Chapter Thirteen, The Establishment of Israel, 1918-1948

To most people enduring the horrors of World War I, Britain’s conquest of Palestine and proclamation of the Balfour Declaration in late 1917 were matters of only marginal consequence. While the capture of Jerusalem in December 1917 was a boost to Allied morale and the Balfour Declaration committed Britain to support the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine neither seemed important in comparison to the dramatic revolution then occurring in Russia or to the titanic military struggle rapidly approaching its culmination in France.

In fact, the wartime events related to Palestine would prove to be of enormous regional and even global significance owing to the fact that they permitted the Zionists to make tangible progress for the first time in their heretofore unsuccessful effort to create a Jewish state. The Balfour Declaration and the conquest of Palestine would set in motion a bitter zero-sum struggle between two nationalist movements, one Jewish and one Palestinian, over which would control the land that lay between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. That struggle would end in a Zionist victory in a conflict that Israelis call the War of Independence and that Palestinians refer to as al-Nakba, or the catastrophe. The result would be the establishment of the state of Israel, the permanent exile of the overwhelming majority of the Palestinian population, and the birth of the region’s most enduring and damaging conflict.

Establishing the Mandate, 1918-1922: Zionism Triumphant?

The events of 1917 electrified the Zionists. Not only had Britain committed itself to supporting the establishment of a Jewish state, as leaders like Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952) chose to interpret the Balfour Declaration’s call for a “national home,” but, critically, it had also taken possession of the territory in which the Zionists hoped to found that state. Subsequent events further boosted their optimism. At the San Remo Conference in April 1920, London had secured the formal endorsement of both Paris and Rome for a British mandate over Palestine and thus ensured that it had the legal standing to put the Balfour Declaration into effect. To top it off, London announced that the prominent British Zionist Herbert Samuel (1870-1963) would serve as the territory’s first high commissioner.

The Zionists’ postwar euphoria peaked in 1919 and 1920. With Britain seemingly firm in its commitment to their movement, Zionist leaders felt confident in pressing aggressively for the rapid realization of their most aspirational goals. For example, lobbying to secure international support for an expansive understanding of the new state’s borders future Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion (r. 1848-1954, 1955-1963) argued that it should encompass the territory controlled by the ancient Hebrew kingdom at its height. He thus called for it to include land on both sides of the Jordan River as well as parts of Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt. Even the cautious Weizmann, the driving force behind the Balfour Declaration, could not hide his excitement at the prospect of the rapid establishment of a Jewish state throughout the entirety of the mandate. Though he continued to use the amorphous term ‘homeland’ rather than the more inflammatory word ‘state’ while attending the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, he was so confident of the impending success of Zionism that he felt comfortable publicly expressing his desire to “make Palestine as Jewish as England is English.”

The Arab Riots of 1920 and 1921

Ultimately, Zionist confidence following World War I was badly misplaced. Not only would the establishment of a Jewish state prove to be far from imminent, but Britain would begin to back away from its commitment to the Balfour Declaration just a few years after the conflict had ended. Indeed, more than a quarter century would pass before the movement finally succeeded in establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. What accounted for Zionism’s postwar failure? Why was it unable at that time to achieve a goal that had seemed so tantalizingly close?

Ironically, the movement’s inability to secure a Jewish state at that time was a function not of its weakness but instead of its strength. With every success, Zionism engendered a growing fear among members of the indigenous, Arab-Palestinian population that a powerful and alien minority was in the process of displacing them from the land on which they and countless generations of their ancestors had lived. The issuance of the Balfour Declaration, intemperate statements by Zionist leaders, rising Jewish land purchases and the concomitant displacement of Arab peasants, or fellahin, and, especially, immigration, (18,500 Jewish people arrived in the territory between 1919 and 1921), stoked those concerns. In response, the Palestinians began to espouse an incipient, proto nationalism. The formation of Muslim-Christian associations throughout the territory in 1918 and the establishment of the First Palestinian Arab Congress in 1919 reflected this new outlook. Expressing widespread opposition to Zionism, these organizations called on Britain to cede the entirety of Palestine to Faisal I’s (1883-1933) Arab Kingdom of Syria. They also made clear that they viewed the contest with the Zionists as an existential, winner-take-all fight. As one Arab bluntly told the fact-finding King-Crane Commission, “[w]e will push the Zionists into the sea—or they will send us back into the desert.”

Palestinian frustration with the British and fear of displacement finally boiled over in early 1920. Urged on by mayor Musa Kazim al-Husseini (1853-1934), a crowd of Arabs began attacking Jews and looting Jewish-owned shops in Jerusalem’s Old City following a Muslim religious procession on Easter Sunday. The rioting quickly got out of hand. Indeed, it was so intense and involved so many people that the British lost control of Jerusalem for three days and only managed to restore order after they declared martial law and deployed troops. By the time the soldiers had suppressed the riot, five Jews and four Arabs had been killed and an additional 239 individuals from both communities had been wounded, the majority of whom were Jewish.

Palestinian fear of Zionism and mounting anger toward the British produced a second round of intercommunal clashes the following year. Stories of rising immigration and Jewish land purchases had left the Arabs primed for a fight. Ironically, however, it was a May Day brawl between rival Jewish communist and socialist groups in Jaffa that sparked the return of intercommunal violence. Initially, the fighting remained confined to the leftist Zionist groups. Once it spilled over into a nearby Arab neighborhood, however, it quickly transformed into a vicious pogrom in which Arab mobs attacked Jewish people and shops in both Jaffa and the surrounding countryside. The British once more responded aggressively to the rioting. Declaring a state of emergency, they sent sizeable contingents of troops and armored cars into battle against armed bands of Arabs and even dropped bombs on villages. When the smoke finally cleared, British officials were shocked by the scale of the Jaffa riots: forty-seven Jews had died and 146 had been wounded, while forty-eight Arabs had been killed and seventy-three injured.

Dominated by the Labor Zionists, so called because they came from the socialist parties and labor unions, the Zionist leadership found the riots of 1920 and, especially, 1921 deeply concerning. They questioned the capacity and willingness of the British to protect Jews in the mandate, wondered whether their movement would be able to overcome Arab resistance, and worried that the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, was vulnerable to further attacks. Above all, they were concerned that the scale of the violence might lead either prospective Jewish immigrants or the British to arrive at the truth: that the Zionists faced a coherent, proto- nationalist Palestinian opposition. If Jewish Europeans drew such a conclusion, immigration would slow to a trickle and the Zionist share of the population in Palestine would remain tiny. If the British did, London would almost certainly respond by weakening or even abandoning its commitment to the Balfour Declaration in order to appease the numerically superior Arabs. In either case, the goal of Zionism, the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, would be doomed to failure.

To counter such conclusions, the Zionists deployed two arguments. First, contending that the Arab and Jewish peoples shared common interests, they rejected the idea that ethnic tensions caused the riots and instead located the roots of the violence in class conflict between the exploited fellahin, and the Palestinian notables who owned the land they worked. The latter, the Zionists continued, had stirred up the otherwise apolitical Arab masses with lurid tales of Jewish aggression and land purchases in a successful effort to divert the peasants’ justified anger, creating in the process, a misplaced fury that soon manifested itself in the form of anti-Jewish rioting. Second, the Labor Zionists not only disputed the idea that Zionism was a threat to the well-being of the Arab peasants but argued that the continued inflow of Jewish immigrants and capital would transform Palestine’s feudal economy into a dynamic, modern one that would dramatically lift Arab living standards. Once the economic benefits of Zionism began to manifest themselves, they added, any lingering resentment among the Palestinian masses toward the movement would rapidly dissipate as they refocused their anger on the landlords who had for so long exploited them.

The Churchill White Paper of 1922

These arguments may have reassured Jewish Europeans thinking about immigrating to Palestine, but they failed to move British officials. Administrators in the mandate possessed enough experience managing colonies to tell the difference between transitory unrest and serious problems, and what they saw in Palestine in 1920 and 1921 deeply concerned them. Indeed, the sheer scale of the violence suggested not only that Palestinian opposition to the Balfour Declaration was far more serious than the Zionists claimed but that the disorder in the mandate was likely to continue unless the British addressed at least some of the Arabs’ objections.

The riots also laid bare for the first time the existence of significant tension between policymakers in London and those serving in Palestine over the question of which community the British should favor. Officials in the capital lamented the recent violence in Palestine but, insulated by distance from the disorder and in close contact with key Zionist leaders, remained committed to fulfilling Britain’s promise to establish a Jewish homeland in the territory. To administrators in Jerusalem, in contrast, the Jaffa riots had exposed the contradictions inherent in London’s simultaneous promise to establish a national homeland for the Jews and its pledge to uphold the rights of the “existing non-Jewish communities.” They argued that since there was simply no feasible way that Britain could meet both of those obligations and since the Palestinians constituted the vast majority of the territory’s population, the mandatory government should pursue policies that favored the Arabs. In keeping with this line of thinking, officials in Jerusalem moved to appease the Palestinians immediately after the Jaffa riots by placing temporary restrictions on immigration and by pressing London to back away from the commitment it had made in the Balfour Declaration to help the Zionists establish a Jewish national home in Palestine.

Reconciling these differences fell to Secretary of State for the Colonies Winston Churchill (1874-1965), who did so in 1922 in a statement colloquially referred to as the Churchill White Paper. It included three main provisions designed to ease Arab concerns. First, while the document restated Britain’s commitment to help the Zionists establish a national home in Palestine and confirmed that Jewish people had a right to immigrate to the territory, it also reassured the Arabs that the Balfour Declaration did not mean that all of Palestine “should be converted into a Jewish national home, but [only] that such a home should be founded in Palestine.” Second, it put restrictions on immigration for the first time. Finally, the paper formally detached Transjordan from Palestine.

The British moved quickly to put the Churchill White Paper into effect. To ensure Zionist interests, London had the text of the Balfour Declaration formally incorporated into the mandate charter that the League of Nations issued in July 1922, and it arranged for the world body to accredit an important Yishuv organization, the Zionist Executive, as the official representative of the Jewish community in Palestine. Meanwhile, to ease Arab concerns, British officials in the mandate began enforcing limits on immigration in accordance with the white paper.

Churchill was pleased with the results of his work. In his eyes, London had addressed each party’s concerns and had done so in a way that resolved the contradiction inherent in the Balfour Declaration. With limits on immigration now in effect, the Palestinians could be certain that they would not lose their livelihood to Jewish settlers or see the entire mandate swallowed up by a Zionist state. With the declaration having been formally incorporated into the mandate charter, meanwhile, the Zionists could rest assured that they would get the national home that they sought. For a time, events in Palestine appeared to sustain Churchill’s favorable assessment of London’s new approach. Indeed, the absence of intercommunal violence in the mandate over the next few years suggested strongly that the colonial secretary really had resolved the conflict between Palestinian Arabs and Jewish immigrants.

In reality, neither the Palestinians nor the Zionists were in the least bit pleased with the terms of the Churchill White Paper. The Arabs disliked it because they did not want any further Jewish immigration and because they believed that the Zionists remained intent on establishing a Jewish state throughout the entirety of the mandate. They turned out to be correct in this belief. For their part, the Labor Zionists who dominated the Zionist Executive were unhappy with it because it appeared to indicate that Britain was backing away from the commitment it had made in the Balfour Declaration.

The Simmering Conflict, 1922-1936 Zionism’s New Approach

Nonetheless, the Zionist Executive opted to accept the terms of the Churchill White Paper. What explains this decision? Why did it agree to abide by a deal that most Zionists believed was contrary to their movement’s interests? It did so for two reasons. First, the Zionist leadership understood that Jews accounted for only a small minority of Palestine’s population, just 11 percent according to the 1922 census, and were thus not in a position to achieve the dream of a Jewish state without the continued backing of their British patron. Second, they agreed to abide by the new limits that Churchill had imposed because they viewed those restrictions as merely temporary ones that they would be able to discard after they had founded the Zionist state. That is, once they had established control of a part of Palestine, however small, they could then bring in as many immigrants as they liked and could expand their fledgling state to include additional territory.

