The Mandate of Palestine
1919 – May 15, 1948
A. Carrying the Weight of the World on Their Shoulders
We ended the last segment with the fall of the Ottoman Empire (OE) after it entered WWI as a member of the Central Powers, and the Central Powers were then defeated by the Allies. Our primary focus is on Palestine, which was a province in the now defunct OE. Decisions, declarations, and treaties were made during and following WWI that have been referenced ever since to justify a given perspective on what was intended and agreed to by the decision makers then, and consequently how things should be now. Examples include the Balfour Declaration, Sykes-Picot Treaty, Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points, and the Treaty of Versailles.
I want you to consider what it would be like if you had been sent to Paris following the end of World War I with the mission of crafting a treaty that would restore peace and sufficiently satisfy the interests of your fellow countrymen that they would concur with the terms of the treaty and other agreements that you helped craft. While there would be multiple leaders and representatives from many countries and people groups in Paris after the Armistice to work out a treaty or a series of treaties, there were basically only three countries and primarily one man from each of those countries that made nearly all the key decisions. They were:
- Georges Clemenceau, Prime Minister of France
- David Lloyd George, Prime Minister of Great Britain
- Woodrow Wilson, President of the USA
I can think of no time in history where the tangible fate of more people was riding on the decisions of three men than these “Big Three” at the Paris Peace Conference following WW I.
(Note: Italy was included in “The Big Four”. However, my reading is that Italy’s Prime Minister Orlando did not make a significant difference.)
Let’s stop and recognize the level of chaos, disorder and despair that existed and then attempt to briefly look at the perspectives and challenges of each man. My point for doing this is so that we can understand how immaterial the fate of Palestine was to Clemenceau and Lloyd George. Woodrow Wilson was the only one of the three to care about the self-determination of people with a common ethnic group and culture. (This fell under Point #5 of his famous 14 Points.)
The chaos from lack of governance of key nations. Of the six main powers that were engaged at the beginning of the war: Austria-Hungary, Germany, and the OE on one side and Great Britain, France, and Russia on the other, the governments of three: Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia – all monarchies – had been deposed by the time of the signing of the armistice ending WWI. The governments that replaced them were weak and considered illegitimate by many of their respective citizens and by many other nations. Further, there were forces hard at work trying to overthrow the governments that survived the war. Communists aspired to overthrow the governments of Great Britain and France. Nationalism, which I identified as one of the reasons for the fall of the Ottoman Empire, was spurred on by Wilson’s promotion of self-determination. Within a few years, the Sultan of the OE would be deposed by Kemal Pasha (aka Ataturk) and the Turkish Nationalists. The world was truly turned upside down.
Destruction, Death, and Injury. France had taken the brunt of the physical devastation of the war with much of its most productive industrial and agricultural areas destroyed. Its GDP was only 60% of what it had been pre-war. Over 4% of its population, about 1.7 million had died and more than 4 million military were wounded. This was the second major war France had had with Germany. In 1871, France had been severely defeated by Germany and was humiliated by the terms of the treaty which required France to pay heavy reparations and to lose territory. Great Britain had not suffered much physical destruction, but about 2% of its population had been killed and twice that many wounded. All totaled, WWI resulted in the deaths of some 20 million people, and even more were seriously wounded.
Spanish Flu. Beginning in 1918, as the war was coming to an end, the Spanish Flu struck. It infected 500 million people, or about one third of the world’s population and killed some 50 million people worldwide. This was in addition to those killed by the war.
Stop a moment and compare the problems facing us today to those of the people living a century ago and appreciate how fortunate we are to be alive now and not then.
Main objectives and obstacles of the three key men.
1. Clemenceau’s main objective was to so cripple and hamstring Germany that it could never threaten France again. He wanted to hang the blame for the war fully on Germany and impose very heavy reparations to repay France for its severe losses. He also wanted to take back from Germany provinces lost by France in the previous war. In the Middle East, he wanted France to control oil rich provinces and port access to them.
2. Lloyd George wanted to make sure that the U.K. had a share in Germany’s colonies and that Germany’s navy would be reduced. He was also under pressure from the British public to punish Germany and make it pay reparations. This was balanced by a desire to keep Germany strong enough to be a useful trading partner for the U.K. (Germany had been GB’s #1 trading partner prior to the War.) In the Middle East, like Clemenceau, he wanted his country to have control and access to the oil fields. Regarding Palestine, per Dr. Fisher “Lloyd George was unimpressed by Zionist pleas, but he definitely opposed the idea of the Holy Places falling into the hands of ‘agnostic, atheistic France’.”
