized Jewish life in Christian Europe, and the difference matters for understanding why the arrival of European Jewish nationalism was experienced locally as a rupture rather than a continuation.
3.2 Demography
All figures for the Ottoman period are estimates, and the estimates vary by source and by method. The following table gives commonly accepted ranges rather than false precision.
| Year | Total population | Arab (Muslim/Christian/Druze) | Jewish | Jewish share |
| c. 1880 | ~450,000–500,000 | ~425,000–475,000 | ~15,000–25,000 | ~3–5% |
| 1914 | ~700,000–750,000 | ~640,000–690,000 | ~60,000–85,000 | ~9–12% |
| 1922 (census) | ~752,000 | ~669,000 | ~84,000 | ~11% |
| 1931 (census) | ~1,036,000 | ~861,000 | ~175,000 | ~17% |
| 1946 (estimate) | ~1,845,000 | ~1,237,000 | ~608,000 | ~33% |
Sources: Ottoman registers as analyzed by Justin McCarthy; British Mandate censuses of 1922 and 1931; the Anglo-American Survey of Palestine (1946). The 1914 Jewish figure is disputed: Zionist sources conventionally give 85,000, while McCarthy’s reconstruction from Ottoman data suggests substantially fewer, and wartime expulsion and emigration reduced the number to roughly 55,000–60,000 by 1918.
Two features of this table deserve emphasis. The first is the speed of the change: a community that was one in twenty in 1880 was one in three by 1946. The second, less often noted, is that the Arab population itself roughly tripled over the same period, driven by falling mortality, improved public health, and economic growth, with some in-migration from neighboring regions. Both facts are used polemically , the first to demonstrate deliberate demographic transformation, the second to suggest that the Arab population was itself substantially recent , and both deserve to be stated without the polemic. Palestinian Arab society in 1880 was overwhelmingly composed of families long resident in the territory, and its growth thereafter was overwhelmingly natural increase.
3.3 Economy and the Land Code of 1858
The single most consequential piece of Ottoman legislation for this history was not about Jews or Zionism at all. The Land Code of 1858 required the registration of landholdings, principally in order to improve tax collection and conscription. Peasant cultivators, who had held land for generations under customary and often collective arrangements (musha’), had strong reasons to avoid registering in their own names , taxation and the draft , and frequently registered holdings in the name of a village notable, an urban merchant, or an absentee landowner in Beirut or Damascus.
The result, over the following half-century, was a legal concentration of ownership in relatively few hands that did not correspond to the reality of who farmed the land. When Zionist land-purchasing organizations arrived with capital, this was the structure they encountered: large tracts legally owned by absentees who were willing to sell, and cultivated by tenant families with deep customary claims and no legal standing. The dispossession that followed was thus, in a formal sense, entirely lawful , and, in the experienced sense, a theft. This gap between legality and justice recurs throughout the Mandate period and explains why “the land was legally purchased” and “the peasants were dispossessed” are both true statements.
The economy itself was agrarian and increasingly commercialized: citrus from the Jaffa hinterland, olive oil and soap from Nablus, grain from the coastal plain and the Jezreel valley, with a growing export orientation and increasing integration into European markets from mid-century.
3.4 The Old Yishuv and intercommunal relations
The Jewish community of 1880 was small, mostly religious, and concentrated in the four cities holy to Judaism , Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, Tiberias. It comprised Sephardi and Mizrahi families long resident in the region, many Ottoman subjects fully integrated into the local linguistic and commercial world, alongside Ashkenazi communities sustained substantially by charitable remittance from Europe (halukka).
Relations with the Muslim and Christian majority were those of a settled minority: unequal, occasionally strained, structured by religious hierarchy, and lacking the national antagonism that would arrive with the new immigration. This should not be romanticized into a lost golden age , that is a common rhetorical move and it flattens a real history of subordination , but the distinction between an unequal coexistence and a national conflict is genuine, and the Old Yishuv itself frequently regarded the Zionist newcomers with suspicion for disrupting it.
3.5 Sacred geography
The land’s religious significance is not decoration in this story; it converts every territorial dispute into a dispute about ultimate things.
For Judaism it is the Land of Israel, the setting of the Israelite kingdoms and the two Temples, the object of two millennia of liturgical longing , “next year in Jerusalem” was recited nightly in communities that had no expectation of going. For Christianity it is the land of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection, and European powers had been asserting protectorates over its holy places and Christian communities for centuries. For Islam, Jerusalem is al-Quds, the site of the Prophet’s Night Journey and the third holiest city after Mecca and Medina, and the Haram al-Sharif , containing al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock , stands on the platform Jews revere as the Temple Mount.
That last sentence describes a single hill claimed absolutely by two faiths. In 1929 it would produce the first mass intercommunal bloodshed of the Mandate. It has done so repeatedly since.
4. Zionism: The Logic of a Stateless People
4.1 The failure of emancipation
The Zionist argument is unintelligible without the European context that produced it. The nineteenth century had offered European Jewry a bargain: legal emancipation in exchange for assimilation into the nation-state. Jews would cease to be a corporate community and become citizens of the French, German, or Austro-Hungarian nation, differing only in private religious practice.
By the 1880s the bargain was visibly failing at both ends. In the Russian Empire, home to roughly five million Jews , the largest Jewish population in the world , emancipation had never been offered at all. Jews were confined to the Pale of Settlement, excluded from many occupations and educational institutions, and subjected after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 to a wave of pogroms in which mobs killed, raped, and burned while authorities stood aside or participated. The May Laws of 1882 codified further restriction. Over the following four decades roughly two million Jews left the Russian Empire; the overwhelming majority went to the United States, and a small fraction went to Palestine , a proportion worth remembering, since it indicates that Zionism was a minority answer to a majority experience.
In the West the failure took a different form. In France, the country that had pioneered Jewish emancipation in 1791, the wrongful conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus for treason in 1894 was accompanied by public crowds calling for death to the Jews. In Germany and Austria a new antisemitism was emerging that framed Jewishness as racial and therefore ineradicable by conversion or assimilation , a shift with obvious and terrible implications. Karl Lueger was elected mayor of Vienna in 1897 on an openly antisemitic platform.
The Zionist conclusion followed: if the Jewish people constituted a nation rather than merely a confession, and if minority status was structurally unsafe, then the solution was national self-determination in a territory of their own , the same solution Europe was applying to Poles, Czechs, Serbs, and Italians.
4.2 Hibbat Zion and the First Aliyah
Practical settlement preceded Herzl. The Hibbat Zion (Love of Zion) societies formed in Russia and Romania after 1881, and Leon Pinsker’s Auto-Emancipation (1882) argued that Jews must cease appealing to the conscience of others and constitute themselves as a nation. The First Aliyah (1882–1903) brought perhaps 25,000–35,000 immigrants, many of whom left again; it founded agricultural colonies including Rishon LeZion, Zichron Ya’akov, and Rosh Pina, which survived largely through the philanthropic subsidy of Baron Edmond de Rothschild and which relied heavily on Arab labor , a plantation model that the next wave would deliberately overturn.
4.3 Herzl and political Zionism
Theodor Herzl, a Budapest-born, Vienna-based journalist and playwright of assimilated background, covered the Dreyfus Affair for the Neue Freie Presse. His contribution was not the idea of a Jewish state but the insistence that it was a diplomatic problem requiring a great-power charter, and the organizational apparatus to pursue one. Der Judenstaat appeared in 1896; the First Zionist Congress convened at Basel in August 1897, creating the World Zionist Organization and a program calling for “a home in Palestine secured under public law.”
Herzl’s diary entry of 3 September 1897 is famous: he recorded that at Basel he had founded the Jewish state, and that in fifty years everyone would recognize it. Fifty years from 1897 is 1947, the year of the United Nations partition resolution; the state itself was declared in 1948. The prediction was, depending on how one counts, exactly right or off by a year, and either way it is among the more striking pieces of political forecasting on record.
Herzl spent his remaining seven years as a supplicant to power, seeking a charter from the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II, the German Kaiser, the British government, and others. In 1903, after the Kishinev pogrom, he brought to the Sixth Zionist Congress a British proposal for territory in East Africa (the “Uganda Scheme”) as a temporary refuge; the resulting crisis nearly split the movement and demonstrated how firmly the territorial claim had attached to Palestine specifically. He died in 1904, aged forty-four.
The structural point matters more than the biography. A stateless people cannot acquire a state without a sponsor. From its inception the Zionist project required great-power patronage, and the search for that patronage would shape both its methods and the way it was perceived by the population already living in Palestine.
4.4 The varieties of Zionism
Treating Zionism as a single program produces persistent misunderstanding. Its principal strands by the Mandate period were:
- Political Zionism (Herzl, later Weizmann): focused on diplomatic recognition and charter.