Accordingly, the Labor Zionists effected a significant, if tactical, policy change following the riots of 1920 and 1921 and the issuance of the Churchill White Paper. For the time being, they abandoned the strategy they had adopted after World War I of trying to secure the rapid establishment of a large Jewish state. Instead, Zionists adopted a more pragmatic, gradualist policy of building up their position in Palestine until such time that they had the international support and domestic strength needed to declare the establishment of the Zionist state.

Revisionist Zionism and the Iron Wall

However, the Zionists were not unanimous in supporting the shift to a gradualist policy. Instead, under the leadership of a dissident member of the Zionist Executive, the Russian-born Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940), a minority rejected the pragmatic strategy of the mainstream Labor Zionists in favor of a far-more aggressive and militaristic approach. Called revisionists because they wanted to revise the mandate’s terms so that Transjordan was again subject to the Balfour Declaration, Jabotinsky and his supporters argued that the incremental strategy would not succeed and that the Zionist Executive could achieve that goal only by abandoning gradualism in favor of the immediate establishment of a Jewish state that included territory on both banks of the Jordan River. Jabotinsky repeatedly laid out his position before the Zionist Executive in the early 1920s. With the leadership firmly committed to gradualism, however, his objections fell on deaf ears. Frustrated, he resigned his seat in 1923 and threw himself into the task of organizing a political opposition movement, later known as the Revisionist Party, and an associated paramilitary youth organization called Betar. The new party enjoyed only modest support at first and remained very much in the minority during the interwar period. Nonetheless, gaining a small, but committed following, it provided an influential ideological challenge to the Labor Zionists.

Jabotinsky’s embrace of militarism stemmed from his rejection of the Labor Zionists’ belief that a Jewish state could be established peacefully in Palestine. He maintained that their position was an absurd one given the zero-sum nature of the dispute over the mandate. From his perspective, the question of which people would control Palestine could only be settled through force. He postulated that no promise of economic gain or assurance that a Jewish homeland would not harm the territory’s non-Jewish residents would placate the Arabs or obscure the fact that Zionism was, at heart, a “colonizing venture,” one that the Palestinians, whom he openly acknowledged were a national group, were bound to oppose.

Considering this fact, he continued, the Zionists could ensure their security only through the erection of a metaphorical “Iron Wall:” a powerful military that would first establish the Jewish state through brute strength and then protect it by responding to every Arab provocation, however minor, with overwhelming force. Eventually, after repeated defeats had exhausted the Palestinians of any hope that they could destroy the Jewish state, the Zionists would finally be able to engage in productive negotiations with the Arabs aimed at granting them limited rights in a Jewish-controlled country. Thus, in Jabotinsky’s eyes, efforts to placate the Palestinians were a waste of time. Only overwhelming force could establish the Jewish state, and only disproportionate strength could ensure its survival.

Jabotinksy’s differences with the Labor Zionists thus appeared to be enormous. Where he acknowledged that Palestinian resistance was inevitable and reflected nationalist sentiment, his labor opponents instead publicly clung to the view that the real conflict in the mandate was a class-based one that would disappear as the economy improved. Likewise, while he asserted that the Zionists could only establish a Jewish state through force, they continued to declare that the movement could do so through negotiation and compromise. At heart, however, the disagreements between the Labor Zionists and the Revisionists were more about tactics than substance. In truth, the moderates shared many of Jabotinsky’s views and pursued their seemingly more conciliatory approach not because it reflected deeply held views but because they believed it would avoid alienating Britain, the patron on whose assistance the achievement of their goal ultimately depended.

Their confidential statements made clear just how similar their views were to the Revisionists’ position. For example, the prominent Zionist H. M. Kalvaryski admitted not long after the Jaffa riots that the violence was not the product of class conflict. As he wrote,“[i]t is pointless to consider this a question only of effendis [elites]…we should realize that we have to reckon with an Arab national movement.” More importantly, despite their public commitment to peaceful coexistence, the Labor Zionist leaders who dominated the Zionist Executive, renamed the Jewish Agency in 1929, privately agreed with Jabotinsky that their movement would need to use force to establish and maintain a Jewish state. As Ben Gurion wrote confidentially in the 1930s, only after repeated military defeats had produced “total despair on the part of the Arabs…may the Arabs acquiesce in a Jewish Eretz [greater] Israel.” Thus, though the Labor Zionists continued to declare their opposition to Jabotinsky in public, they privately accepted the broad thrust of his thinking and disagreed with him far more about timing and rhetoric than method or outcome.

Zionist Institution Building

In the meantime, the mainstream Labor Zionists moved to strengthen the Yishuv’s position. With the Jewish community already possessing a mature national consciousness, they focused on creating a series of interlocking political, cultural, and economic structures that would serve as the foundation of the coming Jewish state and society. They established a parliament, the Haganah militia, an executive body known as the Jewish National Council, and the Histadrut, a federation of labor unions that represented workers but that also provided health care and pursued industrial development. These organizations worked closely with the existing Jewish National Fund, which purchased land for Jewish immigrants, and with the Zionist Executive, which, in addition to its role as the Yishuv’s League of Nations-sanctioned representative to the mandatory power, also promoted immigration to Palestine. Tying these institutions together was the Ahdut HaAvoda, or Labor Unity Party, which, under the leadership of Ben Gurion and his allies, had been instrumental in founding the Haganah and Histadrut. In 1930, it merged with another socialist party to become Mapai, the political party that would dominate Israeli politics during the country’s first three decades. Able to draw on the experience that highly educated European Jewish immigrants brought with them, these institutions grew rapidly in scale and sophistication. By 1930, as a result, they functioned as a de facto government for the Yishuv, one, as we shall see, that left it well prepared for eventual independence.

Jewish economic dynamism matched this institutional growth. Operating separately from the Palestinian economy, and thus implicitly undermining the claim that the growth of the Jewish community would raise Arab living standards, the Yishuv economy underwent rapid growth during the mandate period. Benefitting from the continued arrival of highly educated Jewish European immigrants and the ongoing influx of huge quantities of capital, it expanded at a blistering average annual rate of

13.2 percent during the 1920s, roughly twice the rate at which the mandate’s Arab economy grew. Moreover, Jewish economic development was impressively diversified. It included not only industrial growth in urban areas but also the establishment of dozens of agricultural settlements in the countryside in the form of kibbutz and moshav.

Palestinian Institution Building

The Palestinians, too, engaged in institution and nation building in the 1920s. The Palestinian Arab Congress continued to meet regularly and, in 1920, elected a governing board called the Arab Executive to coordinate resistance to Zionism. The Palestinians also gained control of two new, British-created institutions: the Supreme Muslim Council (SMC), which administered awqaf revenue, and the post of Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Palestine, which afforded its first holder, the young nationalist Hajj Amin al-Husseini (c. 1897-1974), with substantial authority thanks to the power it vested in him to name Islamic judges, or qadis, to their posts. Meanwhile, following France’s destruction of Faisal’s Arab Kingdom of Syria in July 1920, the Palestinians abandoned their earlier pan-Arabist attempts to attach Palestine to greater Syria in favor of a new effort to transform the mandate into an independent, Arab state, a change that abetted the development of a strong, Palestinian nationalist identity.

While these institution- and nation-building efforts may appear significant at first glance, they were anemic in comparison to the Zionists’ accomplishments in the interwar era. In stark contrast to the Yishuv’s efficiently run bodies, Palestinian political structures were weak, riven by debilitating factional disputes, and incapable of providing the direction that modern states and societies require. What accounted for the ineffectiveness of these institutions? Why were the Palestinians unable to keep pace with the Yishuv in establishing the sort of quasi-state political, military, and economic structures that could, when the time was right, be transformed into state institutions?

Traditionally, historians have argued that three shortcomings intrinsic to Palestinian society explain the failure to develop governing structures comparable to those of the Yishuv. First, they have maintained that sharp class, religious, and political differences prevented the Palestinians from presenting a unified front against either the Zionists or the British. Most notably, the intense political rivalry between the grand mufti al-Husseini’s dominant faction and the loose opposition party controlled by his family’s traditional rivals, the Nashashibi clan, diverted Arab energies away from confronting Zionism and into internecine battles. Second, adherents of the traditional view have noted that the Palestinians were far-less developed politically than the Zionists and lacked their rivals’ organizational sophistication and diplomatic tact. As a result, the Zionists were able to outmaneuver them at every turn. Finally, emphasizing historical contingency, proponents of this interpretation have asserted that Palestinian leaders were peculiarly ineffective and frequently worked against their own best interests.

Considerable evidence seems to support this interpretation. For example, the Arabs initially rejected High Commissioner Samuel’s proposal in 1922 to establish a joint legislative council for the mandate based on a proportional system of representation that would have given them more seats than the Zionists. The Palestinians eventually warmed to the offer, but as would seemingly happen again and again, the proposal was no longer on the table when they belatedly changed their minds. Such episodes have long shaped interpretations of the Palestinian nationalist effort in the interwar era and have led many scholars to conclude that there is more than a grain of truth to Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban’s (1915-2002) famous quip that “[t]he Palestinians never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

However, the traditional view has not gone unchallenged. While acknowledging the manifest failings of the Palestinian leadership, a number of historians have recently taken issue with the conventional interpretation by arguing that it fails to capture adequately the significant constitutional constraints under which the Palestinians operated or to note the very different political circumstances in which the Arabs and Zionists found themselves. Indeed, they maintain that trying to explain Palestinian failures by focusing on their shortcomings vis-à-vis their Zionist rivals is of little analytical value. As the historian Rashid Khalidi notes, contrasting the Palestinians with sophisticated immigrants from modern Europe amounts to “comparing the incomparable.” Far more useful, he contends, is to contrast them with the Arabs who lived in other parts of the region. As he points out, the Arabs of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq were no more sophisticated than the Palestinians yet were able to make significant progress toward the achievement of independence in the face of vigorous resistance from the powerful British and French empires. Given Arab achievements against those mighty states, in other words, the Zionists’ relative sophistication cannot alone explain the Palestinians’ remarkable lack of success in the interwar period.

Today, a growing number of historians argue that the Palestinians’ lack of institutional success was largely a product of the mandate’s peculiar political structure. Scholars like Khalidi, the historian Michael Provence, and others now conclude that the Palestinians were unable to secure their goals not because they were less sophisticated than the Zionists or because they suffered from peculiar amounts of factional infighting but instead because they found themselves caught in a constitutional “iron cage” from which they were never able to escape. This trap was a brutal catch-22: to get formal political representation from the British, the Palestinians had to consent to the terms of the mandate. Accepting the mandate, however, meant acknowledging the right of the Zionists to establish a national home in Palestine, the precise turn of events that the Palestinians sought political standing to avert. To Provence, this dilemma explains why the Arabs pursued seemingly counterproductive courses such as their refusal to go along with Samuel’s offer to establish a legislative council based on proportional representation. As he notes, the Palestinians did not reject that proposal because they were shortsighted or caught up in pointless factional infighting; they did so instead because it would have required them to formally accept the creation of the very Jewish homeland that they were fighting to prevent.

These scholars also argue that British-imposed constitutional constraints accounted for many, though not all, of the fault lines that split the Palestinians. Here, they center their critique on the Supreme Muslim Council and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. The most powerful Arab institutions in the mandate, these structures were established by the British to define the Palestinians in religious rather than national terms. Coming with attractive salaries and patronage opportunities, seats on the SMC and the post of Grand Mufti also amounted to de facto bribes that ensured that Palestinian elites were beholden to London and would thus toe the imperial line and encourage acceptance of British rule. Finally, these scholars contend that Britain used these institutions to divide the Palestinians. By carefully appointing members from both the dominant al-Husseini group and the al-Nashashibi opposition to seats on the SMC, the British ensured that the body served as an arena for factional skirmishes among the Palestinian leadership rather than as a center of resistance to Zionism or imperial rule. In other words, the infighting that put the Palestinians at a disadvantage was not a function of flaws intrinsic to their society, but instead the product of a deliberate British policy of divide and conquer.