3. Woodrow Wilson. America had suffered far less than the other countries involved so Wilson was inclined to be less harsh towards Germany. He was more interested in a “just and stable peace”. In addition to self-determination, his 14 Points for Peace included freedom of the seas (something Brits totally opposed) and setting up a League of Nations. He felt it would be best to help Germany re-build and encourage everyone to focus more on peace than on revenge.
Woodrow Wilson arrived in France in mid-December 1918. He contracted the flu while in Paris in April 1919, which undermined his ability to advocate more strongly for his ideas. Had he not been so debilitated, it is probable the treaty with Germany would have been more fair and WW II precluded. What Wilson did get was the formation of The League of Nations and the empowerment of this newly created body to oversee the governing and future disposition of over a dozen colonies and provinces that had been held by the Central Powers. That the Treaty of Versailles specifically included a “mandate” that “Palestine” one day be an independent nation with the people within its borders self-determining the kind of government they would have, is amazing considering all the other issues and problems that those men had to address and attempt to resolve.
Woodrow Wilson has really gone up in my eyes for creating the League of Nations and getting the other two men to sign off on having the colonies of their vanquished foes become their respective nations’ “protectorates” rather than simply their new colonies.
While chaos and disorder were reigning throughout half the world, there was one group of people who were laser focused on achieving a two-millennial old goal: To make Palestine a homeland for the Jews. We will turn to this topic in the next segment.
B. The Jewish Zionists Playing the Long Game
Should the Jews have their own nation and if so, should it be in Palestine? The prevailing train of thought in the 19th century among most Jewish leaders was that Jews should minimize their Jewishness and assimilate into the societies where they lived. Theodore Herzl, born in 1860 to well to do Jewish parents in Budapest, grew up holding this perspective.[1] He studied in Vienna and became a journalist. In 1891, Herzl moved to Paris to take a job as a correspondent with an Austrian newspaper. There he was shocked to find so much antisemitism. Several events, including the Dreyfus Affair, caused him to change his views and determine that so long as antisemitism existed, assimilation was impossible. He concluded that Jews must have a country of their own and it should be in Palestine. This perspective is referred to as Zionism.
In 1897, Herzl hosted a conference in Basel, Switzerland to discuss his ideas. Over 200 Jews attended from around the world. There they founded the World Zionist Organization (WZO) with the mission “to create a publicly guaranteed homeland for the Jewish people” in Palestine. It also set up Herzl as president of the WZO. Since Palestine belonged to the Ottoman Empire (OE), Herzl went to Istanbul in hopes of convincing the Sultan to agree to such an arrangement. That was a non-starter. It was clear that so long as the (OE) existed and controlled Palestine, it would never be a homeland for the Jews.
Even so, the WZO did what they could until “the Sick Man of Europe” died. They pursued a strategy of building a homeland through persistent small-scale immigration and the founding of such bodies as the Jewish National Fund (1901—a charity that bought land for Jewish settlement) and the Anglo-Palestine Bank (1903—provided loans for Jewish businesses and farmers). Herzl and the WZO were not the first Jews to focus on making Palestine a homeland for the Jews. In the late 1870s, Jewish philanthropists such as the Montefiores and the Rothschilds responded to the persecution of Jews in Eastern Europe by sponsoring agricultural settlements for Russian Jews in Palestine. This continued, on a small scale through the 1880’s and 1890’s.
When the OE joined the Central Powers at the beginning of WW I, the Zionists had a clear vision for what needed to happen: the Central Powers needed to be defeated, the British needed to control Palestine and they needed to support having it become a homeland for the Jews. Chaim Weizman was a Jewish leader who stepped to forefront to make this happen.
Weizman was a Russian born biochemist who attended the second WZO Congress in Basel in 1898. He was a brilliant scientist and an inventor. One of his most important inventions was acetone, a critical element in munitions. Weizman was also a masterful politician. Among the many important people he befriended and/or came into close association with were David Lloyd George, who was Minister of Munitions in 1915 and later Prime Minister; Arthur Balfour, a former prime minister and the foreign secretary in WWI; C.P. Scott, the editor of the influential newspaper, the Manchester Guardian; Winston Churchill, who was First Lord of the Admiralty at the time; Albert Einstein, and at the end of the war, Woodrow Wilson.
Weizman transferred the manufacturing rights of acetone to a British company that was able to produce it on a mass scale. This greatly helped the Allies’ war effort. He parlayed this action into favorable considerations by British leaders for a homeland for the Jews in Palestine. Weitzman was not a one man show. Jews throughout the world raised huge funds to support the Allies. They also used their political and journalistic influence to support a homeland for the Jews in Palestine.
One of the most important assets of the British Empire was the Suez Canal which began near the south end of Palestine. Weizman helped convinced British leaders that Jews would make more stable and competent stewards of Palestine with its proximity to the Canal than Arabs.
