After the League of Nations granted Great Britain the authority to administer the mandate over Palestine, conflicting expectations of Jews and Arabs about what had been promised them by the British erupted into enduring hostility.
At the conclusion of World War I, the victorious Allies met in Paris in 1919 to decide the fate of the defeated Central Powers. The year before, U.S. president Woodrow Wilson had proclaimed in his Fourteen Points
The French had ambitions to receive the mandate on greater Syria, which included the region of Palestine to the south, an area supposedly agreed upon in 1916 by the British and French foreign officials Sir Mark Sykes and François-Georges Picot.
Chaim Weizmann, a Russian immigrant and British citizen after 1910, championed the idea of creating a national home for the Jews. Weizmann had earned official favor by discovering an industrial fermentation process to produce acetone, a key ingredient in cordite-explosive propellants. In October of 1917, the War Cabinet approved the issuance of a letter from Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lionel Walter Rothschild declaring that the British government would look favorably on the “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” providing that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. . . .” In November, the Balfour Declaration was made public by the Zionist Federation.
The question of who would receive the mandate for Palestine remained open, as both the French and the Italians had interests in protecting the Holy Land. On the other hand, the British cabinet was divided about the merits of accepting the responsibilities inherent in a mandate. While Balfour had become a firm Zionist, he believed British interests would not be served in receiving the trust for such a problematic enterprise. Others thought the mandate should be internationalized, and some believed the United States should accept the task, although it had never declared war against Turkey and was otherwise opposed to annexationist European ambitions. The American King-Crane Commission (1919) reported great Arab sympathy toward an American mandate, but the idea died when the United States refused to join the League of Nations. Neither the British, the Zionists, nor the Arabs were inclined to see the title awarded to France, and the British prime minister David Lloyd George, whose strict Baptist upbringing made him sympathetic to Zionism, believed strongly that English colonial interests in Egypt necessitated control of Palestine.
On the eve of World War I, some eighty-five thousand Jews lived in Palestine among approximately six hundred thousand Arabs, a small number of whom were Christians. Approximately thirty-five thousand Jews had arrived since the 1880’s, and many of them cleaved to the Zionist position that immigration should be promoted as much as possible, so that the region would be undeniably Jewish. Mounting Arabic hostility to the implications of such an immigration policy resulted in negotiations between Weizmann and Faisal I, future king of greater Syria. Apparently, Faisal did not consider the Palestinians to be true Arabs, and he was persuaded that he could use Zionist support in his claims against the French in Damascus. As a result, he agreed to accept continued Jewish immigration as long as other promises to Arabs were fulfilled. The Faisal-Weizmann Agreement,
However, the General Syrian Congress,
In the spring of 1920, at the London and San Remo conferences, Great Britain gained rights to the Palestine mandate, and on June 24, 1922, at the League of Nations meeting in Geneva, the mandate was officially instituted. Eastern borders of the mandate were drawn with an eye toward facilitating the building of a British oil pipeline from its mandate in Iraq through Transjordan (now Jordan) to seaports in Palestine. In September, the eastern portion of the mandate (then known as the Emirate of Transjordan and now known as Jordan), an autonomous political division under ՙAbd Allā ibn al-Ḥusayn, elder son of the sharif of Mecca, was excluded from all provisions concerning Jewish settlement, while the territory west of the Jordan River became known as Palestine.
Although some British officials, such as George Nathaniel Curzon,
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Fromkin, David. A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East. New York: Henry Holt, 1989. A comprehensive history of the battles and negotiations that ended World War I in the Middle East. -
Sanders, Ronald. The High Walls of Jerusalem: A History of the Balfour Declaration and the Birth of the British Mandate for Palestine. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983. A detailed account of events during World War I leading to the Balfour Declaration and the British mandate. -
Segev, Tom. One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate. Translated by Haim Watzman. New York: Henry Holt, 2000. Passionate stories of Jews and Arabs in Palestine who experienced the events that led to the creation of the mandate. -
Sicker, Martin. Reshaping Palestine: From Muhammad Ali to the British Mandate, 1831-1922. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999. A history of the emergence of Zionism and its role in the creation of Palestine. -
Stein, Leonard. The Balfour Declaration. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961. Detailed description of the events and statesmen associated with the Balfour Declaration by a friend of the leading Zionists.
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