The British mandate in Palestine was doomed from the outset. The terms of the Balfour Declaration were written into the preamble of the mandatory instrument issued by the League of Nations to formalize Britain’s position in Palestine. Unlike all of the other postwar mandates, in which a great power was charged with establishing the instruments of self-rule in a newly emerging state, the British in Palestine were required to establish both a viable state from among the indigenous people of the land and a national home for the Jews of the world. The Balfour Declaration was a formula for communal conflict. Given Palestine’s very limited resources, there simply was no way to establish a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine without prejudice to the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. Inevitably the mandate engendered conflict between rival nationalisms—the highly organized Zionist movement, and a new Palestinian nationalism forged by the dual threats of British imperialism and Zionist colonialism. Palestine would prove Britain’s gravest imperial failure in the Middle East, a failure that would condemn the whole of the Middle East to conflict and violence that persist to the present day.

Palestine was a new country in an ancient land, cobbled together from parts of different Ottoman provinces to suit imperial convenience. The Palestine mandate originally spanned the Jordan River and stretched from the Mediterranean to the frontiers of Iraq through vast, inhospitable desert territory. In 1923 the lands to the east of the Jordan were formally detached from the Palestine mandate to form a separate state of Transjordan under Amir Abdullah’s rule. The British also ceded a part of the Golan Heights to the French mandate in Syria in 1923, by which point Palestine was a country smaller than Belgium, roughly the size of the state of Maryland. The population of Palestine was already quite diverse in 1923. Palestine was a land holy to Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and for centuries had attracted pilgrims from around the world. Starting in 1882 a new wave of visitors—settlers rather than pilgrims—began to arrive. Pushed by the pogroms of Tsar Alexander III’s Russia and pulled by the appeal of a powerful new ideology, Zionism, thousands of Eastern European and Russian Jews sought refuge in Palestine. They entered a society that had an 85 percent Muslim majority, a Christian minority representing some 9 percent of the population, and an indigenous Jewish community. The original Yishuv (as the Jewish community of Palestine was known) did not exceed 3 percent of the population of Palestine in 1882 and lived in the four towns of rabbinical learning: Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias, and Safad.³² Two distinct waves of Zionist settlers reached Palestine before the First World War. The First Aliya, or wave of Jewish immigrants, entered Palestine between 1882–1903 and doubled the size of the Yishuv from 24,000 to 50,000. The Jewish community expanded yet more rapidly under the Second Aliya (1904?1914), and by 1914 the total Jewish population of Palestine was estimated to have reached 85,000.³³ The Arab population of Palestine had watched the expansion of Jewish immigration after 1882 with mounting concern. The Arab press began to condemn Zionism during the 1890s, and leading Arab intellectuals openly criticized the movement in the early years of the twentieth century. Legislation was drafted in 1909 to stop Jewish settlement in Palestine, and Zionist activity was twice debated in the Ottoman Parliament in 1911, though no bills ultimately were passed.³⁴ These concerns intensified after support for Zionism became official British policy with the 1917 Balfour Declaration. The King-Crane Commission, which traveled the length and breadth of Palestine in June 1919, was overwhelmed by petitions opposed to Zionism. “The anti-Zionist note was especially strong in Palestine,” explained the commissioners in their report, “where 222 (85.3 per cent) of the 260 petitions declared against the Zionist program. This is the largest percentage in the district for any one point.” The message from Palestine was clear: the indigenous Arab people, who had opposed Zionist immigration for years, did not accept Britain’s commitment to build a Jewish national home in their land. Yet the message seemed to fall on deaf ears, as Britain and the international community determined Palestine’s future without consultation or the consent of its people. Where peaceful means failed, desperate people soon turned to violence. Jewish immigration and land purchase provoked growing tension in Palestine from the beginning of the mandate. Opposed to British rule and to the prospect of a Jewish national home in their midst, the Arab population viewed the expansion of the Jewish community as a direct threat to their political aspirations. Moreover, Jewish land purchase inevitably led to Arab farmers being displaced from lands they had tilled as sharecroppers, often for generations. Between 1919 and 1921, Jewish immigration to Palestine accelerated dramatically, as over 18,500 Zionist immigrants moved to the country. Major riots broke out in Jerusalem in 1920 and in Jaffa in 1921, which left 95 Jews and 64 Arabs dead and hundreds wounded. Some 70,000 Zionist immigrants reached Palestine between 1922 and 1929. In the same period, the Jewish National Fund bought 240,000 acres of land in the Jezreel Valley in northern Palestine. The combination of high immigration and extensive land purchase was blamed for the next round of violence, which erupted in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safad, and Jaffa in 1929, claiming 133 Jewish and 116 Arab lives.³⁵ After each instance of violence, British investigations led to new policies designed to assuage the fears of the Palestinian majority. In July 1922, following the first wave of riots, Winston Churchill issued a White Paper that sought to calm Arab fears that Palestine would become ?as Jewish as England is English.? He claimed that the terms of the Balfour Declaration did not ?contemplate that Palestine as a whole should be converted into a Jewish National Home, but that such a Home should be founded in Palestine.”