Immigration and Land Purchases

The Zionists’ institutional advantage over the Palestinians proved central to the rapid expansion of the Yishuv in the 1920s. Thanks to the efficient work of the Zionist Agency, more than 70,000 Ashkenazi Jews would immigrate to Palestine over the course of the decade. Many of those immigrants settled on the more than 240,000 acres of arable land that the Jewish National Fund purchased for them in the 1920s, land that not only dramatically increased the Jewish community’s holdings but that also made possible the establishment of more than fifty new agricultural settlements.

Stepped up land purchases and immigration deeply troubled the mandate’s Palestinian population in the decade after World War I. While immigration had been a concern since the 1880s, it gained new salience in the 1920s owing to the rapid growth of the Jewish community, which, thanks to the aforementioned arrival of Ashkenazi Jews more than doubled between 1922 and 1931, an ominous trend that fed growing concerns among the Arabs that the Zionists would soon have the critical mass needed to declare the establishment of a Jewish state. Land transactions were equally worrisome. The Zionists were not only buying large tracts, but, in many cases, were also evicting Palestinians whose families had worked that land as tenant farmers for generations. Reduced thereafter to seasonal agricultural work or day labor in the mandate’s towns and cities, the dispossessed saw the security and stability that they had once enjoyed replaced by a painful precarity.

Like all issues related to the Zionist-Palestinian conflict, the impact of Jewish land purchases on Arab tenant farmers remains hotly debated. Based on studies of mandate records, Israel’s backers contend that property transfers to the Zionists resulted in the displacement of only a small number of Arab farmers. Supporters of the Palestinians counter by arguing that the documentary evidence masks the true extent of evictions and that the actual figure is far higher. Regardless, the political impact was clear: concerns about being dispossessed radicalized many tenant farmers and compelled the Arab leadership in the mandate to loudly call for an outright ban on further land transfers. The fellahin would likely have been much-less enthusiastic about those demands had they known that many of the loudest voices publicly denouncing land transfers were at the same time quietly profiting from the practice. Indeed, a significant share of the Palestinian leadership, including fully one quarter of the men who served on the Arab Executive, were secretly selling land to the Zionists at the very time that they were vocally attacking the practice.

Still, despite the Palestinians’ apprehensions about continued immigration and land sales, the absence of significant conflict following the Jaffa riot in 1921 led British officials to conclude that the Churchill White Paper had been successful in restoring peace to the mandate. Benefitting from good economic times for much of the 1920s, Britain’s efforts to conciliate both parties did, indeed, appear to have eased intercommunal tensions and to have led the Palestinians and Zionists to come to an accommodation, even if they did so grudgingly. On top of that the Jewish population remained essentially unchanged from 1926 to 1932 and even fell slightly in 1927 when net emigration exceeded immigration. This suggested to many that the struggle between Zionism and Palestinian nationalism had peaked and was winding down.

The 1929 Palestine Riots

A new round of intercommunal conflict at the end of the decade made clear, however, that the struggle for control of Palestine was as white hot as ever. Rising Arab worries about Jewish immigration and land purchases set the stage for renewed clashes, but it was a religious issue related to the Wailing, or Western Wall that ultimately sparked the violence. A place where devout Jews had prayed for centuries, the Wailing Wall is all that remains of the Second Temple that sat on the Temple Mount from 516 BCE until its destruction in 70 CE. While holy to Jews, the wall is also part of the enclosure to Islam’s third-holiest site, the Haram al-Sharif, or holy sanctuary, on which sits the Dome of the Rock shrine and the al-Aqsa Mosque, and is thus significant for Muslims as well.

The Haram al-Sharif, the Wailing Wall, the alley that runs along the wall, and the adjoining neighborhood were all part of a waqf. However, the people who directed those endowments did not control entry to the sites. Instead, it was the Status Quo, a formal arrangement that that the Ottoman government had adopted in the nineteenth century and that the British continued to observe, that governed access to the religious sites. By its terms, Jews were entitled to pray at the Wailing Wall. To ensure free passage along the alley, however, they were banned from placing furnishing of any kind in front of it.

A dispute over the observance of the Status Quo that began in 1928 would turn the Wailing Wall into an intercommunal flashpoint and spark renewed violence the following year. The conflict began on Yom Kippur in September 1928 when conservative Jewish worshippers erected screens to separate men from women praying at the wall. Fearing that the dividers were part of a Zionist plot to take control of the Wailing Wall and the Temple Mount, Muslim Palestinians demanded that the British restore the Status Quo and remove the screens. Eager to uphold the peace, the mandatory government complied. However, restoration of the Status Quo did not put the issue to rest. Instead, extremists in both camps issued evermore provocative statements and took increasingly inflammatory actions culminating in members of Betar holding a demonstration in front of the wall in mid-August 1929 at which they chanted “the wall is ours.” This affront was too much for Muslim Palestinians. On August 23, 1929, enraged Arab peasants poured out of the Haram al-Sharif following Friday prayers and attacked Jewish people and businesses. As news of the attacks travelled, the violence intensified and spread throughout the mandate. By the time British reinforcements finally managed to regain control on August 29, 133 Jews, including nearly the entire Jewish community of Hebron, and 116 Arabs had been killed.

The Passfield White Paper

Britain’s response revealed the intractable nature of the conflict. Shocked by the extent of the violence, London sent a delegation to Palestine called the Shaw Commission to ascertain the causes of the riots. It determined that the religious dispute was merely a symptom of a larger issue: “the twofold fear of the Arabs that by Jewish immigration and land purchases they may be deprived of their livelihood and in time pass under the political domination of the Jews.” In response, the Labor Party government of Prime Minister Ramsey MacDonald (r. 1929-1935) moved to formally alter Britain’s approach to Palestine through the issuance of the Passfield White Paper in 1931. It marked a significant change in policy. By limiting further immigration to the mandate’s “economic absorptive capacity” and by placing stringent restrictions on land sales to the Zionists, it effectively abandoned the Balfour Declaration’s open-ended commitment to a Jewish homeland in Palestine in favor of a more even-handed approach.

Unsurprisingly, the Passfield White Paper created intense feelings among both Palestinians and Zionists. The Arabs were thrilled when they read its terms and concluded that their appeals to justice and majority rule had finally made an impression on the British. In contrast, Jewish leaders found the document alarming. Viewing it as an existential danger to the Zionist project, one that threatened to prevent the Yishuv from ever having the numbers needed to establish a Jewish state, they responded by mounting an intense and highly effective political pressure campaign against MacDonald. Vulnerable, owing to the fact that his was a minority government, the prime minister soon capitulated. In February 1931, he issued a public letter addressed to Chaim Weizmann in which he repudiated the Passfield White Paper and recommitted Britain to the terms of the Balfour Declaration. Drafted in its essentials by Weizmann, the letter explicitly declared that London would place no limits on immigration or land purchases. Now, it was the Palestinians turn to be furious. With their hopes first raised and then dashed, they bitterly criticized the MacDonald government and denounced his note to Weizmann by calling it the “Black Letter.”

The riots of 1929 and the conflict over the Passfield White Paper laid to rest any illusion either that the situation in Palestine was peacefully resolving itself or that it could be settled through negotiations. In response, Zionists, British officials, and Arabs alike reexamined their assumptions and approaches to the evolving situation in the mandate. For the Palestinians, London’s quick retreat from the Passfield White Paper indicated that reasoned arguments based on appeals for justice and self-determination would neither arrest the continued growth of the Jewish community nor stop the establishment of a Zionist state. As a consequence, many younger, more extreme Arabs began to organize armed militias. For the Zionists, the ferocity of the Arab attacks in 1929 and Britain’s shocking inability to protect the Yishuv ended any lingering hopes that they might secure a Jewish state through peaceful means. After the riots, accordingly, the Labor Zionists transformed the Haganah from a weak, decentralized militia into a powerful proto army. Even that move did not go far enough for a small group of Haganah officers. Determined to retaliate aggressively to any further Arab attacks, they formed a separate militia group called Irgun that soon became the military arm of the Revisionist Party. For the British, finally, the events of 1929 laid bare for the first time that Palestine was a poisoned chalice, a perpetual trouble spot that defied easy (or, for that matter, difficult), solutions. They would spend the next decade seeking desperately to find some formula that could reconcile competing Arab and Zionist demands while permitting continued imperial control. They never succeeded.

The Great Depression and Hitler’s Rise to Power

Meanwhile, surging antisemitism in Europe in the early 1930s and the German dictator Adolf Hitler’s (r. 1933-1945) rise to power dramatically altered the situation in Palestine. Firmly in control of Germany by early 1933, Hitler and his supporters wasted no time in stepping up violence against German Jews and in imposing ever-more stringent restrictions on them. The Nazis forbade them from marrying Gentiles, banned them from the professions and from teaching, and organized boycotts of Jewish businesses. The Nazi campaign against German Jews, and similar efforts in nearby states, profoundly frightened the Jewish population of Central and Eastern Europe and led tens-of-thousands to consider emigration. However, their options were far-more limited than they had been in the recent past. Rising anti-Semitism and widespread opposition to immigration during a time of unprecedented global mass unemployment led traditional havens such as Canada and the United States, the fabled Golden Medene, to maintain strict limits on Jewish immigration. As a result, European Jews had nowhere to go but Palestine.

The ensuing flood of refugees remade the mandate’s demographic makeup and fundamentally altered the balance between the Jewish and Arab communities. In contrast to the average of 5,000-6,000 Jews who had arrived annually between 1929 and 1931, the mid-1930s saw tens of thousands of refugees pour into the territory each year. 30,000 immigrated in 1933, 42,000 more in 1934, 62,000 in 1935, and 30,000 in 1936. All told, this new wave of immigration, by far the largest yet, more than doubled the Jewish population of the mandate, increasing it from 164,000 in 1930 to 370,000 in 1936 and raising the Jewish share of Palestine’s population from 18 percent in 1930 to 27 percent in 1935. Predictably, the surge in the mandate’s Jewish population created enormous alarm among the Arabs and fed a sharp rise in fears that the Zionists would, with British help, displace them from Palestine.

Land purchases in the 1930s further contributed to Palestinian discontent. The Zionists acquired fewer total acres over the course of that decade than they had in the 1920s, but the land that they purchased in the 1930s tended to be cultivated rather than fallow and thus had a greater impact on the fellahin. Some Arabs tried to organize boycotts and extract pledges from landowners to prevent further property transfers. However, even vigorous efforts to enforce such agreements failed in the face of surging land values. Indeed, with prices quadrupling between 1929 and 1935, even those deeply opposed to Zionism could not resist the temptation to make a windfall profit. As the German consul noted, “Arab nationalists ‘in daylight were crying out against Jewish immigration and in the darkness of night were selling land to the Jews.’” Double dealing of this kind harmed the interests of the peasants, but, perhaps more importantly, it also powerfully eroded Palestinian solidarity. Creating an atmosphere of suspicion, it would help to sow sharp divisions along lines of class, ones that would hamstring Arab efforts to oppose the British and the Zionists for the duration of the mandate.

The Great Arab Revolt, 1936

By the mid-1930s, land sales and the surge in immigration had left the mandate on a knife’s edge. With Jewish refugees pouring into Palestine in unprecedented numbers and rumors of impending displacement rife, Arab anger and resentment finally boiled over. The result was the outbreak of the Great Arab Revolt in the spring of 1936: a mandate-wide rebellion against Zionism, British rule, and, to a lesser extent, the politically dominant Arab notables. Begun with high hopes and great determination, the rebellion was, for a time, a serious challenge to the Zionists and a huge financial drain on London. Ultimately, however, it failed to achieve its goal of compelling Britain to end its support for Zionism. As important, it left the Palestinians too weak, divided, and demoralized to thereafter mount an effective resistance to Zionism.