- Labor Zionism (Ben-Gurion, Berl Katznelson, the Second Aliyah generation): dominant from the 1930s to 1977, socialist in orientation, committed to building the state through Jewish agricultural and industrial labor, the kibbutz and moshav, the Histadrut labor federation (founded 1920), and the Haganah.
- Cultural Zionism (Ahad Ha’am): skeptical of statehood as the primary goal, seeking a spiritual and cultural center to regenerate Judaism worldwide. Ahad Ha’am was also among the earliest and sharpest internal critics of settler conduct toward Arabs.
- Revisionist Zionism (Ze’ev Jabotinsky, from 1925): nationalist and anti-socialist, demanding a Jewish state on both banks of the Jordan, contemptuous of gradualism, and the ideological ancestor of the Israeli political right through Herut and Likud.
- Religious Zionism (Mizrahi, and the theology of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook): reconciling messianic tradition with practical settlement.
- And, importantly, the binationalists , Brit Shalom, founded 1925, and later Ihud, including Judah Magnes, Martin Buber, Arthur Ruppin, and Hannah Arendt , who argued for a shared state of two nations. They were intellectually distinguished, politically marginal, and unable to find a substantial Arab partner. Their existence establishes that alternatives were articulated at the time and not merely imagined in retrospect; their failure establishes something about the constraints they faced.
4.5 The Arab question inside Zionist thought
The claim sometimes made that Zionists were unaware of the Arab population is false, and the internal record refutes it.
Ahad Ha’am’s essay “Truth from Eretz Israel” (1891), written after a visit, warned bluntly that the land was not empty, that the settlers were treating the local peasantry with contempt, and that this behavior would produce enmity. Yitzhak Epstein’s “The Hidden Question” (1907) argued that the movement had failed to reckon with the fact that its purchases were displacing cultivators, and predicted the consequences with precision. Arthur Ruppin, who directed Zionist settlement operations, wrote extensively and privately on the problem.
The most consequential formulation came from the opposite political direction. Jabotinsky’s essays “The Iron Wall” and “The Ethics of the Iron Wall” (1923) conceded the Arab case with startling frankness: no indigenous population had ever voluntarily consented to colonization, the Palestinian Arabs were behaving exactly as any people would, and therefore Zionist settlement could proceed only behind a wall of military force that Arabs could not breach , after which, and only after which, negotiation would become possible on terms Zionists could accept. The essay is quoted by Palestinian writers as an admission and by Israeli writers as a realistic strategic doctrine. Both readings are supportable; it is one of the most honest documents either movement produced.
4.6 “A land without a people”
The phrase “a land without a people for a people without a land” is frequently attributed to Zionist leaders and cited as evidence that the movement denied Palestinian existence. Its history is more complicated. It originated with Christian Restorationist writers in Britain in the 1840s, was used sporadically by some Zionist figures, and was never an official slogan of the movement. Herzl did not use it. The word “people” in the original nineteenth-century usage carried the sense of “a nation” rather than “inhabitants” , the claim being that Palestine lacked a nation, not that it lacked residents.
None of which fully rescues it. Even in the charitable reading, the phrase asserts precisely what was at issue: that the Arabs of Palestine did not constitute a nation with a corresponding claim, and that the land was therefore politically available. The denial of national standing to the existing population was a real and consequential feature of mainstream Zionist thought for decades, and it did not require the slogan to be operative.
5. Palestinian Arab Nationalism: The Logic of a People with a Land
5.1 Ottomanism, Arabism, and local patriotism
Arab political consciousness in the late Ottoman period was layered rather than singular, and the layers coexisted without contradiction for most of those who held them. A notable in Jerusalem in 1910 could be simultaneously a loyal Ottoman subject, an advocate of greater cultural and administrative rights for Arabic-speakers, a partisan of Greater Syria, and a defender of the specific interests of Palestine. Which layer became politically dominant depended on circumstances, and circumstances changed rapidly between 1908 and 1920.
The Arab cultural revival (nahda) of the nineteenth century, centered in Beirut, Cairo, and Damascus, produced a renewed literary and historical self-consciousness among Arabic-speakers. Political Arabism , the demand for autonomy or independence from Ottoman Turkish rule , developed more slowly and was radicalized by the centralizing and Turkifying policies of the Young Turks after 1908.
5.2 1908 and the press
The Young Turk revolution of 1908 restored the Ottoman constitution, lifted press censorship, and opened parliamentary politics. The effect in Palestine was immediate. Arabic newspapers appeared , al-Karmil in Haifa (1908), founded by the Orthodox Christian Najib Nassar, and Filastin in Jaffa (1911), founded by the Orthodox Christian cousins Issa and Yusuf al-Issa , and both made opposition to Zionist land purchase and immigration a central editorial commitment. Nassar published a book-length study of Zionism in 1911, drawing on the Zionist movement’s own published materials.
Arab deputies raised the question in the Ottoman parliament. Petitions from villages and towns objecting to land sales reached Istanbul. Ruhi al-Khalidi, deputy for Jerusalem, warned of the movement’s political ambitions while distinguishing them from Judaism itself. This is a decade before the Balfour Declaration and two decades before mass immigration.
The role of Palestinian Christians in this early nationalism is significant and often overlooked. It reflected a broader pattern across the Arab world in which Christians, for whom a secular national identity offered better standing than a religious one, were disproportionately prominent in the nationalist press and intelligentsia. It also complicates any account that treats Palestinian opposition to Zionism as fundamentally Islamic in character; it was, in its formative period, substantially secular and led in part by Christians.
5.3 Notables, factions, and the structure of leadership
Palestinian politics under the Ottomans and then the Mandate operated through a system of urban notable families , the “politics of notables” described by Albert Hourani , in which a small number of landowning and religious lineages mediated between the population and the state. In Jerusalem the dominant rivalry was between the Husseini and Nashashibi families, and this factionalism, rooted in patronage rather than program, would prove severely costly.
The consequences deserve to be stated plainly, because they are frequently omitted from sympathetic accounts. The notable class had interests , including, in some cases, an interest in selling land to Zionist buyers, which a number of prominent families did while publicly denouncing such sales. Its authority rested on connections to the imperial state, which meant that when the imperial state was British and committed to the Jewish national home, the leadership’s structural position was compromised from the outset. And factional rivalry repeatedly produced paralysis at moments requiring unified decision.
Hajj Amin al-Husseini, appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921 by the British High Commissioner Herbert Samuel , himself a Jewish Zionist, in an appointment intended to balance Palestinian opinion , became the dominant Palestinian political figure of the interwar period. His record is genuinely damning in one crucial respect: after fleeing Palestine in 1937 he spent the war years in Axis Europe, met Hitler in November 1941, broadcast propaganda for Germany, and assisted in recruiting Bosnian Muslims for the Waffen-SS. Attempts to minimize this are not credible. Equally, attempts to treat it as the explanation of the conflict, or to attribute the mufti’s positions to the Palestinian population as a whole, are not credible either: he was a factional leader whose authority was contested by other Palestinians throughout, and Palestinian opposition to Zionism both preceded him and outlasted him.
5.4 When did Palestinian national identity form?
This is a live and consequential dispute.
One position, associated with Rashid Khalidi’s Palestinian Identity, holds that a distinctly Palestinian national consciousness , layered over Ottoman, Arab, and Islamic identities , was already forming before the First World War, evidenced by the press, the petitions, the parliamentary debates, and the everyday attachment to place expressed in local sources.
A second position, associated with Yehoshua Porath and much mainstream scholarship, dates the crystallization of a specifically Palestinian (as distinct from Syrian-Arab) nationalism to the period 1918–1923, when the collapse of Faisal’s Damascus government and the imposition of separate mandates foreclosed the Greater Syria option and forced political organization within the boundaries Britain had drawn.
A third position, argued by Efraim Karsh and others, holds that Palestinian nationalism was essentially reactive and late, a product of opposition to Zionism rather than an independent development, and therefore possesses a weaker claim than Jewish nationalism.
The third position is the most politically loaded and the weakest as history, for a reason that applies symmetrically: virtually all modern nationalisms are recent, constructed, and formed in relation to an “other.” Modern Jewish nationalism is itself a product of the same decades and the same European ideological environment; if recency of formation disqualified a national claim, it would disqualify both. A more defensible summary is that Palestinian identity has deep pre-national roots in place, kinship, and religion; that its modern political form emerged in the early twentieth century; that Zionist settlement significantly accelerated and shaped that emergence; and that this is an unremarkable description of how nations generally come into being.
6. The War of Promises, 1914–1922
The First World War destroyed the Ottoman Empire and made Palestine’s future a question for European powers to settle. Between 1915 and 1917 Britain made three commitments that were mutually inconsistent, and the manner of their reconciliation determined the next thirty years.
6.1 Promise to the Arabs: the McMahon–Hussein correspondence, 1915–16
In ten letters exchanged between July 1915 and March 1916, Sir Henry McMahon, British High Commissioner in Egypt, negotiated with Sharif Hussein bin Ali of Mecca, the Hashemite guardian of the holy cities, for an Arab revolt against Ottoman rule. Britain undertook to support Arab independence in specified territories in return.