The Balfour Declaration was one of the most important tangible evidences of Weizman and other Zionist leaders efforts to achieve their goal. It was a letter sent by Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothchild, a leader in the Jewish community in Great Britain, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. It stated:
“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
The British government had asked President Wilson in Sep of 1917 if he supported making the declaration. Wilson said no, the time was not ripe. When he was asked again the following month, Wilson consented provided that the caveat about not prejudicing the rights of the non-Jewish communities in Palestine was added. Why the change? Because American Jewish leaders, including Louis Brandeis, who Wilson had appointed to the Supreme Court and Felix Frankfurter, a future SCOTUS justice, prevailed upon Wilson to support the declaration. The Zionists had been playing the long game by forming themselves into an army of lobbyists in the US and Europe to achieve their goals. And with the victory of the Allies, and the Treaty of Versailles, nearly all their goals were achieved:
- The Ottoman Empire collapsed and lost control of Palestine.
- Great Britain took control of Palestine.
- GB’s government publicly stated it was in favor of Palestine becoming a homeland for the Jews.
There was just one problem and a big one. Palestine had not become a colony of GB where GB could do as she pleased with the conquered territory. Rather, GB was assigned by the League of Nations to serve as a “Mandatory Power” over specific territorial mandates of which Palestine was one. GB was obligated to set its mandate on a course to become a free and independent nation with a system of government that represented the will of its indigenous population. At the time, no more than 10% of the population was Jewish while 85% of the people in Palestine were Muslims and mainly Arabs. If things were allowed to take their natural course, Palestine would become an independent nation governed by Muslim Arabs. That is what nearly everyone, especially in the Muslim world, expected would happen.
But that was not at all what the Zionists had worked so long and so hard to bring about. Being so close, they were now more determined than ever to see Palestine become a state where Jews controlled their destiny. They would have to continue playing the long game, redoubling their efforts, and investing significantly more resources if their dream was to become a reality.
C. The Victor’s Curse.
Great Britain had reluctantly entered WW I. Unlike Russia, France, and Germany, it had no treaties obligating it to defend any nation that had been attacked by other nations. However, when Germany invaded neutral Belgium, GB chose to join Russia and France against its #1 trading partner, Germany. It cost her 6% of her adult male population – 880,000 men. The financial cost was $47 billion, slightly more than the $45 B it cost Germany. The huge debt crippled GB’s economy and led to its decline.
So, what did it get in return? New colonies? No, mandates, which I referenced in 4-II. Empire was no longer cool. Self-determination of the indigenous populations, as promoted by US President Wilson, was now in. Following WWI, 16 mandates were established by the newly created League of Nations and were allocated to seven mandatory powers: Five went to the United Kingdom, one each to Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Belgium and Japan, and the rest to France.
Conspicuously absent from this list is the United States, which had been the impetus for the League of Nations and the mandate system. Congress refused to join the League or have anything to do with administering the dispossessed former colonies or territories of the Central Powers.
It was the mandatory power’s responsibility to assist its mandate in becoming an independent country with its government reflecting the interests of its indigenous people. No doubt, this would be a financial, military, and administrative burden and nowhere more so than with Palestine. It proved to be a hugely expensive nightmare for the British with relatively few benefits.
On July 1, 1920, Sir Herbert Samuel the First High Commissioner of Palestine, relieved the British military authorities. At the time, there were 550,000 Muslims, 70,000 Christians and 50,000 Jews. The Muslims and most Christians spoke Arabic as did a small minority of the Jews – the ones whose families had been there for centuries. The large majority of the Jews were newcomers and of those, many belonged to Haluka communities living on charity from world Jewry who had come there to pray and die.
It should have been obvious to them from the beginning that it was an impossible undertaking; the Balfour Declaration was incorporated into the charter for the Mandate of Palestine. On one hand, UK was to establish there a national home for the Jewish people and on the other hand it must not prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities. The Balfour Declaration had been issued because of the powerful and effective lobbying of Zionists in the US and UK. And most of the Zionists did not simply want Palestine to be a place where Jewish people could come and live; they wanted Jews to rule it as an independent nation. Such an outcome, of course, would greatly prejudice the rights of the Arab Muslims whose families had been living in Palestine for over a thousand years.
Quoting Dr. Fisher: “No problem weighed more heavily upon Palestine than that of immigration and population. Zionist leaders, who wished to obtain a Jewish majority as quickly as possible, encouraged mass immigration. When a majority was achieved, GB would be asked to relinquish her mandate and Palestine would become an independent Jewish state. Justice Brandeis dissented from this policy, believing that immigration should proceed slowly and only as rapidly as a secure economic basis for the immigrant’s livelihood could be assured.”