Revolt and General Strike, April-September 1936

The revolt began in early 1936. In April, a band of Palestinian militants murdered two Jewish men and wounded a third at a nighttime roadblock. The incident set off a spiral of violence throughout the mandate. Loosely organized groups of urban Arabs threw rocks at police officers while their rural counterparts harassed British soldiers and engaged in acts of sabotage. The situation quickly escalated. In short order, increasingly sophisticated Arab militia bands were sniping at imperial troops, ambushing patrols, laying mines, sabotaging railways, and attacking isolated Jewish settlements. Meanwhile, a loosely connected network of nationalist groups moved to support the insurgency by organizing an economic boycott patterned after the recent Syrian General Strike. Designed to stop the flow of tax revenue that underwrote British control of the mandate, it rapidly attracted widespread support within the Palestinian community. By the summer of 1936, as a result, Britain found itself in a difficult spot simultaneously attempting to suppress a full-scale insurrection while also trying to overcome a mandate-wide strike at the very moment that its limited fiscal and military resources were already stretched thin by the increasingly aggressive actions of fascist Germany and Italy.

Immigration and land purchases established the conditions for the revolt and the strike, but what accounted for its timing? Two factors stand out. The first was geostrategic. Britain’s failure to contest Benito Mussolini’s (r. 1922-1945) invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and its unwillingness to act when Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland in March 1936 suggested to Arab leaders that London lacked the fortitude to deal with a costly insurrection and would quickly capitulate in the face of continued pressure so near to the Suez Canal. The second reason was economic in nature. The sudden collapse of the boom that the mandate had enjoyed between 1932 and 1935 left thousands of embittered Arabs confronting the prospects of unemployment, some because their Jewish employers had responded to the downturn with a “Hebrew labor” policy that involved replacing Palestinian workers with recent immigrants from Europe. As a result, by early 1936 the mandate was brimming with young, resentful Arab men who, having little to lose, were only too willing to take up arms against the British or to enforce the economic boycott.

The rebellion caught the Palestinian notables flat footed. Lulled into complacency by their dependence on the British for their salaries and patronage powers, the leading Palestinians in the al-Husseini and Nashashibi factions had quietly acquiesced to continued immigration and British rule during the 1920s and early 1930s and were thus on the sidelines when the younger, more-radical nationalists launched the insurgency in April 1936. Once the revolt began, however, the notables moved quickly to assume control. On April 25, the factions agreed to put aside their differences and formed the Arab Higher Committee (AHC) to coordinate the economic resistance. The Grand Mufti served as its chairperson. Its first act was to announce that the boycott, thereafter known as the Arab General Strike, would continue until the British agreed to meet three demands: the immediate cessation of immigration, a blanket ban on Jewish land purchases, and the establishment of a representative government for the mandate. Publicly, the AHC focused exclusively on coordinating the economic resistance and denied that it had any connection to the militants. Privately, however, it moved to support the insurgents and sought with mixed success to assume control of the rebellion.

Likewise caught off guard, the British initially responded as the Palestinians had anticipated. Desperate to avoid a costly anti-insurgency campaign, mandate authorities pursued a passive appeasement policy that included new limits on immigration in hopes that such an approach would undercut support for the rebellion. By the end of the summer, however, London reluctantly came to conclude that conciliation was not working and shifted to a more aggressive response. It deployed a division of troops to Palestine, imposed martial law, and instituted a system of collective punishment wherein British soldiers demolished houses and made mass arrests in Palestinian villages suspected of supporting the revolt. The new tactics were ugly, but they were also effective. By mid-autumn, it had become abundantly clear that the rebellion had failed.

The strike proved similarly unsuccessful. Despite imposing depression conditions on the mandate’s Arab population, it had been unable to compel the British to negotiate. Why had the economic protest failed? More pertinently, why had it been unable to match the success of the concurrent Syrian General Strike? The explanation lies in the peculiar, bifurcated nature of Palestine’s economy. Over the course of the prior two decades, rapid Zionist commercial, industrial, and agricultural development had produced a largely self-contained Jewish economic sector in the mandate. Far-more advanced than the Palestinian economy, it accounted for the bulk of the taxes that the British collected. As a result, though the strike had all-but shut down the Palestinian sector of the economy, it had failed to depress tax receipts enough to force the British to the table.

Faced with the failure of the insurgency and the prospect of impoverishment and even famine in the Palestinian community, the AHC began to consider bringing the uprising to a close. However, ending the rebellion and the strike would prove tricky. Complicating the AHC’s efforts to secure a negotiated settlement, the guerrilla commanders in the field made clear that they would accept nothing less than a total victory. As a result, the Arab Higher Committee would need to find, or somehow generate, political cover if it wished to push forward with a negotiated end to the strike and the revolt. It managed to do so in the fall of 1936 with the help of the emir of Transjordan and the kings of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Yemen. At the AHC’s indirect behest, those rulers issued statements appealing for an immediate end both to the strike and the revolt. The gambit worked. In conjunction with London’s pledge to send a committee to assess the situation in Palestine, their entreaties were sufficient to give the AHC the pretext it needed to bring the strike and the rebellion to an end in October. There was a cost, however. In inviting the monarchs to assume a direct role in their affairs, the Palestinians had set in motion a process that would soon lead to the Arab heads of state taking charge of their cause, a change in leadership that would, as we shall see, have negative consequences for them.

The Peel Commission Report, 1937

Named for its chair, Lord William Peel (1867-1937), the commission that London had promised to send to the mandate arrived in November 1936. Its visit would prove to be a crucial turning point for Palestine, one that would fundamentally alter the terms of the debate over the disposition of the mandate. The Zionists and Palestinians approached the commission very differently. Yishuv leaders viewed it as a golden opportunity to make their case and seized the opportunity to do so. Presenting Zionism as a moderate movement that was more-than willing to compromise, Weizmann, Ben Gurion, and others promoted a plan before the commission that called for a partition of the territory into separate Jewish and Arab states as a way to end intercommunal violence. The Palestinians, in contrast, once again fumbled the opportunity to present their position. While the Zionist leadership was outwardly solicitous and claimed to be eager to compromise, the AHC instead assumed a defiant attitude and initially refused to meet with the commission unless London first imposed an outright ban on further immigration. Indeed, it was only just before the commission returned to Britain that outside pressure finally succeeded in compelling the Palestinians to present their case.

Released in July 1937, the Peel Commission Report outlined a dramatic new approach to the mandate that would set the stage for its division in 1948. Admitting openly for the first time that “an irrepressible conflict has arisen between two national communities” and that a unitary state was doomed to failure, it proposed partitioning the mandate between the Jewish and Palestinian peoples. According to its plan, the Zionists would establish a small state in territory that stretched northward from Tel Aviv to the Lebanese border and then east to the Sea of Galilee, and Britain would retain control of Jerusalem and a corridor of land connecting it to the coast. The remaining territory, about eighty percent of the mandate, would be appended to Transjordan. It seemed like a Solomonic solution: a wise division of the mandate that would satisfy both parties’ interests. However, resolving the clash between rival nationalist movements through partition raised a new issue. What was to happen to the Arabs who lived in the area assigned to the Jewish state and to the Zionists who resided in the territory allotted to the Palestinians? The Peel commission proposed to solve this issue through population transfers similar to the exchange of people that occurred between Greece and Türkiye in the Treaty of Lausanne. In other words, Arabs would relocate from the Zionist state, and Jews would move out of the territory assigned to the Palestinians.

At first look, the plan to forcibly move people to create ethnically homogenous states appeared to be even handed. As a result of the population transfers, both the Jewish state and the Arab one would have uniform populations and would thus be free of ethnic tension. Upon closer inspection however, the commission’s proposal revealed itself to be entirely one sided. While the plan called for a mere 1,250 Jewish people to relocate from the territory assigned to the Arabs, it required no fewer than 225,000 Palestinians to depart from the new Zionist state, a forced transfer that the Arabs condemned as unacceptable. However, the Peel Commission’s proposed population relocation was a critical component of the partition plan. Without it, the Jewish state would retain an Arab minority that was nearly as large as its Jewish population, thus rendering moot the entire point of Zionism.

The Zionist movement reacted with mixed emotions to the specifics of the partition plan but ultimately came to endorse the idea. Unsurprisingly, Jabotinsky and the revisionists outright rejected the commission’s recommendations on the grounds that they did not immediately grant the Zionists the entirety of both Palestine and Transjordan. In contrast, though they were disappointed that the plan allotted the Jewish state a mere 1920 square miles of territory, a bit larger than six times the size of New York City, prominent Labor Zionists like Weizmann, Ben Gurion, and Moshe Sharett (1894-1965) were enthusiastic about the proposal and lobbied aggressively for its acceptance. They articulated two arguments in its favor. First, they contended that sovereignty would mean the lifting of immigration limits and a concomitant rapid increase in the Jewish state’s population. Second, and more importantly, they maintained that a state along the lines that the Peel Commission had outlined would not be Zionism’s end product but would instead constitute a critical opening bid that its people could enlarge through negotiation or conquest. As Ben Gurion privately wrote, “I am certain [that] we will be able to settle in all the other parts of the country, whether through agreement with our Arab neighbours or in another way.” These arguments proved persuasive. Accordingly, while the Twentieth Zionist Congress that met in Zurich in August 1937 rejected the specific borders that the Peel Commission had drawn up, it voted in favor of partition.

Resumption, 1937-1939

The Palestinians, in contrast, reacted angrily to the report. Viewing the partition plan as unjust, they railed against the commission’s proposal to expel hundreds of thousands of Arabs from Galilee and expressed their fear that the creation of a Jewish state, however small, would result in a dramatic increase in immigration that would lead, inevitably, to the Zionist state’s expansion. More importantly, they also responded to the report by resuming the revolt. Beginning in the fall of 1937, Palestinian irregulars were once again harassing patrols, blowing up railroad tracks and viaducts, sniping at British soldiers, cutting telephone and telegraph wires, attacking Zionist settlements, and assassinating officials and suspected collaborators. For a time, they enjoyed substantial success. Indeed, by the summer of 1938, rebel forces controlled large swaths of rural Palestine and even several Arab towns.

Britain reacted aggressively to the renewed violence. Returning to the approach that had brought the first phase of the rebellion to a conclusion, it deployed a rising tide of reinforcements to the mandate. By 1939, as a result, the British army in Palestine numbered more than 100,000 troops, equivalent to one quarter of the population of Palestinian men. Those soldiers employed brutal counterinsurgency tactics to suppress the rebellion. They vigorously enforced martial law, put Arab hostages on the fronts of trains and vehicles to discourage mine laying, blew up houses that belonged to rebels or their family members, arrested thousands without bringing them to trial, and summarily executed Palestinians suspected of engaging in insurrection.

This time, moreover, the British did not limit themselves to a military response. Instead, using the assassination of a British official in September 1937 as a pretext, the mandate government went after the Palestinians’ political leadership by declaring the AHC illegal and by arresting and deporting many of its members to the Seychelles Islands. The British executed their dragnet with characteristic skill. Nonetheless, they failed to apprehend their main target: the increasingly militant Grand Mufti. Slipping out of Palestine at night by boat, he joined a handful of other prominent Palestinians in Lebanon, where, with little success, he tried to direct the rebellion.