The critical passage excluded from the pledged area “portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo.” Everything turns on the word rendered as “districts” , Arabic wilayat, which can mean either the formal Ottoman province (vilayet) or, more loosely, a district or environs. If the four cities are read as naming provinces, the exclusion covers a specific coastal strip and Palestine, which lay south of all four and in no province named after them, falls inside the pledged area. If they are read as naming the cities and their surroundings, the exclusion is a line running down through Syria and Palestine’s status becomes arguable.
Britain subsequently maintained that Palestine had always been intended for exclusion. The 1939 Anglo-Arab Committee that examined the correspondence could not reach agreement, though its British members conceded the Arab reading was stronger than had previously been admitted. McMahon’s own later statement asserting exclusion was made two decades after the fact.
Two things are safe to say. First, the ambiguity was in part deliberate: Britain needed a revolt and preferred not to specify. Second, whatever the drafters privately intended, Hussein and the Arab leadership believed Palestine was included, and acted on that belief. The Arab Revolt began in June 1916 and materially assisted the British campaign under Allenby.
6.2 Promise to France: the Sykes–Picot Agreement, 1916
While the correspondence was still running, Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot secretly negotiated the partition of the same Ottoman territories between Britain and France, with Russian assent , direct control for France in coastal Syria and Lebanon and for Britain in southern Mesopotamia, spheres of influence elsewhere, and an international administration for most of Palestine. The agreement was concluded in May 1916 and made public by the Bolsheviks in November 1917, who found it in the tsarist archives and published it to embarrass the Allies. Hussein learned of it from the newspapers.
Sykes–Picot has become shorthand for imperial cartography imposed without regard to the populations mapped, and while the actual post-war borders differed from its lines in important respects, the shorthand captures the method accurately.
6.3 Promise to the Zionists: the Balfour Declaration, 1917
On 2 November 1917 the Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, wrote to Lord Walter Rothschild conveying a Cabinet declaration:
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.
Sixty-seven words, and nearly every clause was fought over in drafting. Note first the asymmetry that Palestinians have pointed to ever since: the Jewish people, then roughly a tenth of Palestine’s population, are named and granted a national home; the Arab majority, some ninety percent of inhabitants, appear only as “existing non-Jewish communities” and are guaranteed civil and religious rights , not political or national ones. Note also the vagueness of “national home,” a term with no standing in international law, chosen precisely because “state” would have been too explicit for the Cabinet to approve.
Why did Britain issue it? Four motives are documented, and their relative weight is genuinely debated.
Imperial strategy was central. Palestine commanded the eastern approaches to the Suez Canal, the artery to India. A friendly, dependent population there served British security, and the declaration provided a basis for claiming Palestine against the internationalization Sykes–Picot had envisaged and against French ambitions.
Wartime propaganda mattered in 1917, a desperate year. British officials , operating on an inflated estimate of Jewish influence that was itself antisemitic in structure , hoped a pro-Zionist declaration would encourage Russian Jews to keep Russia in the war after the February Revolution and mobilize American Jewish support for full US engagement. Neither effect materialized.
Protestant restorationism was a real strain in British elite culture, and Balfour and Lloyd George both held versions of it: a biblically inflected sentiment favoring Jewish return.
Genuine sympathy also existed, alongside its dark twin. Some British officials sincerely wished to remedy Jewish suffering. Others, including Balfour himself in other contexts, held recognizably antisemitic views and saw a Jewish national home as a solution to unwanted Jewish immigration into Britain , an attitude that ran through the 1905 Aliens Act, which Balfour’s government had passed.
Chaim Weizmann’s role as lobbyist was significant, though the older account crediting the declaration to his chemical services to the war effort is now regarded as overstated.
The most revealing opposition came from within the Jewish community. Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India and the only Jewish member of the Cabinet, fought the declaration bitterly on the grounds that it would define Jews as a separate nationality and undermine the position of Jewish citizens in Britain , an argument that has an obvious poignancy in hindsight, and which reflected the position of much of the assimilated Western Jewish establishment at the time. Partly in response to him, the final clause protecting the rights of Jews in other countries was added.
What is not in dispute is that no Palestinian Arab was consulted. Balfour stated the position with characteristic candor in a 1919 memorandum, acknowledging that the Powers had made no declaration of policy which they had not violated, that in Palestine they did not propose to consult the wishes of the present inhabitants, and that Zionism was of greater import than the desires of the Arabs who then inhabited the land. He was describing what he took to be a justified priority. He was also, accurately, describing the character of the entire arrangement.
6.4 Faisal–Weizmann, King–Crane, San Remo
Two episodes from 1919 are frequently cited and both need qualification.
The Faisal–Weizmann agreement of January 1919, in which Hussein’s son Emir Faisal expressed support for the Balfour Declaration and for Jewish immigration, is cited as evidence of Arab acceptance. Faisal appended a handwritten condition making the agreement void if Arab independence in Greater Syria were not achieved. It was not achieved , the French expelled him from Damascus in July 1920 , and the agreement lapsed. Faisal also did not represent the Arabs of Palestine, who rejected his authority to speak for them on this question.
The King–Crane Commission, dispatched by President Wilson in 1919 to consult the region’s populations under the self-determination principle, found overwhelming local opposition to Zionist aims and recommended sharply limiting the program. Its report was shelved and not published until 1922. It is important as a demonstration that Britain and France knew what local opinion was, and proceeded regardless.
At San Remo in April 1920 the Allied powers assigned the Palestine mandate to Britain, incorporating the Balfour Declaration. The League of Nations Council confirmed the mandate in July 1922 and it took effect in September 1923.
6.5 The Mandate text and its structural asymmetry
Article 22 of the League Covenant described mandates as a “sacred trust of civilization” for peoples “not yet able to stand by themselves,” with Class A mandates (the former Ottoman Arab territories) recognized as provisionally independent pending advice and assistance. On its face this promised eventual independence to the inhabitants.
The Palestine Mandate was written differently from its neighbors, and the difference is the whole story. Its preamble incorporated the Balfour Declaration. Article 2 made Britain responsible for “placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home.” Article 4 recognized “an appropriate Jewish agency” as a public body to advise and cooperate with the administration. Article 6 required facilitation of Jewish immigration and close settlement on the land. Article 22 made English, Arabic, and Hebrew official languages.
No Arab agency was recognized. Britain offered a parallel body and Palestinian leaders refused it, because accepting would have entailed accepting the Mandate itself, including the Jewish national home clause. This was a defensible position of principle and, in retrospect, a serious strategic error: for a quarter-century the Yishuv had an internationally recognized quasi-governmental institution , collecting revenue, running schools, conducting foreign relations, and eventually maintaining an army , and the Palestinians had none. The imbalance at the moment of decision in 1947 was built into the constitutional architecture of 1922, and reinforced by Palestinian choices in response to it.
One further British decision shaped the map: the Churchill White Paper of 1922 confirmed the separation of Transjordan, east of the river, from the area of the Jewish national home, and installed Abdullah as emir. It also restated that Britain did not contemplate the disappearance or subordination of the Arab population, and defined the national home as a community with a right to exist, not as making Palestine “as Jewish as England is English” , a formulation Zionists resented and Arabs found insufficient.
7. The Mandate as a Demographic Race, 1920–1935
7.1 Two communities, two trajectories
The Mandate created conditions under which each community built as much of a state as it could.
The Yishuv built a great deal. The Jewish Agency functioned as a government-in-waiting. The Histadrut, founded in 1920, was simultaneously a labor federation, an employer, a health service, a bank, and a construction conglomerate. The Va’ad Leumi handled communal administration; the Hebrew University opened in 1925; Hebrew was successfully revived as a vernacular, an achievement without close parallel; and the Haganah, founded in 1920 after the Nebi Musa riots, developed from local defense groups into an organized militia. This was made possible by capital imported from the diaspora, by the educational and organizational resources of a largely European immigrant population, and by the recognized legal standing the Mandate conferred.
Palestinian society had none of these advantages and squandered some of its own. Leadership rested on rival notable families; the Arab Executive formed in 1920 lacked resources and recognition; the Supreme Muslim Council, created by the British in 1922 and dominated by Hajj Amin al-Husseini, controlled religious endowments and became a base of factional power rather than a national institution. Boycott of Mandate institutions preserved principle at the cost of influence. There was no Palestinian equivalent of the Jewish Agency’s fundraising reach, and Arab capital was neither concentrated nor politically mobilized to the same degree.