Sir Herbert Samuel set an initial quota of 1,000 Jewish immigrants per month. Winston Churchill, as Colonial Secretary, generated a memorandum which modified this policy to allow more immigrants, if they could be absorbed economically. The memorandum also assured Arabs that nothing would be done to jeopardize their rights. On average about 30K Jewish immigrants per year came to Palestine so that by 1939, there were 445K Jews there versus 1,050K Arabs.
As you can imagine, there were beau coups conflicts between the Arabs and Jews. For example, in 1928 one incident resulted in 130 Jews and 116 Arabs being killed.
Iraq had obtained independence from the UK in 1932. The Arabs in Palestine were ready for the same. In 1935, they petitioned the High Commissioner to establish a government under the terms of the mandate. The High Commissioner responded by proposing a legislative council consisting of 11 Muslims, 7 Jews and 3 Christians, 2 business reps, and 5 British officials. The Arabs agreed to cooperate. The Jews refused. They wanted to postpone self-government until they had the majority. Zionists put pressure on the House of Commons which voted to rescind the High Commissioner’s plans. This, of course, totally irked the Arabs.
The Arabs revolted against the British from 1936-1939. Both Zionists and British were attacked by Arabs. The British army killed some 5,000 Arabs and wounded about 15,000.
In July 1937, the Peel Commission determined the best solution was partition and this was endorsed by the British cabinet making it official policy. Non-Zionist Jews, who were against setting up a Jewish state were opposed to it on that basis. Arabs were opposed to it since it gave most of the best farmland to the Jews, and the Zionist were not happy because they felt they should get more since Jordan (the land east of the Jordan River), had already been carved out of Palestine and given to the Arabs.
Nothing could be found that was acceptable to all the parties. And then World War II was upon them. The British White Paper of 1939 placed the future of Palestine on ice for the duration of the war. British policy was to severely limit the immigration of the Jews into Palestine. The Holocaust, of course, would force them to change that policy.
The cost of Palestine to Great Britain was staggering. It invested huge funds in public works projects there. At one point, GB had 100,000 soldiers stationed in Palestine. Nearly 1,000 of them were killed by both Arab and Jewish terrorists. In 1946, two Jewish terrorists assassinated Lord Moyne, the Leader of the House of Lords, and the Minister of State for the Middle East. Any action that the British took that was perceived as either pro-Jewish or pro-Arab incensed people in the other camp around the world. During WW II, GB had to have the support of the Arab countries so, they attempted to tightly restrict Jewish immigration. President Truman, getting pressure from Jews in the US, insisted that the British greatly expand Jewish immigration. It was lose-lose for the British at every turn.
With the end of WW II, Great Britain was economically and militarily exhausted. It simply could not continue to invest more time and treasure in the intractable problems of Palestine. On 15 May 1948, Britain gave up her mandate. The British Army departed from Palestine. The day before, David Ben Gurion had announced on a radio station the existence of the State of Israel. President Truman recognized Israel as a legitimate country 18 minutes later. Palestine had been a curse to Great Britain for three decades. At last the nightmare was over.
Now what? There would be all out war between the Arabs and the Jews. Would the fate of who would control Palestine finally come down to which side would prevail in a military conflict? Has military might ever determined who would possess a given territory?
D. What if France, not UK had been the Mandatory Power over Palestine?
I want to add a PS here which is the result of an exchange with John Hashagen. France would have gladly taken on the mandate of Palestine, but Lloyd George did not want the Holy Lands to go to “the atheistic French.” But what if France had done so rather than the British? France was conquered by Germany in the summer of 1940 and so Germany would have had control of Palestine unless it was captured by the Allies. The Allies did defeat the Germans and Vichy France in Syria and Lebanon in the summer of 1941. It was a very contested war. One of the main reasons the Allies won was because the British had such a strong military force in Palestine (which was due mainly to the unrest there.) Had the French forces been stationed in Palestine instead of the British, almost certainly the Axis Powers would have retained the Levant and Palestine would have been administered by the Germans during WW II instead of the Brits. There would have been few if any Jews left in Palestine by the end of WW II. Without question, it would have been a Muslim Arab controlled nation and we would not have all the unrest that exists in the Middle East.
I am not saying that this would have been a better outcome. Just that the world would be significantly different had the French controlled Palestine instead of the British and there would be no nation of Israel and very few Jews in Palestine today.
As I see it, the Jews owe a huge debt of gratitude to British for having taken on the impossible, expensive and thankless job of administering the Mandate of Palestine.
[1] Many Jewish leaders feared that if there was a Jewish nation, especially in the heart of the Muslim world, it would become a source of tension and antisemitism for Jews living elsewhere. Consider all the grief that Jewish students are currently experiencing on college campuses today as the result of the pro-Palestinian protests. The Jewish leaders who opposed the Zionists had good reason to be concerned.
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