The Zionists also responded forcefully to the renewed violence. This new policy marked a dramatic shift away from the approach that they had adopted during the first phase of the revolt. Eager to cultivate a moderate, accommodating image on the world stage, the Yishuv had responded cautiously in 1936 and early 1937 to Arab attacks on Jewish settlements. After a series of high-profile Palestinian attacks in October 1937, however, the Labor Zionists abandoned their earlier restraint and fully embraced Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall strategy. Using arms and training that the British had provided, the Haganah shifted from a strictly defensive strategy to an aggressive defense doctrine that involved both frequent patrolling outside isolated settlements and retaliatory killings of Arab villagers. Irgun went much further. Beginning in November 1937, it began responding to Palestinian attacks by bombing bus stations, marketplaces, and commercial districts that Arabs frequented. These attacks were deadly. One in Haifa in July 1938 killed thirty-nine Palestinians and wounded seventy more, while another in Jaffa the following month killed twenty-four Arabs and injured thirty-nine. Thereafter, such violence, executed by both Zionists and Arabs, became commonplace throughout the mandate.

Due to the aggressive efforts of the British and the Zionists, the revolt finally came to a conclusion in 1939. It had been a bitter failure for the Arabs. By the time imperial forces had brought the rebellion to heel, 5,000 Palestinians had died, 10,000 had been wounded, and thousands more were languishing in prison. Meanwhile, valuable orchards had been levelled, crops had been torched or uprooted, and thousands of homes had been demolished. Perhaps worst of all, the Palestinians had become hopelessly divided along lines of class and faction as the revolt dragged on. Indeed, by late 1938, the rebellion had almost completely transformed from an anticolonial revolt into an Arab civil war replete with firefights, assassinations, and terrorist attacks.

It is nearly impossible to overstate the significance of the failure of the Great Arab Revolt to the outcome of the contest for Palestine. Put simply, it set the Zionists and the Arabs on very different trajectories. For its part, the Yishuv emerged from the rebellion much stronger than it had been at the insurrection’s start. Largely unaffected by the conflict, its dynamic economy had maintained its rapid expansion while immigration had continued to fuel a Jewish population boom. In addition, boosted by British weapons and training, the Yishuv’s armed forces had taken a huge step in their transition from militia to conventional military. Finally, continuing their rapid development, Zionist political bodies had matured to the point that the Yishuv now constituted nothing less than a para-state.

For the Arabs, on the other hand, the Great Arab Revolt had been an unmitigated disaster. Having played for broke, they had come up empty. The failed rebellion had grievously weakened the Arab community’s economy, badly strained its social cohesion, and gutted its military capabilities. Politically, it had left the Palestinians hopelessly divided and had resulted in the death or exile of so many prominent figures that it created a debilitating leadership vacuum that the incompetent and rash Grand Mufti filled. The failure of the rebellion had been so total, in fact, that it rendered the Palestinians incapable of organizing either an effective resistance during World War II or a response to the Zionists when the question of who would control the territory was finally resolved in 1948. Thus it can be argued that it was the revolt of 1936-1939 and not the war of 1948 that constituted the critical turning point in the contest for Palestine.

The White Paper of 1939

Astonishingly, in light of the defeat they had suffered, the Palestinians received one last opportunity to recover their position. They got this chance thanks to the rapidly worsening international situation. By the late spring of 1939, global war seemed inevitable. Germany had occupied Czechoslovakia in violation of an earlier promise to respect its borders, Italy had seized Albania, and Japan had begun casting covetous looks at Britain’s valuable colonies in Southeast Asia. With hopes for global peace rapidly fading, London suddenly came to perceive its support for Zionism as a huge liability. Not only had it sparked a costly rebellion in Palestine that continued to divert scarce troops desperately needed elsewhere, but it had also alienated Arabs throughout the Middle East and thus threatened the empire’s access to critical oil supplies and its control of the vital Suez Canal. Accordingly, London undertook a sweeping reappraisal of its approach to Palestine. The result was the release of a new policy statement: the White Paper of 1939. The latest in a long string of important documents regarding Palestine, it signaled a fundamental change in London’s approach to the mandate. It imposed severe restrictions on land sales, limited immigration to 15,000 Jewish people per year until 1944, after which further immigration could only occur with Arab consent, and promised the establishment in ten years of a democratic, multiethnic government in the mandate that would be structured “in such a way as to ensure that the essential interests of each community are safeguarded.”

The White Paper came as a tremendous shock to the Zionists. It constituted a rejection not only of the partition proposal articulated in the Peel Commission Report but, far more importantly, of the Balfour Declaration itself: the legal bedrock on which Zionism rested. More immediately, it also threatened to severely restrict immigration at a time when growing Nazi violence made leaving an imperative for European Jews. The Labor Zionists consequently rejected its terms and responded by once more mounting an aggressive public relations campaign aimed at pressuring London into reverting to its earlier, pro-Zionist policy. This effort did bear some fruit, but, thanks to Britain’s increasingly single-minded focus on war preparation, it ultimately proved unsuccessful in reversing London’s new policy toward Palestine.

Characteristically, the Irgun went much further than the Labor Zionists in expressing dissatisfaction with the White Paper. Furious at what it considered to be London’s abandonment of its earlier commitment to a Jewish home in Palestine, the group responded by initiating sabotage and terrorist operations against the British aimed at forcing them from the mandate, a campaign that Irgun only reluctantly ended when the outbreak of war in Europe compelled it to take sides. Importantly, the decision to leave London unmolested did not enjoy unanimous support in the organization. On the contrary, a small number of Irgun members who remained single-mindedly focused on pushing the British out of Palestine split from Irgun after the war began to form an even-more extreme splinter group called Lehi, or the Stern Gang. Unyielding, it continued to launch terrorist attacks until British police killed its founder, Avraham Stern (1907-1942), in 1942.

The terms of the White Paper were far more favorable to the Palestinians than any previous British policy had been. Indeed, its provisions might well have given them a genuine shot at preventing both the establishment of a Jewish state in the mandate and their eventual displacement. Nonetheless, the AHC dismissed the new British policy outright. What explains this choice? Why did they reject the opportunity that the White Paper seemed to present? Publicly, they did so because it failed to implement an immediate ban on immigration and because it pushed independence too far into the future. These were no doubt genuine concerns, but they did not represent the real reason that the Arabs rejected the White Paper. Instead, it was the Palestinians’ old problem, factionalism, that led them to renounce its terms. While many members of the AHC wanted to respond favorably to the new British policy, the unremitting hostility to the White Paper of the few remaining rebel bands still in the field and, more importantly, the strident opposition of the Grand Mufti tied the committee’s hands. As a result, the Palestinians turned down what British Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald (1901-1981) called a “golden opportunity” and refused to embrace this latest, and last, opportunity to have a say in the political future of the mandate.

World War II: Picking Sides

The war that the British had feared finally came in September 1939. For the Labor Zionists who dominated the Yishuv’s leadership, the start of the conflict posed a difficult dilemma. On the one hand, there was no question that they would fight against Hitler’s brutal, anti-Semitic regime. On the other, they also bitterly opposed the White Paper of 1939 and did not want to take any action that might suggest acquiescence to its terms. How, then, could they help the British defeat the Nazi regime without simultaneously accepting, implicitly or explicitly, the terms of the hated White Paper? David Ben Gurion provided a way of resolving this predicament when he proposed that the Zionists adopt a bifurcated approach to the war and to Britain’s new policy position. “We shall fight the war against Hitler as if there were no White Paper,” he declared in 1939, “and we shall fight the White Paper as if there were no war.”

Ben Gurion’s two-track approach of contesting both Hitler and the British defined the mainstream Zionists’ approach to the war. Most rank-and-file Zionists pursued the first track. Seeking to help defeat Hitler, they either enlisted in Allied armies or joined the British-trained Jewish Brigade that served in Italy in 1945. Focused on the second track, meanwhile, leaders like Ben Gurion instead undertook a skillfully executed diplomatic campaign that centered on winning Washington’s support for Zionism. Central to that effort was a meeting they held with a group of prominent Jewish Americans in New York City’s Biltmore Hotel in May 1942 at which they drafted a new Zionist policy statement. Known as the Biltmore Program, it formally replaced the movement’s earlier endorsement of partition with a call for the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth that would occupy the entire mandate.

Both tracks paid enormous dividends for the Yishuv. The creation of the Jewish Brigade and the enlistment of Zionists in Allied armies provided the Haganah with a cadre of experienced combat veterans who would later turn raw recruits into effective soldiers. Endorsed by both the Democratic and Republican parties in their election platforms in 1944, meanwhile, the Biltmore Program helped to secure critical American diplomatic support for the Zionist effort to overturn the White Paper.

The Palestinian leadership proved unable to match the Zionists’ deft approach to the war. Divided and in some cases jailed, the members of the AHC failed to provide any effective leadership whatsoever during a period that would prove critical in settling the struggle for the mandate. Making matters worse for the Palestinians were the high- profile statements of the exiled Grand Mufti. Living in Baghdad during the first two years of the conflict, he made no effort to hide his fervent hope that Germany would win the war and, in the process, destroy the British Empire in the Middle East. He did not limit himself to anti-British diatribes. Instead, putting words into action, he helped to orchestrate Iraqi Prime Minister Rashid Ali’s (1892-1965) ill-fated, pro-Axis coup in 1941, after which he spent the remainder of the war in Germany making propaganda broadcasts and recruiting Muslim POWs for service in Axis armies. These actions may have won al-Husseini accolades among anti-imperialists in the Arab world, but they also damaged the Palestinians’ reputation and thereby weakened their case in the court of international public opinion, a venue that would prove to be of vital importance in the critical years immediately following the war.

The Holocaust

While al-Husseini was striving to recruit Muslims, his hosts and their many collaborators were profoundly if indirectly shaping Palestine’s future through the Holocaust: the German-led effort to completely eradicate Europe’s Jewish community. Resulting in the systematic murder of around six million Jews, it came perilously close to achieving its goal before the Allied conquest of Poland and Germany finally closed the death camps in 1945. Also known as the Shoah, the Holocaust powerfully influenced the contest for control of Palestine in three ways. First, it won enormous public sympathy for Zionism throughout Western Europe and especially in the pivotally important United States. Believing that the Holocaust amounted to a collective, civilizational moral failing, many Europeans and Americans came to conclude that helping the Jewish people establish a state in Palestine was the only way that the West could atone for its culpability in the Holocaust. Second, reinforcing the conviction that the Jewish people could never be truly secure until they had their own state, the Shoah hardened the Zionists’ resolve and left them increasingly unwilling to compromise. Finally, the Holocaust created a huge population of Jewish refugees following the war who were, unsurprisingly, disinclined to live among people who had so recently collaborated in the Nazi effort to kill them. Many of them wished to follow the example of earlier generations and immigrate to the United States; however, a large proportion preferred the security that life in a Jewish state seemed to offer and demanded that they be permitted to move immediately to Palestine.

Partition

The refugees and their aspiration to relocate to the mandate would play a central role in the Zionists’ postwar strategy. With the conclusion of the fighting in Europe in May 1945, the leadership of the Yishuv believed that it was on the cusp of finally achieving the Zionist dream of a Jewish state. To secure it, they planned to first bring hundreds of thousands of refugees to Palestine after which they would declare the establishment of a Jewish state encompassing the entire mandate. However, Britain stood in the way of that dream. Eager to court the newly independent Arab states so as to retain its dominant position in the region, London continued to adhere to the more even-handed policy toward Palestine that it had adopted with the White Paper of 1939. In keeping with this approach, it made clear that it opposed the establishment of a Jewish state, and it continued to enforce strict limits on immigration. London’s approach thus put it on a collision course with the Labor Zionists and their plan to flood the mandate with immigrants and quickly declare a Jewish state. In response, in the summer of 1945, Ben Gurion and the Labor Zionists abandoned the cautious, bifurcated strategy that had guided their movement since the outbreak of World War II in favor of a militant approach aimed at forcing London to quit Palestine as a prelude to the establishment of a Jewish state.

