British Palestine

Mandatory Palestine was the territory Britain administered under a League of Nations mandate from 1920 until 1948. Its terms were contradictory from the first day. The mandate incorporated the Balfour Declaration's promise of a national home for the Jewish people, and simultaneously required that nothing be done to prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities, who were about ninety per cent of the population. Britain had also made overlapping promises to the Arabs through the McMahon correspondence and to France through Sykes-Picot. Jewish immigration rose sharply, especially after 1933, and land purchase displaced tenant farmers. Communal violence followed in 1920, 1921, 1929 and above all in the Arab revolt of 1936-39, which Britain suppressed with aerial bombing, house demolitions and mass detention, and which broke the Palestinian political leadership for a generation. The 1939 White Paper then capped Jewish immigration at the moment European Jews most needed refuge, and Zionist militias turned on the British in turn. By 1947 Britain had a hundred thousand troops in the territory and no policy. It referred the question to the United Nations and announced withdrawal. The UN partition plan of November 1947 was accepted by the Jewish Agency and rejected by the Arab states. Civil war began immediately. The mandate expired on 14 May 1948, Israel declared independence the same day, and five Arab armies invaded. Around seven hundred thousand Palestinians fled or were expelled. Every subsequent conflict in the territory descends from the arrangement that ended here. The mandate's population was roughly 750,000 in 1922 and 1.8 million by 1946. Britain governed from the Jerusalem headquarters that is now a hotel. The King David Hotel bombing of 1946 killed 91 people and hardened the decision to leave.

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