7.2 Immigration
| Wave | Years | Approx. immigrants | Character |
| First Aliyah | 1882–1903 | 25,000–35,000 | Russian/Romanian; agricultural colonies; high attrition |
| Second Aliyah | 1904–1914 | 35,000–40,000 | Russian socialists; kibbutz, Hebrew labor, Tel Aviv (1909) |
| Third Aliyah | 1919–1923 | ~35,000 | Post-revolution Russia and Poland; pioneer labor brigades |
| Fourth Aliyah | 1924–1928 | ~60,000–80,000 | Polish middle class fleeing economic legislation; urban |
| Fifth Aliyah | 1929/1933–1939 | ~225,000–250,000 | German and Central European refugees from Nazism; capital and professional skills |
Attrition was significant throughout; a substantial minority of arrivals in every wave subsequently left.
The Fifth Aliyah is the decisive one. Between 1932 and 1939 the Jewish population roughly doubled. The Haavara (Transfer) Agreement of 1933 with Nazi Germany , controversial then and since , permitted some German Jews to transfer a portion of their assets to Palestine in the form of German goods, and facilitated the emigration of roughly 50,000 people along with capital that materially strengthened the Yishuv economy. It has been condemned as commerce with the murderers and defended as a rescue operation conducted under the only terms available; both descriptions are accurate.
From the Palestinian side, the same figures described something else: within a single decade, the population share of a community they regarded as foreign settlers went from under a fifth to nearly a third, under the protection of an imperial power against whose decisions they had no appeal. It is essential to grasp that the immigrants were fleeing for their lives and that the receiving population was watching its country change hands. Neither perception was false.
7.3 Land: purchase, tenancy, and dispossession
By 1947 Jewish individuals and institutions owned roughly 1.7–1.9 million dunams, approximately 6–7 percent of the total land area of Mandate Palestine.
This figure is deployed in two misleading ways. Advocates for the Palestinian case cite the 6–7 percent against the 55 percent allotted by the partition plan as prima facie injustice, without noting that a large share of the remaining territory was state domain inherited from the Ottomans or uncultivable desert, and that Jewish holdings were concentrated in the fertile coastal plain and valleys where they constituted a much higher proportion of cultivable land. Advocates for the Zionist case cite the legality of purchase without addressing the consequences for cultivators.
The consequences were real. The Sursock purchases in the Jezreel Valley in the early 1920s , a Beirut family selling large tracts to the Jewish National Fund , displaced a substantial number of tenant families; the Hope Simpson report of 1930 identified several hundred such families as landless from that transaction alone, and the Lewis French inquiries of the early 1930s attempted registration of landless Arabs with contested and probably undercounted results. When compensation was paid to tenants it was inadequate to establish themselves elsewhere.
Two features of Zionist land practice made these purchases different in kind from ordinary transfers. First, land bought by the Jewish National Fund was held in perpetuity as the inalienable property of the Jewish people and could not be resold or leased to non-Jews. Second, the principle of avoda ivrit (Hebrew labor) , pressed by the Labor movement from the Second Aliyah onward, partly for ideological reasons and partly, as Gershon Shafir argued, because Jewish workers could not compete with Arab wage levels , meant that Arab cultivators were not retained as laborers on land that changed hands. A sale therefore removed land and employment permanently from the Arab economy. Whatever its legality, the cumulative structure was one of replacement, and Palestinians understood it as such well before any scholar named it.
Britain’s own inquiries repeatedly identified the problem , the Shaw Commission (1930), Hope Simpson (1930), the Passfield White Paper (1930) recommending restriction of immigration and land sales , and repeatedly retreated from the remedy. The Passfield White Paper was effectively nullified within months by Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald’s letter to Weizmann in February 1931, which Palestinians named the Black Letter. The pattern is important because it recurs: investigation, accurate diagnosis, Zionist political pressure in London, reversal. It taught Palestinians that legal and political channels within the Mandate were futile, a lesson with direct consequences in 1936.
7.4 Two economies
The economic record is genuinely mixed and both polemical uses of it are unsound.
Jewish capital import, public health investment, and infrastructure development contributed to overall economic growth in Palestine, and Arab wages, literacy, and population growth in the coastal areas exceeded those in neighboring Arab countries. This is the basis of the claim that Zionist settlement benefited the Arab population.
But the two economies were substantially segregated by design , Hebrew labor, separate trade unions, separate agricultural markets , and the benefits were unevenly distributed, accruing more to urban Arab merchants and to landowners selling land than to the rural cultivators bearing the displacement. More fundamentally, the argument that economic improvement should offset political dispossession is one no nation has ever accepted about itself. The Palestinian objection was never principally that they were becoming poorer. It was that they were losing their country.
Lockman’s work on Jewish and Arab workers documents the contact that did occur across the divide , joint actions, shared workplaces, occasional cross-communal organizing , and the persistent institutional pressure that suppressed it. Separation was a project, not a natural fact, and both national movements had reasons to maintain it.
7.5 The cycle of violence, 1920–1929
April 1920: Riots during the Nebi Musa festival in Jerusalem killed 5 Jews and 4 Arabs with hundreds wounded. The Haganah was founded in response.
May 1921: Rioting in Jaffa and its surroundings killed roughly 47 Jews and 48 Arabs. The Haycraft Commission attributed the cause to Arab hostility toward Jews arising from political and economic grievances connected to immigration.
August 1929: The most serious violence of the decade began in a dispute over Jewish worship arrangements at the Western Wall, beneath the Haram al-Sharif, inflamed by nationalist agitation on both sides over the preceding year. It escalated into attacks across the country: 133 Jews and at least 116 Arabs were killed, the majority of the Arab dead by British forces. In Hebron, a community of Jews of the Old Yishuv with no connection to Zionist politics was attacked and 67 were killed; a comparable number were sheltered and saved by Arab neighbors, a fact that is part of the same record and is regularly omitted from both narratives. In Safed a further 18–20 were killed.
Hillel Cohen’s study of 1929 argues that this year marks the point at which the conflict became genuinely national and popular on both sides, transmitting from elites to the general population. The Hebron massacre also ended the physical presence of the Old Yishuv there and became a permanent fixture of Israeli memory, invoked to argue that Arab violence targeted Jews as such rather than Zionism as a political program.
7.6 The road not taken: the Legislative Council
Britain proposed representative institutions on several occasions, notably in 1922 and again in 1935–36. The proposals foundered on an insoluble arithmetic. Arabs demanded representation proportional to population, which would have given them control and enabled them to halt immigration , precisely the outcome the Mandate obliged Britain to prevent. Zionists opposed any body in which they would be permanently outvoted before achieving a majority. Britain’s compromise formulas satisfied neither.
The 1935–36 proposal came closest: the Arab Higher Committee was prepared to consider it, and it was defeated by opposition in the British Parliament following Zionist lobbying. This episode is worth noting because it inverts the usual pattern of the “missed opportunity” argument, which is more often deployed against Palestinian leadership. Here a Palestinian acceptance was available and was blocked in London.
8. The Great Revolt and the Birth of Partition, 1936–1939
8.1 Causes and course
The Arab Revolt of 1936–39 , to be distinguished from the Hashemite Arab Revolt of 1916–18 against the Ottomans, an entirely different event with which it is frequently confused , was the largest and most sustained Palestinian uprising before 1987.
Its causes were cumulative: the immigration surge following Hitler’s rise, which brought over 60,000 in 1935 alone; continuing land transfer and rural landlessness; the failure of every constitutional avenue since 1920; the example of nationalist agitation in Egypt and Syria producing treaty concessions from Britain and France; and the death of Sheikh Izz al-Din al-Qassam in a firefight with British police in November 1935, which produced a martyr and a model of armed action.
The revolt had two phases. From April to October 1936, a general strike , one of the longest in colonial history , was organized under the newly formed Arab Higher Committee, accompanied by attacks on British and Jewish targets. It was suspended in October at the urging of Arab rulers, pending the Peel Commission. When Peel reported in July 1937 recommending partition, the revolt resumed in a far more violent and rural guerrilla phase lasting into 1939, during which insurgents controlled substantial parts of the countryside and briefly the Old City of Jerusalem.
8.2 British counterinsurgency
Britain committed roughly two divisions and crushed the revolt with methods that were standard for colonial policing of the period and are properly described as brutal: punitive house demolitions, including the demolition of a large section of the old city of Jaffa in 1936; collective fines and collective punishment of villages; mass detention without trial; the execution of over a hundred prisoners; and, as Matthew Hughes’s archival work has documented, torture and extrajudicial killing that British commanders knew of and tolerated. Palestinian deaths are estimated at 5,000 or more, with 15,000–20,000 wounded and roughly 10 percent of the adult male population killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled. Around 300–400 Jews and roughly 260 British personnel were killed.
Britain also armed and trained Jewish auxiliaries: the Jewish Settlement Police, the Notrim, and Orde Wingate’s Special Night Squads, in which Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon received early training. The Haganah gained combat experience, organization, and legitimacy. This is a direct causal link from British counterinsurgency to the military balance of 1948.
8.3 Internal Palestinian violence
The revolt also consumed the Palestinians from within. Husseini factional forces assassinated rivals, particularly among the Nashashibi camp, which eventually organized counter-bands (“peace bands”) that fought alongside the British. Estimates of Palestinians killed by other Palestinians during the revolt run to a fifth or more of total Arab deaths. Village populations were subjected to levies and reprisals by insurgent commanders as well as by British forces.