The Zionist Insurgency

However, the Haganah was late to the party. Furious about London’s refusal to ease immigration limits in response to the Holocaust, Irgun and Lehi had long since resumed their terror campaign against the British. Leadership changes in both organizations precipitated this new approach. Yitzhak Shamir (1915-2012), who would later serve as prime minister, revived the Stern Gang’s dormant terror campaign against the British soon after he took charge of the group in 1943. In similar fashion, the Polish-Jewish immigrant Menachem Begin (1913-1992), also a future prime minister, restarted the Irgun insurgency against the British just days after he assumed control of the group in 1944. Focusing their efforts on weakening Britain’s civil authority, both organizations soon made their presence felt. Beginning in 1944, the Irgun carried out a spectacular string of bombings against government offices and police stations. Lehi, in contrast, focused on assassinations, including the murder of the British High Commissioner to the Middle East, Lord Moyne (1880-1944), whom they targeted for his role in enforcing the blockade on immigration to Palestine.

The Haganah formally if secretly joined the insurgency in October 1945 when it entered into an alliance with Lehi and the Irgun called the Hebrew Rebellion Movement. It called for the Haganah to complement the revisionist groups’ campaign of bombings and assassinations by engaging in non-lethal acts of sabotage. Accordingly, while Lehi and Irgun forces pressed on with their terrorist attacks, Haganah units in late 1945 freed immigrants from detention centers, bombed coast-guard installations in retaliation for the seizure of ships carrying refugees, and sabotaged rail lines.

Britain’s aggressive reaction to the stepped-up insurgency heightened the standoff between London and the Zionists. The British initially responded to the rise in violence by deploying 100,000 soldiers to the mandate in early 1946. Seeking to pressure the Yishuv leadership into standing down, they followed by detaining hundreds of prominent Zionists including four members of the Jewish Agency at the end of June. This last move rankled Irgun’s leadership. Committed to responding forcefully to any slight, it retaliated a few weeks later by detonating a huge bomb in the seat of the mandate government: the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. The resulting explosion was massive. Collapsing an entire wing of the hotel, it killed ninety-one people and wounded another one hundred.

Immigration and Diplomacy

The bombing was too much for the Labor Zionists. While the Irgun and Lehi pressed on with their terror attacks, the mainstream Zionists instead abandoned their sabotage campaign in favor of a return to a diplomatic approach. Their new strategy had two components. The first involved using the plight of Jewish Holocaust survivors languishing in camps in Europe to turn American public opinion against British policy in Palestine. To do so, the Zionists arranged for thousands of Holocaust survivors to travel to the mandate aboard chartered steamers, thereby compelling Britain either to permit them to disembark or to divert thousands of them to internment camps on the island of Cyprus. The second centered on solidifying Zionism’s standing in the United States by presenting the movement as a moderate one. In support of that effort, the Labor Zionists abandoned the Biltmore Program’s demand for a Jewish state in the entirety of the mandate and instead reembraced the more politically palatable idea of partition.

The decision to pursue a diplomatic strategy soon bore fruit. By the middle of 1946, the Labor Zionists’ illegal-immigration campaign had made the predicament of Holocaust survivors suffering in refugee camps a major cause célèbre in the US and had turned American public opinion sharply against Great Britain. Among those who empathized with the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust was the president of the United States, Harry Truman (r. 1945-1953), who was genuinely moved by the plight of the refugees and increasingly sought a favorable resolution of their situation. Empathy for the Jewish people was important in shaping Truman’s position with regard to Palestine, but practical motives also played a critical role in spurring him to challenge Britain’s approach to the mandate. A shrewd politician who had cut his teeth working for the Prendergast political machine in Kansas City, he keenly grasped the electoral benefits that would accrue to the Democratic Party in the 1946 elections in states like Illinois and New York that had substantial Jewish populations if he expressed his support for Zionist goals. “I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism,’’ he told an aide. “I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs in my constituents.” Truman was thus more-than receptive to the Zionists’ goals, particularly after they dropped their demand for the entire mandate. Accordingly, he announced on Yom Kippur in October 1946 that he favored both the immediate admission of 100,000 Holocaust survivors into Palestine and the partition of the mandate into Jewish and Palestinian states.

Truman’s announcement that he supported the establishment of a Jewish state was the final straw for the British in Palestine. Demoralized by the ongoing terror campaign of Irgun and Lehi and now at odds with Washington, London began to give serious consideration to abandoning what had become a thankless and expensive commitment. Accordingly, after making one last futile effort to get the Zionists and Arabs to agree to a compromise solution, the British government announced in February 1947 that it was leaving Palestine the following year and dumped the seemingly insoluble problem onto the two-year-old United Nations (UN).

UNSCOP

Now tasked with resolving the Palestine crisis, the UN General Assembly responded by sending yet another fact-finding mission to the mandate. Called the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), it spent five weeks touring the mandate and conducting interviews in order to determine a path forward that was acceptable to all parties. Enjoying the considerable advantage of having bugged the committee’s meeting rooms, the Zionists went to great lengths to make their case for partition. They presented their movement as moderate, compromising, and modern, and they worked diligently to ingratiate themselves with the UNSCOP representatives. They even went so far as to arrange for committee members to meet with Jewish settlers who spoke their native language. In contrast, in what one British official described as “exceedingly inept diplomacy,” the recently reconstituted AHC refused to present its case and instead opted to boycott the committee entirely. It is true that officials from the independent Arab countries did present an Arab plan to the UNSCOP representatives; however, their proposal for a single, Palestinian-dominated state in which Jewish people would enjoy no political rights contrasted unfavorably with the Zionists’ seeming reasonableness.

The committee released its report in September 1947. By an eight-to-three vote, it recommended that the UN partition the mandate into Palestinian and Zionist states bound together, as a function of practical necessity, in an economic union. In order to minimize dividing the Arab and Jewish communities, each state would have three, non- contiguous sections connected to each other at tangential crossing points. Jerusalem would join neither state. Instead, owing to its importance to the three Abrahamic faiths, it would become a UN-administered international trusteeship.

Britain was delighted with the report. Palestine had become a booby prize for London, an expensive obligation that sapped the army’s morale and diverted resources desperately needed to rebuild the British economy following World War II. In addition, the detention of Jewish refugees seeking to flee persecution in Europe for the relative safety of the mandate had done serious damage to Britain’s international reputation. Accordingly, London wasted no time in using the report’s publication to announce that it was withdrawing from the mandate effective May 14, 1948.

Critics were quick to point out the many serious flaws and inequities inherent in the UNSCOP plan. The Arab League, which the Arab states had established in 1945 to coordinate their foreign policies, complained that while Zionists accounted for only one- third of the population in Palestine, the report had assigned them 56 percent of the mandate including much of the best farmland. They also noted that while the share of the territory allocated to the Palestinians possessed negligible numbers of Jewish people, the portion granted to the Zionist state contained 407,000 Arabs. Other observers focused on the Rube Goldberg-esque division of each state into three segments that enjoyed only tangential connections with each other. As they noted, the two crossing points linking the sections of the Jewish state would be coincident with those connecting the Palestinian territories, an arrangement that all-but guaranteed friction. More generally, they pointed out that the division of the proposed states into multiple segments gave each of them long, nearly undefendable borders, and left them, in one British academic’s words, “entwined in an inimical embrace like two fighting serpents.” In part because of these criticisms, the formal partition proposal, Resolution 181, faced an uphill fight as it headed toward a vote in the UN General Assembly.

Resolution 181, November 29, 1947

Indeed, drawing strength from these criticisms, two challenges, one practical, the other political, loomed increasingly large as the vote neared. First, passage required the support of a daunting two-thirds of the UN’s member states, meaning that the resolution would fail if a comparatively small number of states found the critiques of the resolution sufficiently compelling to join the UN’s six Arab members in opposing it. More importantly, the resolution confronted substantial opposition among officials in the US Departments of State and Defense and in the Central Intelligence Agency who warned that support for Zionism could imperil America’s increasingly important economic interests in the Middle East and might even create an opening in the Arab world that Moscow could exploit. Highly influential in shaping American foreign policy, those officials could potentially turn the Truman administration against Resolution 181, a turn of events that would sway many of Washington’s allies to vote against the partition plan and thus doom it to failure.

Fortunately for the Zionists, President Truman was unreceptive to the American foreign-policy establishment’s objections. With his eyes firmly locked on the upcoming 1948 presidential election, he rejected its recommendations. Instead, he not only instructed the US ambassador to the UN to vote in favor of partition but also aggressively strong-armed wavering states into supporting the resolution. His efforts worked. Thanks to his pressure tactics, Resolution 181 narrowly passed on November 29, 1947, with thirty-three states in favor, including both the US and the USSR, thirteen opposed, and ten abstaining.

Unsurprisingly, the Jewish and Arab communities in the mandate responded very differently to the resolution’s passage. To the Palestinians, the vote marked yet another demoralizing injustice imposed by imperialist Westerners, one that called on them to cede the land of their ancestors to a foreign invader. To the Zionists, in contrast, the passage of Resolution 181 was a moment of triumph. At long last, their dream of a Jewish state appeared to be at hand.

Zionist confidence was apt, for the Yishuv was well-prepared for the independence that Resolution 181 appeared to have secured. Politically, it had strong parties, a sense of unity, and a sophisticated parastate replete with a strong connection to its people and a suite of sophisticated and well-run ministries. Indeed, as the events of 1948 would show, its well-developed administrative structure needed only a name change and international recognition to become a modern state. The effort to establish a powerful army had been equally successful. While the Haganah may have suffered from a shortage of heavy weapons, it was nonetheless well-position to defend the Yishuv. It fielded 35,000 soldiers including many battle-hardened veterans of World War II, and it maintained factories capable of producing mortars, small arms, and ammunition. Perhaps most importantly, it possessed a highly capable general staff that was able to coordinate complex operations and to provide logistical support for units in the field.

The contrast with the Palestinians could hardly have been starker. Militarily, the Arabs’ modest militia forces possessed only a handful of modern weapons and had no cadre of World War II veterans on which they could call. Worse, the Palestinians did not merely lack a coordinating body comparable to the Haganah’s general staff but in fact enjoyed no central direction of their military forces whatsoever. Politically, the AHC did not function like a parastate along the lines of the Yishuv’s government. Instead, it was an organization largely focused on infighting and factional maneuvering, one that lacked functionally defined ministries and that was incapable of offering the sort of effective leadership and oversight that are the hallmarks of modern states.

Even when the AHC made wise decisions, its endemic internal dissension ensured poor outcomes. In 1946, for example, it established the Arab Office to serve as a quasi-foreign ministry. Filled with a highly educated and professional staff, it showed great promise and appeared poised to give the Palestinians an effective international presence for the first time. Unfortunately for the mandate’s Arab population, however, it soon fell victim to factionalism, in this case, the Grand Mufti’s insistence that he personally control all of the Palestinians’ quasi-governmental institutions. As a result, by mid 1947, a peculiarly fateful moment in the contest for Palestine, the Arab Office had been weakened to the point that it was no longer able to provide the effective international representation that the Palestinians so desperately needed.

The Palestinians’ abject lack of preparedness in 1947 had multiple sources but was primarily a legacy of the events of the interwar period and the manifestly unequal nature of the mandate. From the start, the “iron cage” that London had imposed on them in the early 1920s had prevented the Palestinians from establishing the foundations of an effective government or from gaining the international legitimacy that the mandate charter had accorded the Zionists. Britain’s defeat of the Great Arab Revolt in the 1930s had been even more damaging. It left the Palestinians bitterly divided and desperately short of the experienced troops, arms, and capable military commanders that they would need to counter the Zionists in 1948. As a result, as the moment of reckoning approached, the Palestinians found themselves without either effective governing institutions or a capable military, deficits that would leave them thoroughly outmatched by the Zionists.

