The Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate
Britain conquers Palestine in the First World War, promises a "national home for the Jewish people" there, and rules for three decades as Jewish immigration grows and Arab resistance hardens.
- The Balfour Declaration — Arthur James Balfour, The Avalon Project, Yale Law School (1917)
- One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate — Tom Segev, Metropolitan Books (2000)
- The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 — Rashid Khalidi, Metropolitan Books (2020)
- Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)
- The Israel-Palestine Conflict: A History — James L. Gelvin, Cambridge University Press (2021)
On 2 November 1917, as British troops pushed into Ottoman Palestine, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour wrote to Lord Rothschild that the government “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”, provided “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. British forces took Jerusalem the following month.
- The Balfour Declaration — Arthur James Balfour, The Avalon Project, Yale Law School (1917)
- One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate — Tom Segev, Metropolitan Books (2000)
Britain’s motives were mixed: wartime propaganda aimed at Jews in America and Russia, strategic interest in a friendly population near the Suez Canal, and genuine sympathy among some Christian politicians for the “restoration” of the Jews. Britain had also encouraged Sharif Hussein of Mecca to believe that the Arab lands would be independent, and agreed with France in the secret Sykes–Picot agreement of 1916 to divide the region.
- One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate — Tom Segev, Metropolitan Books (2000)
- The Israel-Palestine Conflict: A History — James L. Gelvin, Cambridge University Press (2021)
The Mandate
In 1922 the League of Nations gave Britain a mandate over Palestine that wrote the Balfour Declaration into its terms. Britain’s 1922 census counted about 757,000 people, roughly 11 percent of them Jews, the rest overwhelmingly Muslim and Christian Arabs. By the end of the Mandate, after successive waves of immigration, Jews were about a third of nearly two million people.
- One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate — Tom Segev, Metropolitan Books (2000)
- Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 — Benny Morris, Vintage (2001)
The Jewish community, the Yishuv, built a state-in-waiting: the Jewish Agency, the Histadrut labour federation, Hebrew schools and the Hebrew University (1925), kibbutzim, the city of Tel Aviv and the Haganah militia. Land was bought, often from absentee landlords, and sometimes tenant farmers were evicted. Palestinian Arabs, led by rival notable families such as the Husseinis and Nashashibis, demanded representative government and an end to immigration, which Britain refused because an Arab majority would have blocked the Jewish national home.
- Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)
- The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood — Rashid Khalidi, Beacon Press (2006)
- One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate — Tom Segev, Metropolitan Books (2000)
Violence and retreat
Tension erupted repeatedly. In 1929 a dispute over the Western Wall led to riots in which 133 Jews were killed, including 67 in Hebron, and 116 Arabs, most of them by British police.
- One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate — Tom Segev, Metropolitan Books (2000)
- Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 — Benny Morris, Vintage (2001)
- One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate — Tom Segev, Metropolitan Books (2000)
- The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 — Rashid Khalidi, Metropolitan Books (2020)
After the Second World War, Jewish underground groups fought Britain, most notoriously in the Irgun’s 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel, which killed 91 people, while Britain turned back ships of Holocaust survivors. Exhausted, Britain handed the problem to the United Nations in 1947 and left on 14 May 1948.
- Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)
- One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate — Tom Segev, Metropolitan Books (2000)
The two peoples remember these thirty years in opposite ways: one as the building of a homeland, the other as the loss of one.
A historic recognition of Jewish rights in the ancestral homeland, written into international law by the League of Nations. Britain then retreated from its promise, above all in the 1939 White Paper, which shut the gates on Jews fleeing Hitler.
- Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)
- One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate — Tom Segev, Metropolitan Books (2000)
A colonial betrayal. Britain had encouraged Arab hopes of independence, then promised a land where Arabs were about 90 percent of the people to a European movement, referring to them only as "existing non-Jewish communities" and protecting their "civil and religious" but not political rights.
- The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 — Rashid Khalidi, Metropolitan Books (2020)
- The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood — Rashid Khalidi, Beacon Press (2006)
Britain made overlapping, contradictory wartime pledges to Arabs, Zionists and France. The Mandate's own terms favoured the building of a Jewish national home while denying Palestinian Arabs representative government, which made a clash almost inevitable.
- One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate — Tom Segev, Metropolitan Books (2000)
- The Israel-Palestine Conflict: A History — James L. Gelvin, Cambridge University Press (2021)
- Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 — Benny Morris, Vintage (2001)
Why it matters today
For Israelis the Declaration and the Mandate were the first international recognition of the Jewish people's tie to the land, and the decades in which the Yishuv, the Jewish community, built the institutions, towns, kibbutzim and defence force of a future state.
For Palestinians 1917 is where the catastrophe began: an empire promised their country to another people without asking them. Every 2 November Palestinians mark the anniversary in protest, and many see Britain as bearing a historic responsibility it has never accepted.