The cumulative effect was catastrophic for Palestinian capacity. By 1939 the political leadership was exiled, imprisoned, or dead; the Arab Higher Committee was outlawed; the notable class was fractured beyond repair; rural society was impoverished and disarmed; and the population was exhausted. When the decisive confrontation came eight years later, one community possessed a trained army, a functioning treasury, a diplomatic service, and a unified command, and the other possessed none of these. This asymmetry is the single most important legacy of the revolt, and it was forged principally by British repression compounded by Palestinian self-destruction.
8.4 Peel and the transfer question
The Peel Commission, reporting in July 1937, produced the most analytically candid British document of the Mandate. It concluded that the obligations to the two communities were irreconcilable, that the Mandate was unworkable, and that partition was the only solution: a Jewish state in the coastal plain and Galilee (roughly 17–20 percent of the territory), an Arab state joined to Transjordan, and a British corridor retaining Jerusalem and Bethlehem.
It also recommended, in the event of partition, the transfer of Arab population from the Jewish area , voluntary if possible, compulsory if necessary , citing the Greek–Turkish exchange of 1923 as precedent. Approximately 225,000 Arabs would have been moved, against roughly 1,250 Jews.
Zionist responses were divided and the historiographical argument about them is sharp. The Twentieth Zionist Congress accepted the principle of partition while rejecting the specific boundaries as inadequate and authorizing further negotiation. Ben-Gurion wrote privately that a partial state would be a stage, a base from which to expand , language his critics read as proving that acceptance was tactical and expansion always intended, and his defenders read as the ordinary realism of a leader who could not know the future and who was, in any case, endorsing an actual compromise. The related dispute over Ben-Gurion’s writings on transfer, including a contested passage in a 1937 letter to his son and the June 1938 Jewish Agency Executive discussion, turns partly on translation and on what was omitted from published editions. Morris concluded that support for transfer was widespread in the Zionist leadership by 1937–38 while stopping short of finding a pre-1948 expulsion plan; Masalha argued the intention was systematic; Karsh argued the evidence has been distorted. Readers should treat confident assertions in any direction with caution, and should note that Peel’s transfer proposal was a British recommendation before it was a Zionist aspiration.
Arab responses: the Arab Higher Committee rejected partition outright, unwilling to concede any portion of the homeland to what it regarded as a settler movement imposed by empire, and objecting specifically to the transfer provision. The Nashashibi faction was more accommodating and Emir Abdullah of Transjordan, who stood to gain the Arab portion, favored acceptance. The Bloudan Conference of Arab states in September 1937 rejected it.
The plan was abandoned. The Woodhead Commission of 1938 was appointed to examine practicality and concluded that partition on Peel’s lines was unworkable, which suited a British government now urgently seeking Arab goodwill.
8.5 The White Paper of 1939
With European war approaching and Arab opinion across the Middle East mattering strategically, Britain reversed course. The MacDonald White Paper of May 1939 provided for an independent Palestine within ten years with an Arab majority; limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 over five years, after which further immigration would require Arab consent; and sharply restricted land sales to Jews in most of the territory.
The document was a repudiation of the national home policy in all but name, and the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations found it inconsistent with the Mandate. Palestinian leadership rejected it as well , the mufti, from exile, refused it as insufficient , a decision widely judged, including by later Palestinian historians, as among the gravest of the period’s errors, since the White Paper offered majority rule within a decade and its rejection removed any Palestinian stake in defending it.
Its timing was, for Jewish people, catastrophic beyond calculation. The gates of the one destination committed to receiving them were closed at the precise moment the need became absolute.
9. The Holocaust and the Closing of the World’s Doors
9.1 Nowhere to go
Between 1941 and 1945 Nazi Germany and its collaborators murdered approximately six million Jews, roughly two-thirds of European Jewry and a third of the world’s Jewish population. Communities that had existed for a thousand years were annihilated. Whatever else must be said about this history, no part of it is intelligible without holding the scale and the finality of that fact.
What preceded it matters for the argument about Palestine. In July 1938, delegates from thirty-two countries met at Évian-les-Bains to address the German and Austrian Jewish refugee crisis. Almost every participating state declined to increase its quotas. The United States maintained its restrictive national-origins system; Britain excluded Palestine from the agenda; only the Dominican Republic offered significant admission. The conference’s message, correctly read by Berlin, was that the world objected to persecution but would not accept the persecuted.
Individual episodes made the point in miniature. The St. Louis was turned back from Cuba and the United States in 1939 and returned to Europe, where a substantial portion of its passengers were later killed. In Palestine specifically, British enforcement of the White Paper quota produced the Patria disaster of November 1940, in which 267 people died when the Haganah’s attempt to disable a deportation ship went wrong, and the sinking of the Struma in the Black Sea in February 1942 after Turkey, pressed by British refusal to admit the passengers to Palestine, sent it back out; 768 people died and one survived.
After the war, roughly 250,000 Jewish survivors and returnees who could not or would not go back to their pre-war homes , many having discovered on return, as at Kielce in Poland in July 1946, that antisemitic violence had not ended with the Reich , were held in displaced persons camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy. The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in 1946 recommended the immediate admission of 100,000 to Palestine. Britain, still committed to the White Paper policy, declined. The Exodus 1947, carrying 4,500 survivors, was intercepted and its passengers ultimately returned to camps in Germany, a spectacle that did more damage to Britain’s international position than any other single act of the period.
9.2 The consequences for Zionism
The Holocaust settled the internal Jewish argument. Assimilationist, Bundist, and territorialist alternatives to Zionism had been strong currents in European Jewish politics; the communities that carried them were destroyed. For survivors and for most of world Jewry the conclusion was no longer theoretical: a people without sovereign power, dependent on the goodwill of others, could be marked for extermination and would find every border closed. The Biltmore Program of May 1942, adopted at a Zionist conference in New York, made the demand explicit for the first time , a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine, not merely a national home , and shifted the movement’s diplomatic center of gravity from London to Washington.
It also changed the Yishuv’s relationship with Britain. The Haganah’s slogan during the war , fight the White Paper as if there were no war, fight the war as if there were no White Paper , captured a posture that became open insurgency after 1945, when the Irgun and Lehi conducted a campaign of attacks including the bombing of the King David Hotel in July 1946, which killed 91 people, and which the Haganah leadership condemned.
9.3 The Palestinian counter-question
Palestinians experienced these same years through an entirely different frame, and their central objection has never been answered.
The Holocaust was a European crime committed by Europeans against Jews. Palestinian Arabs did not perpetrate it. They did not build the camps, run the pogroms, pass the Nuremberg Laws, or close the borders at Évian. Yet the compensation was to be paid in their territory, by the loss of their homeland, while the states that had committed or permitted the genocide contributed sympathy, votes, and relief that the problem was being resolved at a distance from their own borders.
This is not a rhetorical point and it is not disposed of by observing that Jews had an ancient connection to the land or that the mufti collaborated with Hitler. The first is a claim about entitlement that does not address the question of who bears a debt; the second is an accusation against a leader that does not transfer to a population. The Palestinian objection is a straightforward claim about the distribution of moral liability, and no adequate answer to it has been offered in eighty years. It sits at the foundation of Palestinian political consciousness and explains a great deal about why the conflict has been so resistant to formulas that treat the establishment of Israel as a settled and legitimate starting point.
The two propositions must be held together: the Jewish need for a sovereign refuge was real, urgent, and demonstrated in the most terrible manner conceivable; and the Palestinians were being asked to pay for a crime committed by others on another continent. The tragedy is not that one of these is false.
10. 1947: The International Decision
10.1 Britain leaves
By early 1947 Britain was financially exhausted, was maintaining roughly 100,000 troops in Palestine, was under Jewish insurgent attack and international criticism, and could see no policy that would not cost more than it was worth. In February the government referred the question to the United Nations. In September it announced it would terminate the Mandate and withdraw, and it declined to assist in implementing whatever the UN decided , a decision that guaranteed the transition would be violent.
10.2 UNSCOP
The United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, composed of eleven states chosen to exclude the great powers, toured the territory in the summer of 1947. The Arab Higher Committee boycotted its proceedings, on the principled ground that the Palestinian right to self-determination was not a matter for negotiation , and thereby forfeited the opportunity to shape the committee’s findings, while the Jewish Agency presented an organized and effective case. Committee members also witnessed the Exodus affair at first hand, which affected several of them considerably.
UNSCOP produced two reports. The majority report (seven states) recommended partition into a Jewish state, an Arab state, and an internationally administered Jerusalem, bound in an economic union. The minority report (three states , India, Iran, Yugoslavia) recommended an independent federal state with Arab and Jewish provinces, a federal government controlling immigration, and Jerusalem as capital. Australia abstained.
