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?
What if France had been the Mandatory Power over Palestine instead of the UK?
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 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.
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.
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