The First Arab-Israeli War, 1947-1949

The final contest to determine whether the Zionists or the Palestinians would dominate the territory began the day after the UN vote and continued until January 1949. It had two phases. The first was an unofficial civil war between the Zionists and Palestinians that occurred between November 1947 and May 1948. The second, was a conventional conflict between the newly declared Zionist state of Israel and the militaries of five Arab states.

Civil War, November 30, 1947-May 14, 1948

Physical geography and Zionist strategic choices gave the Palestinians the upper hand during the early part of the civil war. Focused at that time on reorganizing the Haganah into a conventional military force, the Zionists initially adopted a defensive strategy that centered on securing population centers and on keeping isolated settlements and the 100,000 Jews who lived in West Jerusalem supplied. This strategy would pay significant benefits in the long run, but, in the immediate term, it played to the Arabs’ strength. With most Haganah units tied down either defending scattered settlements or undergoing reorganization, Palestinian forces, joined in January 1948 by Fawzi al-Qawuqji’s (1890-1977) Arab League-sponsored Arab Liberation Army (ALA), were able to exploit their well-positioned villages to achieve a number of local victories. Launching hit-and-run attacks, they interdicted the roads on which Zionist supply trucks traveled and succeeded in preventing Haganah convoys from bringing supplies to the increasingly desperate Jewish population of West Jerusalem. Even more concerning for Zionist leaders like Ben Gurion, the Haganah’s lack of tangible military success also created a dangerous diplomatic environment for the Zionists. Most notably, in an effort to end the violence, the US State Department began working on a new proposal that called for shelving the partition plan in favor of a UN trusteeship over the entire mandate.

By March, as a result, the Yishuv’s leaders had grown increasingly desperate. As they well understood, their hopes of establishing a Jewish state required not only that they promptly resupply Jewish West Jerusalem but also that they secure a quick military victory that could stave off the trusteeship proposal. Accordingly, they moved to abandon the defensive orientation they had adopted at the start of the civil war in favor of a mandate-wide conventional offensive called Plan Dalet slated to begin in early April. Plan Dalet was a bold and ambitious operation designed to create an enlarged and contiguous Zionist state. It called for the now-fully reformed Haganah to secure lines of communication to outlying settlements and Jerusalem before seizing control of those Palestinian towns and villages that lay within the territory that the UN had assigned to the Zionists. Once those areas had been secured, the Haganah would mount an offensive aimed at knitting the three Jewish territories into a unified whole by taking control of land that Resolution 181 had allocated to the Arabs. Importantly, it authorized field commanders to destroy hostile Palestinian villages.

Plan Dalet was an enormous success right from the start. While the Palestinians’ decentralized command structure and hit-and-run attacks had been well-geared to the early part of the conflict, they proved poorly suited to the conventional warfare that characterized the Haganah offensive. As a result, Zionist units quickly achieved their objectives in all parts of the mandate, particularly on the Jerusalem front. There, they focused on capturing the strategic hilltop-village of al-Qastal, which commanded the road to the city. In heavy fighting that saw the settlement change hands several times, Zionist troops not only secured control of the village in early April, but, in the process, also killed the Palestinians’ only competent military commander, Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini (1907-1948).

An event of even greater significance occurred in the nearby village of Deir Yasin on the same day that Zionist forces took al-Qastal. Though the settlement had not taken part in any of the fighting, Lehi and Irgun decided to launch a joint operation to seize control of it so as to ensure the security of the road to Jerusalem. Despite heavy resistance and substantial Zionist casualties, they managed to secure the village by noon. It was what happened next that made the attack on Deir Yasin so critical to the outcome of the war. Following the battle, the attackers brutally massacred 115 of the survivors, the majority of whom were women, children, or the elderly. Some were paraded through West Jerusalem before they were killed; others had their mutilated corpses shoved down the village’s wells. While the incident would soon become infamous, it was not entirely unique in the fighting for control of the mandate. Indeed, just four days after the massacre, Palestinian irregulars retaliated by ambushing a Zionist medical convoy outside Jerusalem and killing seventy nurses and doctors.

The capture of al-Qastal, the loss of Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini, and, especially, the massacre at Deir Yasin profoundly altered the course of the war. Permanently tipping the military balance on the Jerusalem front in favor of the Zionists, Al-Husseini’s death and the Haganah victory at al-Qastal were of enormous military significance. From that point forward, supplies could flow unimpeded to Jewish West Jerusalem, a situation that greatly eased the Yishuv’s heretofore-challenging strategic situation.

In contrast, the massacre at Deir Yasin was of little military consequence, but proved to be of decisive psychological significance. Immediately following the incident, both the Arab states and the Jewish terrorist organizations that had perpetrated the massacre aggressively publicized the incident, the former to damage the Zionists’ reputation, and the latter to weaken the Palestinians’ will to fight and to encourage them to flee. Lehi and Irgun received a vastly greater return on their effort than did the Arab states. While news of the attack on Deir Yassin did tarnish Israel’s reputation, its primary impact was to so thoroughly demoralize the Palestinian people that they abandoned all organized resistance to the Zionists and fled for safety. Most notably, when the Haganah and Irgun attacked Arab cities such as Haifa, Jaffa, and Tiberias during the latter stages of Plan Dalet, tens of thousands of Palestinians, fearing for their lives, took to the road in desperate flight. As a result, by mid-May at least 300,000 had become refugees.

With the success of Plan Dalet as a backdrop, David Ben Gurion formally declared the birth of the Jewish state, which the Zionists named Israel, on May 14, 1948, the date of Britain’s official departure from the mandate. The Yishuv was well prepared for this momentous day. In sharp contrast to the Palestinians, who had failed to establish effective governing bodies and whose society had crumbled under the weight of Plan Dalet, the Zionists had succeeded in building strong administrative structures that they could easily convert into the institutions of a modern state. The Jewish National Council seamlessly transformed into the provisional government, and the Haganah, with little more than a name change, became the new state’s military: the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). Yishuv leaders had also skillfully laid the groundwork for Israel’s formal diplomatic recognition As a result, almost immediately after Ben Gurion declared the establishment of Israel, the world’s two most powerful countries, the United States and the Soviet Union, extended diplomatic recognition.

Still, the day was not an entirely sunny one. In the wake of Plan Dalet, the Arab League states had decided to reverse an earlier decision to send only volunteers and arms in support of the Palestinians and declared that they were preparing to mount a coordinated assault against the new state. This was grim news for the Israeli government, and it cast the future of the new state in doubt. Indeed, when a concerned Ben Gurion asked IDF leaders for an assessment of the new strategic situation, they informed him that Israel had no better than fifty-fifty odds of surviving a concerted Arab League attack.

Conventional War, May 15, 1948-January 9, 1949

Thus, just as the civil war between Zionists and Palestinians was coming to an end, the first formal Arab-Israeli War began. The conflict was a start-and-stop affair that involved three rounds of often-fierce fighting interrupted by two lengthy, UN-sponsored ceasefires during which diplomats desperately sought a peaceful resolution of the conflict. Like the civil war that preceded it, the conventional contest between Israel and the Arab states ended in a decisive victory for the Zionists and resulted in the permanent expulsion from Israel of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees.

Despite its eventual victory, Israel did not seem to be in a commanding position during the first round of fighting. The day after British troops evacuated the mandate, forces from Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, later joined by token contingents from Yemen and Saudi Arabia, invaded Palestine just as their governments had promised. The IDF deployed units to contain these advances in the south and in the Galilee while it launched a concurrent offensive aimed at seizing East Jerusalem and its holy sites. In response, Transjordan’s powerful Arab Legion occupied positions in and around the Old City. Disciplined and well equipped, it stopped the IDF assault on East Jerusalem and then defeated a series of fierce attacks on the nearby fortified hilltop town of Latrun, which commanded the road between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

Exhausted by the fighting, both sides agreed to a United Nations-brokered ceasefire that went into effect on June 11, 1948. During the truce, the UN imposed an arms embargo on the region and tasked the Swedish diplomat Count Folke Bernadotte (1895-1948) with finding a way to end the fighting. A skilled mediator, he put forward a proposal in late June that centered on jettisoning the UN partition plan in favor of a federated union of Palestine and Transjordan that had autonomous Jewish and Arab sections. According to his proposal, Transjordan would annex the territory near Jerusalem that Resolution 181 had assigned to the Palestinians as well the Negev Desert in the south that the UN had allotted to the Jewish state; the Arab territory would thus be a contiguous block. Meanwhile, Israel would gain control of the fertile Western Galilee region that the original partition plan had granted to the Palestinians and that its forces had already overrun. As a result, the Jewish state would also possess a unified territory. It was a sound idea given the circumstances, and a much-more realistic proposal than the UNSCOP plan. Nonetheless, setting a pattern that would torpedo other peace proposal for decades to come, both sides rejected it out of hand in hopes that they could instead achieve a total victory. In the meantime, Israel took advantage of the ceasefire to strengthen its military position. It smuggled in previously purchased heavy weapons, integrated new recruits into its formations, and completed a secret arms purchase with Czechoslovakia. By early July, as a result, the balance of forces had tipped dramatically in favor of the IDF.

The second round of fighting reflected that shift. Taking advantage of an Egyptian violation of the truce, the IDF used its new weapons to launch offensives on all fronts. Aimed at securing Jerusalem, the main effort faltered in the face of continued stiff resistance on the part of the Arab Legion. However, the enormous success that the Israelis enjoyed on all other fronts more than offset that failure. IDF troops simultaneously took the undefended towns of Lydda and Ramle southeast of Tel Aviv, drove the Lebanese and Syrians back in the north, and badly bloodied the Egyptians in the south. As a result, by the time the second round of fighting had stopped, Israel had dramatically improved its military position and had, by seizing control of land that the UN had assigned to the Palestinians, substantially increased the amount of territory that it possessed.

With both sides once again looking to pause the fighting, the UN succeeded in imposing a second ceasefire on July 18. Taking advantage of the lull, Bernadotte reworked his earlier proposal in hopes of finding a formula that could serve as the basis for a lasting peace. Announced on September 16, his new plan followed the broad outlines of his previous proposal in terms of territorial adjustments but discarded the federal structure in favor of two, distinct states: Israel and an expanded Transjordan. Importantly, it also included a provision guaranteeing that the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had recently fled their homes would enjoy the right of return. Bernadotte’s proposal was once again a reasonable one given the circumstances. It offered both a means of ending the immediate conflict and a way of establishing a durable peace. At the same time, however, it was also highly unpopular among both Arabs and Zionists, especially the Israeli revisionists, who viewed it as a threat to their maximalist territorial goals. Indeed, future Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and other Lehi leaders perceived it to be such a serious danger that they had Bernadotte assassinated just a day after he announced the new plan, thereby rendering his revised peace proposal stillborn.

The final round of fighting that began on October 15 confirmed Israel’s dominant position. It began in the south. Seeking to take undisputed possession of the Negev Desert, IDF forces drove the now-thoroughly demoralized Egyptian army back toward the border. The Israelis then followed with Operation Hiram, which pushed Lebanese troops and Qawuqji’s ALA out of central Galilee and thereby secured full control of the northernmost territory that Resolution 181 had allotted to the Palestinians. In the process, IDF troops expelled the Palestinian civilians who lived in the area, with the result that the land Israel had acquired was, in the words of one Israeli officer, “clean and empty of Arabs.” Finally, after one last Israeli offensive that pushed the Egyptians across the frontier, the UN secured a ceasefire on January 7, 1949, that brought the 1948 War to an end. By that point, the scale of Israel’s victory was undeniable. The Zionist state had not merely survived the conflict that accompanied its birth, but had, in the process, secured control of the vast majority of the territory that had composed the Mandate of Palestine.