The minority proposal is worth pausing on. It represented the last serious international proposal for a single shared state and was closer to what a plebiscite of the territory’s inhabitants would likely have produced. It was rejected as impractical, and because it would have foreclosed Jewish immigration at the very moment the DP camps needed emptying.
10.3 Resolution 181 and its terms
On 29 November 1947 the General Assembly adopted Resolution 181 by 33 in favor, 13 against, 10 abstentions, with Thailand absent , just clearing the two-thirds requirement.
| Jewish state | Arab state | Jerusalem (international) | |
| Share of territory | ~55–56% | ~42–43% | ~1% |
| Jewish population | ~498,000 | ~10,000 | ~100,000 |
| Arab population | ~407,000 (plus ~90,000 Bedouin) | ~725,000 | ~105,000 |
The demographic figures are the crux and are frequently omitted. The proposed Jewish state contained an Arab population nearly equal to its Jewish one. A state established on those boundaries with that population would not have had a secure Jewish majority , a fact that Zionist planners understood, that shaped their strategic thinking, and that is directly relevant to what happened in 1948. Much of the allotted territory was the sparsely populated Negev, which inflates the percentage figure relative to its practical value.
10.4 Superpower motives
Both emerging superpowers backed partition, for reasons that had limited connection to the merits.
The United States: Truman was moved by genuine sympathy for the survivors, by the political weight of an organized domestic constituency in an election cycle, and by personal conviction. The State Department, particularly Loy Henderson and Secretary of State George Marshall, opposed partition strenuously on the grounds that it would damage American standing in the Arab world, jeopardize oil access, and require American troops to enforce. Truman overrode them.
The Soviet Union: Andrei Gromyko’s speech to the General Assembly in May 1947 was a startling reversal of the Soviet line, which had treated Zionism as a bourgeois-nationalist movement. Moscow calculated that a Jewish state , many of whose leaders were socialists from Russia , would accelerate British departure from the Middle East and might align with the Soviet bloc. Czechoslovak arms sales to the Yishuv in 1948, with Soviet approval, were decisive to the outcome of the war. The alignment did not last.
Lobbying: That intense pressure was applied to secure the two-thirds majority is well documented in general terms. The vote was postponed from 26 to 29 November, which allowed additional canvassing. Specific allegations concerning Liberia, the Philippines, Haiti, and Greece , involving commercial pressure and interventions by private American figures , are recorded in memoir and secondary literature with varying evidentiary strength. Some are well supported; some are asserted more confidently than the sources warrant. It is safe to say that the vote was actively worked and that some smaller states changed position under pressure; it is not safe to attach precise mechanisms to every case.
Meanwhile the Palestinians, who constituted roughly two-thirds of the population, had no state, no seat, and no vote in the body disposing of their country. The Arab Higher Committee was permitted to address the Assembly; it had no standing to decide.
10.5 Acceptance and rejection: what each actually meant
The formula “the Jews accepted and the Arabs rejected” is accurate and incomplete, and the incompleteness matters in both directions.
Zionist acceptance was real and was celebrated in the streets of Tel Aviv. It was not unanimous , the Revisionists and the Irgun rejected partition and claimed the whole territory , and among the mainstream leadership it was accompanied by a widely held understanding that the boundaries were not final. Ben-Gurion’s contemporaneous statements make this explicit. This does not negate the acceptance: a party that accepts a compromise while hoping for more later is behaving normally in politics, and the alternative on offer was nothing. But the acceptance should be read as a strategic judgment that international legitimacy was worth more than territory, not as a settled endorsement of the map.
Palestinian rejection was equally real and equally rational from within its own frame. A majority population was being asked to consent to the transfer of more than half its country to a community that was a third of the population and legally owned less than a tenth of the land, on the authority of an assembly of distant states in which it was unrepresented, at a moment when the principle of self-determination was being applied elsewhere. No national movement in history has consented to such terms, and the demand that Palestinians should have done so in order to be regarded as reasonable is a demand made of no one else.
It was also, in cold retrospect, a disastrous judgment. Rejection produced war; war produced the loss not of 45 percent of the territory but of 78 percent, along with the destruction of Palestinian society. Rashid Khalidi’s assessment , that Palestinian leadership combined a just cause with a catastrophic strategic record, particularly in its refusal to engage with institutions it regarded as illegitimate , is the most rigorous internal criticism available and is more damaging than the external versions precisely because it takes the cause seriously.
10.6 Into civil war
Fighting began within days of the vote and escalated through the winter and spring: attacks on buses and convoys, bombings in Jerusalem and Haifa, the siege of the Jewish quarter of the Old City and of Jewish Jerusalem, the collapse of the mixed cities, and the beginning of mass Arab flight from the coastal towns well before the declaration of statehood. The British administration, having declared it would not enforce partition, largely stood aside and withdrew progressively toward the ports. By the time the Mandate expired on 14 May 1948, the civil war had already produced the first several hundred thousand refugees and the essential outlines of the outcome.
That is where the next stage of this history begins.
11. Why Did It Fail? Five Structural Explanations
Blame is available in every direction and is the least useful thing this record produces. The more valuable question is what made agreement so improbable.
11.1 Sovereignty was framed as indivisible
Both movements sought self-determination, and in the political vocabulary of the period self-determination meant a state, and a state meant exclusive sovereignty over a territory. There was no available conceptual framework , no binational model with international backing, no consociational precedent that either side found credible , in which two peoples could hold sovereignty over the same ground simultaneously. Brit Shalom and the UNSCOP minority report both proposed one; neither could attract the necessary constituency. In a zero-sum frame, every gain by one side is a loss to the other, and compromise appears to each as partial defeat rather than partial victory.
11.2 The demographic clock
Because the outcome would ultimately be determined by numbers, both sides experienced time as adversarial. Every year of continued immigration improved the Zionist position and worsened the Palestinian one. This created a structural incentive for Zionists to defer final settlement and for Palestinians to demand immediate resolution , an inversion of the usual conditions under which negotiated settlements become possible. A Palestinian leadership that accepted a freeze in 1922 or 1937 would have locked in a favorable ratio; one that accepted in 1947 was accepting a much worse one. Their consistent refusal to trade time for terms was strategically ruinous and is entirely explicable.
11.3 There was no bilateral arena
For thirty years neither community negotiated principally with the other. Both negotiated with Britain, and later with the United Nations. The imperial mediator was also an interested party with its own strategic priorities, and it responded to whichever community could apply more effective pressure in London , which meant that the rational strategy for each side was to lobby the empire rather than to bargain with its neighbor. Institutional structures shape behavior, and this one systematically discouraged the development of direct relationships, mutual knowledge, and habits of accommodation.
11.4 Asymmetry of state-building capacity
By 1947 the Yishuv possessed a recognized representative body, a treasury, a school system, a health service, a labor federation, a diplomatic apparatus, a functioning underground army with combat experience, and access to diaspora capital and to the sympathy of the two decisive great powers. The Palestinians possessed a fragmented notable leadership, much of it in exile, a shattered rural society, no unified command, no recognized institution, and dependence on Arab states whose own interests , Abdullah’s ambitions in particular , were not identical with theirs.
This asymmetry was not natural. It was produced by the Mandate’s constitutional structure, by British counterinsurgency in 1936–39, by the resources European Jewish immigration brought, and by Palestinian strategic choices, particularly the decision to boycott institutions rather than to contest them.
11.5 Maximalism and its costs on both sides
Palestinian leadership rejected the Legislative Council in 1922, Peel in 1937, the White Paper in 1939 , which offered majority rule within a decade , and partition in 1947. Each rejection was principled; the cumulative result was that every subsequent offer was worse than the last.
Zionist leadership, having secured a national home clause that no Arab consultation had endorsed, generally declined to offer terms that would have guaranteed Palestinian political rights in a shared framework, treated a Jewish majority as the non-negotiable objective, and, in the mainstream, regarded partition boundaries as provisional. The binationalists who proposed otherwise were marginalized.
It is possible to hold both of these observations without treating them as equivalent, and the difference in circumstance , one movement acting under the shadow of extermination, the other defending an existing society , should inform any judgment about them.
11.6 Counterfactuals, honestly assessed
Was any of it avoidable? Three counterfactuals are commonly proposed and none is strong.
If Britain had not issued the Balfour Declaration. Zionist immigration was already underway and the movement was seeking a patron elsewhere; the scale would likely have been smaller and the legal position weaker, but the Holocaust would still have generated overwhelming pressure for a refuge. The conflict would have been different, probably not absent.
If Palestinians had accepted partition in 1937 or 1947. They would have retained substantially more territory and a state, and the refugee catastrophe on the 1948 scale would not have occurred in that form. Whether the resulting arrangement would have been stable, given the demographic composition of the proposed Jewish state and Abdullah’s designs on the Arab one, is doubtful.
