The British Mandate for Palestine
When the great war ended and the Ottoman Empire was dismembered like a slaughtered ox, the League of Nations gave the land of Israel into the keeping of Britain. They called it a Mandate, after the Latin mandatum, a…
Biblical Narrative
When the great war ended and the Ottoman Empire was dismembered like a slaughtered ox, the League of Nations gave the land of Israel into the keeping of Britain. They called it a Mandate, after the Latin mandatum, a charge entrusted; and the British raised the Union Jack over Government House on the Mount of Olives, and Sir Herbert Samuel, a Jew of liberal Anglo-Jewish stock, was sent out to Jerusalem to be the first High Commissioner. He went up to the Western Wall on the first Sabbath, and he prayed there as a Jew before the stones, and the Arabs of Palestine watched from the alleys and understood at once that a new master had come.
And the years went by, twenty-six of them, in a struggle that hardened with each season. The Jews came from Russia and Poland and Germany — the Third Aliyah, the Fourth, the Fifth — bringing with them their socialism and their Zionism and their drained marshes and their planted orange groves and their kibbutzim. The Arab fellahin watched their land slip from absentee Beirut and Damascus landlords into the hands of the Jewish Agency, and the great Arab notables of Jerusalem and Nablus and Hebron grew restive, and the cry of resistance rose in the cafes of Jaffa.
There were riots in 1920, and in 1921, and in 1929 — when sixty-seven Jews of Hebron were slaughtered in their houses by their Arab neighbors of generations, the ancient yeshiva of the patriarchs broken open, the Jewish quarter of Hebron emptied for the first time in eight hundred years. The British issued white papers, and white papers, and white papers — Churchill's, Passfield's, MacDonald's — each one tightening the immigration quotas, each one trying to balance the impossible promises Balfour had made.
And in the fifth month of the year five thousand seven hundred and ninety-seven, when the Holocaust had emptied Europe of its Jews and the survivors of the camps were beating against the wire of the British detention pens in Cyprus, the British washed their hands of the Mandate and laid it before the United Nations, and on the twenty-ninth of November in that year the Assembly voted partition, and on the fifteenth of May in the year following the Union Jack came down at last from over the bay of Haifa, and the British soldiers boarded their ships and sailed away.
The Mandate is held in trust on behalf of the League of Nations for the establishment of the Jewish national home and the development of self-governing institutions.Article 2, Mandate for Palestine, League of Nations, 1922
Archaeology · History · Genetics
The British Mandate for Palestine, formally awarded at the San Remo conference of April 1920 and ratified by the Council of the League of Nations on 24 July 1922, governed the territory from civilian inauguration on 1 July 1920 until midnight 14-15 May 1948. The standard general histories are Tom Segev's One Palestine, Complete (Metropolitan, 2000), Bernard Wasserstein's The British in Palestine (2nd ed., Blackwell, 1991), and Rashid Khalidi's Palestinian Identity (Columbia, 1997). The Mandate text incorporated the Balfour Declaration as a binding obligation while requiring 'safeguarding the civil and religious rights' of all inhabitants.
Demographic transformation defined the Mandate period. The Jewish population of Palestine grew from about 84,000 in 1922 (11 percent of the population) to about 630,000 in 1948 (33 percent), driven by five waves of aliyah: the Third (1919–1923, ~40,000 from Russia and Poland), Fourth (1924–1929, ~80,000, largely middle-class Polish Jews fleeing the Grabski reforms), and Fifth (1929–1939, ~250,000, including ~60,000 from Nazi Germany under the Haavara Agreement). Arab population also rose substantially, from about 670,000 in 1922 to 1.3 million in 1948, through high natural increase and labor migration.
Three crises defined the Mandate's political trajectory. The 1929 Buraq/Wailing Wall riots produced the Hebron massacre (67 Jews killed) and the Safed pogrom; the British response was the 1930 Passfield White Paper restricting immigration, which Lloyd George and Weizmann succeeded in having largely reversed. The 1936–1939 Arab Revolt, treated in Matthew Hughes's Britain's Pacification of Palestine (Cambridge, 2019), began as a six-month general strike led by the Arab Higher Committee under the Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin al-Husseini, and escalated into a guerilla insurgency suppressed with about 5,000 Arab dead, 400 Jewish dead, and 200 British dead. The Peel Commission of 1937 proposed the first formal partition plan; the 1939 White Paper imposed strict caps on Jewish immigration just as the Holocaust began.
The Mandate's terminal crisis was the 1944–1948 confrontation with the Yishuv's underground armies — the Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi — over Jewish immigration of Holocaust survivors. The 1946 King David Hotel bombing, the 1947 Acre Prison break, and the Exodus 1947 affair eroded both British will and international support. On 18 February 1947, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin announced the British government would refer the question to the United Nations; UN Resolution 181(II) of 29 November 1947 voted partition. The British formally departed at midnight 14–15 May 1948, ending 28 years of Mandatory rule. Penny Sinanoglou's Partitioning Palestine (Chicago, 2019) treats the long British wrestling with partition schemes.
The Mandate failed not because Britain neglected its obligations but because the obligations themselves were mutually incompatible — to build a Jewish national home and at the same time to safeguard a non-Jewish majority's political rights.Bernard Wasserstein, The British in Palestine (1991)