Armistice Agreements

Peace talks commenced on January 13, 1949, on the island of Rhodes. With the help of Bernadotte’s successor, the African American statesmen and civil-rights leader Ralph Bunche (1904-1971), Israel soon concluded a series of bilateral understandings with the Arab League states that brought the fighting to an end. However, these agreements did not formally terminate hostilities. Instead, since the documents were ceasefires rather than peace treaties, Israel remained in a technical state of war with its neighbors. As such, it could not trade with those countries, exchange ambassadors with them, or establish civil-aviation links between its airports and theirs. Egypt even barred ships bound for Israel from transiting the Suez Canal.

The armistice agreements also formalized the division of the former mandate between Israel, Egypt, and Jordan. Israel retained the territory it held at the end of the fighting, which totaled 78 percent of the mandate rather than the 56 percent that the UN had allotted it. For its part, Egypt assumed control over the twenty-five-mile-long, five- mile-wide ribbon of territory that extended from the Egyptian border northward along the Mediterranean that has been known since 1948 as the Gaza Strip. Finally, Abdallah’s kingdom, renamed the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in 1949, formally annexed what came to be called the West Bank: a slightly reduced version of the block of territory around Jerusalem that the UN had originally assigned to the Palestinians. Finally, Israel and Jordan split the city of Jerusalem proper between them, with West Jerusalem joining the Jewish state, and the Old City, which included the Haram al-Sharif and the Wailing Wall, falling under Jordanian rule.

The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Crisis

The talks may have ended the fighting, but they did not resolve the situation of the refugees that the war had created. During the conflict, the overwhelming majority of the Arabs who lived in the territory that became Israel had fled their homes. As a result, at the time the war ended, while a small minority, roughly 160,000, remained in Israel, some 700,000 other Palestinians found themselves living as displaced persons either in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, or in the adjoining Arab states. They would never see their homes again. Instead, thanks to Israel’s adamant refusal to permit them to return after the fighting had ceased, the displaced Palestinians remained refugees following the conflict.

What accounted for this situation? How could Israel justify its refusal to permit the Palestinians the right to return to their homes, a right enshrined in international law? Ben Gurion’s government advanced two claims in defense of its position. First, it asserted that the refugees’ flight was, in itself, a hostile act in support of Arab military operations against Israel. As such, the Palestinians had forfeited any right to return to their homes. Second, after 1950, it argued that the Arab states’ retaliatory expulsion of 300,000 Middle Eastern and North African Jews obviated Israel of any obligation to contribute to a solution to the Palestinian refugee crisis. After all, it had its own refugee situation to deal with.

The treatment that the Palestinians received from the Arab states to which they had fled was not much better. With the notable exception of Jordan, which granted citizenship to refugees living in its territory, states such as Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria imposed severe restrictions on the Palestinians. They confined them to the refugee camps that the UN had set up, tightly controlled their movements, and denied them the right to employment.

Why did the Arab states refuse to absorb the displaced Palestinians after Israel had made clear that it was not going to permit them to return to their homes? To a substantial degree, they did so out of fear that the Palestinians might cause unrest either by engaging in political activity or by competing for jobs. More cynically, countries such as Egypt refused to integrate the Palestinians into their societies because they perceived a propaganda advantage in keeping them in the camps: images of destitute refugees dwelling in tents provided them with stark visual evidence that could be deployed to damage Israel’s reputation in the increasingly important court of public opinion. Thus, despite a UN resolution explicitly calling for the refugees to have the right to return to their homes and despite Arab claims of solidarity with the Palestinians, hundreds of thousands of refugees and millions of their descendants would languish for decades in dismal, overcrowded refugee camps in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. Many remain in them to the present day.

The Historical Debate: The New Historians

The cliché that history is written by the victors accurately characterizes the enduring historiographical influence of the unabashedly pro-Zionist traditional interpretation of Israel’s founding. First articulated by Zionist leaders immediately after the 1948 War, that perspective has thoroughly dominated early Western and Israeli views of the establishment of the Jewish state and continues to shape popular understandings to the present day. Its broad outlines are straightforward. It maintains that the Zionists hoped to peacefully establish a small state in the Holy Land that could serve as a refuge for the war-weary Jewish people. Though the Zionists made numerous efforts to arrive at a mutually beneficial understanding with the Palestinians, the Arabs remained implacably opposed and rejected their entreaties out of hand.

Instead, military forces from seven Arab states invaded Israel just after it declared its independence in an effort to kill the Jewish state in the cradle. In support of that effort, Arab leaders ordered hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to leave their homes so as to ensure that the invading armies could maneuver freely against the IDF. Israel appeared to be doomed in the face of this onslaught. Despite being badly outnumbered, however, the plucky Zionists somehow managed to pull off a miraculous, David-versus- Goliath victory against the attackers that secured their new state. Meanwhile, once the fighting had ended, the Israelis made clear that they were willing to make substantial concessions in order to secure a just peace for all parties. Unfortunately, the Arabs remained as implacably hostile as ever and refused to negotiate. Thus, despite its yearning for peace, Israel remained in a technical state of war with the Arab countries for the next few decades.

Based on memoirs, interviews with participants, and, in many cases, lived experience, this account would quickly come to dominate Western and Israeli understandings of the events of 1947-1948. In Israel, people from across the political spectrum accepted it as an accurate account of their nation’s founding, and it served as the basis for the country’s secondary-school history curriculum. In America, it informed the storyline of Leon Uris’s 1958 novel, Exodus, as well as the plot of the film adaptation that director Otto Preminger released in 1960. Both the movie and the novel were huge hits. Uris’s book was the most successful work of fiction since Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind while Preminger’s adaptation was the third highest grossing movie of 1960. As such, they firmly established the conventional narrative as the dominant understanding of Israel’s founding in the United States.

The traditional interpretation stood largely without question in Israel and the West for several decades after the 1948 War. Beginning in the 1980s, however, a group of younger Israeli scholars known as the New Historians began to raise questions about its accuracy. Drawing on recently declassified Israeli documents, New Historians like Avi Shlaim, Simha Flapan, Benny Morris and Ilan Pappé argue not only that the conventional narrative, or, as Shlaim calls it, the “heroic-moralistic version,” grossly distorts the events of 1948, but that the people who popularized it did so as part of a deliberate effort to create a sense of national cohesion in Israel and to secure international support for the Jewish state. These scholars challenge nearly every aspect of the conventional narrative, but their most pointed differences with the traditionalists center on three key topics: the relative disparity in forces, the cause of the Palestinian refugee crisis, and the failure of the combatants to conclude peace and normalized relations following the war.

The New Historians argue, first, that far from being at a military disadvantage, Israel held the upper hand throughout the fighting. They note, for example, that the IDF enjoyed a substantial advantage in firepower, particularly after it received a large shipment of Czech arms during the first ceasefire. They also demonstrate that Israel not only possessed a numerical advantage from the start of the fighting, but that the balance of forces tipped further and further in the IDF’s favor as the war progressed. As Avi Shlaim points out, its strength rose from 35,000 in May 1948 to 65,000 in July to 96,000 in December. In contrast, the Arab states deployed only 25,000 troops in Palestine at the start of the war and lacked the logistical capabilities to match the IDF’s growth.

The Arabs were not just outnumbered and out gunned, moreover, but were sharply divided among themselves. As Shlaim notes, Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia suspected that Abdallah was scheming with the Israelis to annex the West Bank as a first step toward the creation of a greater Syria under his rule. Accordingly, they sent forces into Palestine less to attack Israel than to check his ambitions. Their suspicions were correct. Meeting secretly with future Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meier (1898- 1978) before the war, Abdallah had promised to respect Israeli territory in exchange for Meier’s pledge that Israel would accept his annexation of the West Bank. As Shlaim points out, it is true that the deal broke down over the question of which state would possess Jerusalem and that Israel and Transjordan subsequently engaged in some of the heaviest fighting of the war on the outskirts of the Holy City. Nonetheless, in the broadest sense, the outline of the agreement held: Israel accepted Transjordan’s annexation of the West Bank, and Abdallah kept his troops out of Israeli territory. Happy to have one of his Arab rivals taken down a notch, the emir even permitted the IDF to shift the bulk of its forces to the Egyptian front in October 1948 unmolested. Thus, Israel benefited not merely from having more and better armed troops, but also from the fact that it faced divided enemies that were as focused on weakening their Arab rivals as on attacking the Jewish state.

Second, the New Historians take issue with the conventional interpretation’s assessment of the refugee crisis. While acknowledging some instances in which Arab leaders urged Palestinians to flee the area of battle, they reject the idea that such encouragement was the primary reason that the Palestinians left their homes. Instead, they argue that it was a combination of Israeli attacks on Arab cities during Plan Dalet, orders instructing IDF commanders to expel Palestinians from villages, often couched in euphemistic phrases such as one that encouraged them “to assist the Arabs to depart,” and, above all, the rapid spread of news about the Deir Yasin massacre that motivated hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to flee beginning in April 1948. In other words, in the view of the New Historians, it was Zionist actions rather than Arab directives that ultimately produced the Palestinian exodus.

Finally, the New Historians debunk the idea that Arab intransigence was solely responsible for the inability of the two sides to establish peace and normalized relations following the war. Relying on Israeli diplomatic documents, they instead demonstrate that the Arab states bucked popular anti-Israeli sentiment and made a series of conciliatory peace proposals following the conclusion of the fighting. For example, they show that Egypt’s king Faruq (r. 1936-1952) had sent out peace feelers as early as September 1948 and that Abdallah had long signaled his openness to a deal. They also point out that Syrian Colonel Husni Zaim (r. 1949), who had seized power in March 1949, offered not only to recognize Israel but to permanently resettle 300,000 Palestinian refugees in his country in exchange for a small strip of territory and control of the eastern half of the Sea of Galilee. Still, as substantial as this offer was, Ben Gurion rejected it out of hand. Believing that Israel had time on its side and that it had gotten everything it needed through the armistice arrangements, he refused to consider yielding even a fraction of an acre of Israeli territory in exchange for peace. “I am not in a hurry and I can wait ten years,” he told one reporter, “We are under no pressure whatsoever.” Thus, the New Historians conclude, it was Israeli intransigence rather than Arab hostility that ensured that the two sides failed to secure a durable peace at the conclusion of the 1948 War.

Peace?

Problematically, the increasingly inflexible positions that each side adopted following the conflict meant that stability and normalized relations became less, rather than more, likely as the years passed. For the Israelis, the hardening of attitudes was a function of recent Jewish history. The contrast between the Jewish experience in the Holocaust and the 1948 War had driven home the lesson that they could never again let hostile acts go unpunished. As a result, both revisionists and Labor Zionists alike redoubled their commitment to the Iron Wall strategy of securing peace through overwhelming strength. For Arab leaders, meanwhile, growing inflexibility toward Israel was a product of public opinion. Repeatedly, the Arab people made clear that, at a minimum, there could be no peace that did not involve the return of the Palestinians to their homes, a possibility that the Israelis had declared, with equal insistence, to be off the table. Unsurprisingly, given these positions, the two sides would remain locked in a state of war for decades. Indeed, Israel only ended its formal state of war with Egypt in 1979 and with Jordan in 1994; remarkably, it remains in a technical state of war with Syria and Lebanon at the time of this writing.

Conclusion

Few grasped in the years leading up to 1948 that Israel’s creation would have such a disruptive impact on the Middle East. Perhaps the most far sighted among them was a young, British-born member of the AHC’s Arab Office named Albert Hourani (1915-1993), who would go on to be one of the greatest historians of the region. While giving testimony to a fact-finding group in the late 1940s, he predicted that the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine would completely destabilize the region. It would, he argued, “involve a terrible injustice and could only be carried out at the expense of dreadful repressions and disorders, with the risk of bringing down in ruins the whole political structure of the Middle East.” Hourani’s statement proved painfully prophetic and accurately predicted the sweeping changes and embrace of radicalism that the region would experience over the course of the 1950s and 1960s. It is to this tumultuous period and to the man, Gamal Abdel Nasser (r. 1954-1970), who would dominate it that we shall now turn.