If a binational state had been established. The examples usually invoked in support , Belgium, Switzerland, Lebanon, Cyprus, Bosnia , offer a mixed and largely discouraging record for imposed power-sharing between communities with incompatible national projects and a recent history of violence. The proposal’s advocates were serious people; the absence of a substantial constituency on either side is not accidental.
The most defensible conclusion is that some conflict was probably unavoidable given two national movements, one territory, and an imperial context, but that the specific magnitude of the 1948 catastrophe was not. It was produced by particular decisions, at identifiable moments, by identifiable actors, most of whom had alternatives.
12. Conclusion
By the eve of 1948 the elements were fixed. One people stood at the threshold of achieving something that had appeared impossible for two thousand years and had become, within living memory, a matter of survival. Another stood at the threshold of losing the society in which its families had lived for centuries, as the price of a catastrophe it had neither caused nor been able to prevent. The same event would acquire two names , Ha’atzmaut, independence; al-Nakba, catastrophe , and the two names would organize the memory, politics, and grievance of the following century.
Three conclusions follow from the record assembled here.
The first is that the search for a founding villain fails, but not because all parties are equally implicated. They are not. Britain made incompatible commitments for imperial reasons and then enforced them selectively; the great powers disposed of a territory whose inhabitants they did not consult; the Zionist movement pursued a majority and a state on land where another people lived, and knew it was doing so; Palestinian leadership pursued a just claim through a sequence of strategically catastrophic refusals. These are different kinds of responsibility with different weights, and describing the whole as a tragedy is not the same as declaring an amnesty.
The second is that the two central moral claims are both sound and are not reconcilable by argument. Jewish people had earned, in blood, the conclusion that they required a sovereign refuge. Palestinians had done nothing to earn dispossession and were not liable for Europe’s crime. Any account that resolves this by discarding one of the claims is not a resolution; it is a decision about whose testimony to stop hearing.
The third is about power. Through the entire period examined here, neither of the two peoples whose fate was being determined held meaningful control over the process. Herzl petitioned emperors for audiences. Palestinian villagers were not consulted about the disposal of their villages. The decisive choices were made in London, Paris, Basel, Washington, Moscow, and Lake Success, by people who in most cases had never seen the territory and whose interest in it was strategic. This pattern did not end in 1948, and its persistence is among the more reliable predictors of how subsequent chapters of this history unfolded.
What the record most consistently shows is not the malice of two peoples toward each other but the indifference of the powerful toward both, and the terrible efficiency with which two entirely legitimate needs, placed on the same small piece of ground, could destroy each other.
Appendix A: Disputed Points
Presented as: the question, what each side argues, and where the evidence stands.
1. What Britain promised in the McMahon–Hussein correspondence. Arab position: Palestine fell within the area pledged for independence; the exclusion clause referred to a narrow coastal strip. British/Zionist position: Palestine was always excluded. State of evidence: The Arabic and English texts are genuinely ambiguous, the ambiguity was at least partly deliberate, and the 1939 joint committee could not resolve it. British members conceded the Arab case was stronger than earlier official statements had allowed. Unresolvable on the documents.
2. Britain’s motives for the Balfour Declaration. Positions: imperial strategy; wartime propaganda directed at Russian and American Jewry; Protestant restorationism; humanitarian sympathy; antisemitic desire to divert Jewish migration. State of evidence: All are documented. Their relative weight is debated and probably indeterminate, since different Cabinet members held different combinations.
3. Whether Zionism is best analyzed as settler colonialism. For: it involved organized settlement of a foreign population, land acquisition rendered inalienable, exclusive labor practice, and the pursuit of demographic majority , the structural signature of settler projects. Against: the settlers were refugees from genocide rather than agents of a metropole; there was no imperial homeland to serve or return to; the historical and religious connection to the specific territory has no analogue in the comparative cases. State of evidence: This is a dispute about classification rather than fact, and the underlying facts are largely agreed. Note that the structural argument and the motive argument are not actually in contradiction, which is why the dispute persists.
4. The extent of displacement by land purchase. Range of claims: from negligible (most purchases were of uncultivated or lightly used land, and compensation was paid) to systematic (tens of thousands displaced). State of evidence: British inquiries , Shaw, Hope Simpson, French , documented real displacement in specific cases, notably the Jezreel Valley, but registration of landless Arabs was administratively poor and almost certainly undercounted. The aggregate number is not reliably known. What is not in dispute is that JNF inalienability and Hebrew labor made transfers permanent in a way ordinary sales were not.
5. Whether Zionist settlement economically benefited the Arab population. For: growth in wages, health, literacy, and population exceeding neighboring countries. Against: segregated economies limited the diffusion of benefit; gains accrued unevenly; and economic improvement is not a substitute for political self-determination. State of evidence: The aggregate economic data support the first claim; its moral relevance is what is actually contested.
6. “Transfer” in Zionist thinking before 1948. Positions: transfer was a marginal idea rejected by the mainstream (Karsh); it was a widely discussed option that gained substantial support after Peel proposed it in 1937 but did not constitute an operational plan (Morris); it was a consistent and central objective (Masalha, Pappé). State of evidence: Documents exist showing serious discussion in 1937–38, and the source is the Peel Commission’s own recommendation. Disputes turn on translation of specific Hebrew passages, on elisions in published editions of Ben-Gurion’s diaries, and on how to weigh discussion against policy. Confident assertions in any direction outrun the evidence.
7. Great-power pressure in the 1947 vote. State of evidence: That the US and USSR backed partition for their own strategic reasons is thoroughly documented. That the vote was postponed and actively canvassed is documented. Specific allegations regarding individual delegations rest on memoir and secondary sources of uneven reliability and should be cited with care.
8. Whether coexistence was ever possible. Positions: the two movements were on a collision course from the outset; or different choices by Britain, the Zionist leadership, or Palestinian leadership could have produced a shared polity. State of evidence: Unfalsifiable. Worth knowing that it is contested and that serious historians hold both views.
9. The 1914 Jewish population figure. Zionist sources conventionally give 85,000; McCarthy’s reconstruction from Ottoman registers gives substantially less. The discrepancy involves the treatment of non-Ottoman subjects and of temporary residents. Both figures appear in reputable literature.
10. Responsibility for the failure of Palestinian institution-building. Positions: the Mandate’s structure made an equivalent Arab institution impossible without accepting the Jewish national home; or Palestinian leadership chose boycott over engagement and bears responsibility for the consequences. State of evidence: Both are true, and Rashid Khalidi’s The Iron Cage is the fullest treatment of how the constraint and the choice interacted.
Appendix B: Chronology
| Date | Event |
| 1858 | Ottoman Land Code; registration concentrates title in notable hands |
| 1881–82 | Assassination of Alexander II; pogroms; May Laws; Pinsker’s Auto-Emancipation |
| 1882–1903 | First Aliyah |
| 1894 | Dreyfus convicted in France |
| 1896 | Herzl, Der Judenstaat |
| 1897 | First Zionist Congress, Basel; World Zionist Organization founded |
| 1901 | Jewish National Fund established |
| 1904–14 | Second Aliyah; Tel Aviv founded 1909 |
| 1908 | Young Turk revolution; Arabic press expands; al-Karmil founded |
| 1911 | Filastin founded in Jaffa; Zionism debated in Ottoman parliament |
| 1915–16 | McMahon–Hussein correspondence |
| May 1916 | Sykes–Picot Agreement |
| June 1916 | Arab Revolt against the Ottomans begins |
| 2 Nov 1917 | Balfour Declaration |
| Dec 1917 | Allenby enters Jerusalem |
| Jan 1919 | Faisal–Weizmann agreement |
| 1919 | King–Crane Commission; report shelved |
| Apr 1920 | Nebi Musa riots; Haganah founded; San Remo assigns Mandate to Britain |
| 1920 | Histadrut founded |
| May 1921 | Jaffa riots; Haycraft Commission |
| 1921 | Hajj Amin al-Husseini appointed Mufti of Jerusalem |
| 1922 | Churchill White Paper; Transjordan separated; League confirms Mandate; first census |
| 1923 | Jabotinsky, “The Iron Wall” |
| 1924–28 | Fourth Aliyah |
| 1925 | Revisionist Zionism founded; Brit Shalom founded; Hebrew University opens |
| Aug 1929 | Western Wall riots; Hebron and Safed massacres; 133 Jews and 116+ Arabs killed |
| 1930 | Shaw Commission; Hope Simpson report; Passfield White Paper |
| Feb 1931 | MacDonald “Black Letter” nullifies Passfield |
| 1933 | Hitler comes to power; Fifth Aliyah surges; Haavara Agreement |
| Nov 1935 | Izz al-Din al-Qassam killed |
| Apr 1936 | General strike begins; Arab Higher Committee formed |
| Jul 1937 | Peel Commission recommends partition and population transfer |
| 1937–39 | Second phase of the Arab Revolt; British suppression |
| Jul 1938 | Évian Conference |
| Nov 1938 | Woodhead Commission rejects Peel partition |
| May 1939 | MacDonald White Paper restricts immigration and land sales |
| 1941–45 | The Holocaust |
| Nov 1941 | Hajj Amin al-Husseini meets Hitler in Berlin |
| Feb 1942 | Struma sinks; 768 die |
| May 1942 | Biltmore Program demands a Jewish commonwealth |
| 1945–47 | Jewish insurgency against British rule; DP camps; illegal immigration |
| Apr 1946 | Anglo-American Committee recommends admitting 100,000 |
| Jul 1946 | King David Hotel bombing; Kielce pogrom in Poland |
| Feb 1947 | Britain refers Palestine to the UN |
| Jul 1947 | Exodus 1947 intercepted |
| Aug–Sep 1947 | UNSCOP majority and minority reports |
| 29 Nov 1947 | UN Resolution 181 adopted, 33–13–10 |
| Dec 1947 | Intercommunal civil war begins |
| 14 May 1948 | Mandate ends; State of Israel declared |
Appendix C: Glossary and Principal Figures
Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginsberg) , cultural Zionist thinker; early internal critic of settler conduct toward Arabs.