³⁶ Similarly, the gravity of the 1929 riots led to a number of new reports and recommendations. The 1930 Shaw Report identified Jewish immigration and land purchase as the primary cause of Palestinian unrest and called for limits on Zionist immigration to prevent future problems. This was followed in October 1930 by the Passfield White Paper, which called for restrictions on Jewish land purchase and immigration. Following the publication of each British White Paper sympathetic to Palestinian Arab concerns, the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency of Palestine worked the halls of power in London and Jerusalem to overturn policies deemed inimical to their aims. By bringing great pressure to bear on Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald’s minority government, the Zionists succeeded in getting MacDonald to repudiate the Passfield White Paper. Chaim Weitzman and his advisors more or less wrote the letter for MacDonald, which he signed on February 13, 1931. In his letter, MacDonald confirmed that the British government “did not prescribe and [does] not contemplate any stoppage or prohibition of Jewish immigration,” nor would it prevent Jews from acquiring more land in Palestine. Arab expectations for an improvement in their situation were dashed by the MacDonald letter, which they called “the Black Letter” (in contrast to the White Paper). A vicious cycle then dragged the Palestine mandate into chronic violence: ever-increasing Zionist immigration and land purchase provoked communal conflict, which in turn led to British attempts to introduce limits on the Jewish national home, and Zionist politicking to reverse those limits. As long as this process persisted, no progress was possible in establishing institutions of government or self-rule. The Palestinians did not wish to legitimate the mandate and its commitment to create a Jewish national home; the British did not wish to confer proportional representation, let alone self-rule, on the Palestinian majority who were hostile to the aims of the mandate; and the Zionists cooperated with every aspect of the mandate that advanced their national aims. With each round of violence, the difficulties grew more profound. The problems of the Arab community of Palestine were compounded by divisions within their own leadership. The two leading families of Jerusalem—the Husaynis and Nashashibis—vied for ascendancy over Arab politics in Palestine. The British played upon the divisions between the two families from the outset. In 1920 the notables of Palestine created an Arab Executive to represent their demands to the British authorities, headed by Musa Kazim al-Husayni. A second representative body, the Supreme Muslim Council, was headed by Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the grand mufti of Jerusalem. The Nashashibis boycotted these Husayni-dominated bodies and tried to work directly with the British. With their leadership divided, the Palestinians were disadvantaged in their relations with both the British and the Zionists. By 1929 the shortcomings of the Palestinian nationalist leadership encouraged a host of new actors to take to the national stage. As in Egypt in 1919, nationalism provided a window of opportunity for the emergence of women into public life for the first time. Elite women, inspired by Huda Sha’rawi and the Wafdist Women’s Association, responded to the 1929 riots by convening the First Arab Women’s Congress in Jerusalem in October 1929. Two hundred women attended the congress from the Palestinian Muslim and Christian communities. They passed three resolutions: a call for the abrogation of the Balfour Declaration, an assertion of Palestine’s right to a national government with representation for all communities in proportion to their numbers, and the development of Palestinian industries. “The Congress urges every Arab to buy nothing from the Jews but land, and to sell them everything but land.”³⁷ The delegates then began to break with tradition. Contrary to Palestinian custom, which frowned on women meeting with men in public, they decided to call on the British high commissioner, Sir John Chancellor, to present him with their resolutions. Chancellor received them and promised to communicate their message to London, to be shared with the government’s Commission of Enquiry into the troubles in Palestine. After their meeting with Chancellor, the delegation returned to the Women’s Congress, which was still in session, and held a public demonstration, further departing from accepted standards of female decorum. The demonstration turned into a 120-car parade starting at Damascus Gate and passing through the main streets of Jerusalem to distribute their resolutions to the foreign consulates in the city. Following the congress, the delegates created an Arab Women’s Association with both a feminist and a nationalist agenda: “to assist the Arab woman in her endeavours to improve her standing, to help the poor and distressed, and to encourage and promote Arab national enterprises.” The society raised money to help the families of Palestinians who were imprisoned or executed for anti-British or anti-Zionist attacks. They sent repeated petitions and memoranda to the high commissioner seeking clemency for political prisoners, protesting Jewish arms purchases, and condemning British failures to reach a political agreement with the men of the Arab Executive—to whom they were bound by marriage and family ties. The Arab Women’s Association was a strange hybrid of the politics of Palestinian nationalism and the upper-middle-class culture of British county ladies. They addressed each other by their husbands’ names—Madame Kazem Pasha al-Husayni, Madame Awni Abd al-Hadi—and met to strategize over tea. Yet, as in Egypt in 1919, women’s participation in the national movement was of powerful symbolic value. These well-educated and eloquent women added a powerful voice to the nascent Palestinian nationalist movement. Take, for example, the speech of Madame Awni Abd al-Hadi berating Lord Allenby in the association’s second public demonstration in 1933: “The Arab women have seen the extent to which the British have violated their pledges, divided their country and enforced a policy on the people during the last fifteen years, which will inevitably result in the annihilation of the Arabs and in their supplantation by the Jews through the admission of immigrants from all parts of the world.?³⁸ Her message was clear: the whole of the Palestinian nation, not just its men, was holding Britain accountable for the policies of the mandate.