Aliyah (pl. aliyot) , Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel; literally “ascent.”
Arab Higher Committee , Palestinian national leadership body formed April 1936 under Hajj Amin al-Husseini; outlawed by Britain in 1937, reconstituted 1946.
Avoda ivrit , “Hebrew labor”; the principle that Jewish-owned enterprises should employ only Jewish workers.
Balfour Declaration (1917) , British statement favoring a Jewish national home in Palestine; issued largely for imperial strategic reasons.
Ben-Gurion, David , Labor Zionist leader, chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive from 1935, later Israel’s first prime minister.
Brit Shalom , binationalist association founded 1925 advocating a shared Jewish-Arab state.
Dunam , unit of land area; the metric dunam used in Mandate statistics equals 1,000 square metres.
Haganah , main Jewish underground defense force from 1920; forerunner of the Israel Defense Forces.
Hajj Amin al-Husseini , Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921, dominant Palestinian leader of the interwar period; collaborated with Nazi Germany from exile.
Histadrut , General Federation of Jewish Labor, founded 1920; labor union, employer, and quasi-state institution.
Irgun (Etzel) , Revisionist paramilitary organization; split from the Haganah in 1931; conducted attacks on British and Arab targets.
Jabotinsky, Ze’ev , founder of Revisionist Zionism; author of “The Iron Wall”; ideological ancestor of the Israeli right.
Jewish Agency , body recognized under Article 4 of the Mandate to represent Jewish interests; functioned as a government-in-waiting.
Jewish National Fund (KKL) , land-purchasing body founded 1901; held land as inalienable Jewish national property.
Lehi (Stern Gang) , small militant splinter group that continued attacks on Britain during the Second World War.
Mandate , League of Nations system of administration; Britain held the Palestine Mandate from 1920/1923 to 1948.
Millet , Ottoman system of communal self-administration by religious community.
Musha’ , collective or periodically redistributed village landholding common in Ottoman Palestine.
Nakba , “catastrophe”; the Palestinian term for the events of 1948.
Notables, politics of , system in which urban landowning and religious families mediated between population and state.
Pale of Settlement , the region of the Russian Empire to which most Jews were legally confined.
Peel Commission (1937) , first official British proposal to partition Palestine; also recommended population transfer.
Pogrom , organized violent attack on a Jewish community, especially in the Russian Empire.
Sharif Hussein of Mecca , Hashemite leader who launched the 1916 Arab Revolt on the basis of British promises.
Sykes–Picot Agreement (1916) , secret Anglo-French division of Ottoman Arab territories into zones of control.
UNSCOP , UN Special Committee on Palestine, 1947; its majority report produced Resolution 181.
UN Resolution 181 (1947) , the Partition Plan; accepted by Zionist leadership, rejected by Arab leadership.
Weizmann, Chaim , chemist and diplomat; principal Zionist lobbyist in Britain; later Israel’s first president.
White Paper (1939) , British restriction of Jewish immigration and land purchase on the eve of the Holocaust.
Yishuv , the Jewish community in Palestine; “Old Yishuv” for the pre-Zionist religious communities, “New Yishuv” for the Zionist settlement.
Appendix D: Note on Statistics
Readers should treat every number in this history with a degree of caution, for four reasons.
Ottoman data were collected for taxation and conscription and systematically undercounted the populations with the strongest reasons to avoid both , which is to say, rural Muslims, women, and children. Corrections applied by demographers vary. Non-Ottoman subjects, including many recent Jewish immigrants who retained foreign nationality, were recorded separately or not at all.
Mandate censuses (1922, 1931) were more rigorous but still incomplete, particularly for the Bedouin population of the Negev, whose estimated size varies by tens of thousands across sources and which materially affects the demographic arithmetic of the partition proposals. No census was taken after 1931; the 1946 figures in the Survey of Palestine are projections.
Land statistics conflate distinct categories , total area, cultivable area, state domain, private ownership, effective cultivation , and figures cited without specifying which category is meant are close to meaningless. The frequently cited “less than 7 percent” refers to Jewish private and institutional ownership as a share of the total land area, including desert and uncultivable terrain.
Casualty figures for the 1936–39 revolt in particular are estimates derived from incomplete British records and do not capture deaths from privation, nor consistently distinguish combatants from civilians, nor reliably separate Palestinians killed by British forces from those killed by other Palestinians.
Where this paper gives ranges, the range reflects the actual state of the evidence rather than authorial hedging.
Bibliography and Further Reading
Organized by orientation so that readers can construct a balanced diet deliberately. Inclusion does not imply endorsement; several of these works contradict each other flatly, which is the point.
General surveys
- Charles D. Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: A History with Documents
- Mark Tessler, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
- James L. Gelvin, The Israel-Palestine Conflict: A History
- Ian Bickerton and Carla Klausner, A History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
Late Ottoman and social history
- Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900
- Michelle Campos, Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine
- Salim Tamari, Mountain Against the Sea: Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture
- Justin McCarthy, The Population of Palestine
- Abigail Jacobson, From Empire to Empire: Jerusalem Between Ottoman and British Rule
Zionism: history and thought
- Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism
- Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948
- Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914
- Derek Penslar, Zionism: An Emotional State and Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader
- Arthur Hertzberg (ed.), The Zionist Idea , primary texts
- Ze’ev Jabotinsky, “The Iron Wall” (1923) , primary source
Palestinian history and nationalism
- Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness
- Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood
- Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine
- Yehoshua Porath, The Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement, 1918–1929 and The Palestinian Arab National Movement, 1929–1939
- Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal, The Palestinian People: A History
- Walid Khalidi (ed.), From Haven to Conquest and All That Remains
- Ann Mosely Lesch, Arab Politics in Palestine, 1917–1939
The Mandate, Britain, and empire
- Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate
- Bernard Wasserstein, The British in Palestine
- Jonathan Schneer, The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
- James Barr, A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle for the Mastery of the Middle East
- Kenneth Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917–1939
- Martin Bunton, Colonial Land Policies in Palestine, 1917–1936
- Matthew Hughes, Britain’s Pacification of Palestine: The British Army, the Colonial State, and the Arab Revolt, 1936–1939
- Elizabeth Monroe, Britain’s Moment in the Middle East, 1914–1971
The revisionist debate
- Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001
- Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited
- Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World and Collusion Across the Jordan
- Ilan Pappé, A History of Modern Palestine and The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
- Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities
- Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought
- Efraim Karsh, Fabricating Israeli History: The “New Historians” and Palestine Betrayed , the principal critique
Intercommunal relations and alternatives
- Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906–1948
- Hillel Cohen, Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929
- Hillel Cohen, Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism
- Susan Lee Hattis, The Bi-National Idea in Palestine During Mandatory Times
Holocaust, refugees, and the road to 1947
- Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust
- Arieh Kochavi, Post-Holocaust Politics: Britain, the United States, and Jewish Refugees
- David Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews
- Motti Golani, Palestine Between Politics and Terror, 1945–1947
Primary documents
- The Balfour Declaration (1917); the McMahon–Hussein correspondence (published Cmd 5957, 1939)
- The Mandate for Palestine (League of Nations, 1922)
- Palestine Royal Commission Report [Peel], Cmd 5479 (1937)
- Hope Simpson Report, Cmd 3686 (1930)
- Palestine: Statement of Policy [White Paper], Cmd 6019 (1939)
- A Survey of Palestine (Government Printer, 1946), 2 vols. and supplement
- Report of the UN Special Committee on Palestine, A/364 (1947)
- UN General Assembly Resolution 181 (II), 29 November 1947
Part 1 of this series covers 1948 itself: the declaration of the state, the civil and inter-state phases of the war, the flight and expulsion of some 700,000–750,000 Palestinians, the destruction of over 400 villages, the armistice lines, and the emergence of the two memories , Ha’atzmaut and Nakba , on which everything that follows is built.
