Empire and Aftermath
Palestine under the British Mandate
Aims
• To introduce the history of the British Mandate in
Palestine and the parallel histories of Arab
nationalism and Zionism.
• To consider what life was like in Palestine under
the British Mandate, for Arabs, Jews and the
British themselves (looking at welfare provision
and introducing the concept of ‘Orientalism’).
• To think of the British Mandate within the context
of imperialism and colonialism to see how the
experience compares with other systems you
have and will be considering during the module.
Part one
• The history of the British Mandate, Arab
nationalism and Zionism
The Ottoman Empire
• Until the First World War what became Palestine was ruled by the
Ottoman Empire.
• During the period of Ottoman rule the term Palestine denoted a
geographic region, rather than a specific Ottoman province or
administrative district.
• The Ottoman Empire was a state founded by Turkish tribes under Osman
Bey in 1299.
• During the 16th and 17th centuries the Ottoman Empire was one of the
most powerful states in the world – a multinational, multilingual empire
including much of southeast Europe, Western Asia and North Africa.
• The Ottomans were ethnically Turkish and religiously Muslim, but their
empire was extremely diverse and included many ethnicities and large
Jewish and Christian populations.
• Christians and Jews did not have full equal rights, but were usually
protected.
The Ottoman Empire
Arab nationalism
• From the 16th through 20th centuries, most Arabs lived in the Ottoman
Empire.
• Nationalist ideas began to spread to Arabs in the late 19th century.
• Arab interest in nationalism began as a literary and cultural movement to
re-establish the prominence of Arab culture and to promote a positive
ethnic identity. As time passed, Arabs increasingly expressed the desire for
greater self-rule. I
• Before World War I, few Arabs argued for a completely independent Arab
state.
• As time passed, Arabs increasingly felt that they should have greater selfrule.
• During World War I, many Arabs felt greatly mistreated by the Ottoman
government and Arab nationalists popularized the idea of independent
Arab rule.
Zionism 1
• In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, “pogroms” against Jews became
common. These were organized government-tolerated or governmentsponsored attacks on Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe.
• In Western Europe, ghettoes were abolished and Jews were granted legal
equality with Christians but anti-Semitism continued to flourish, they
began to look for a new solution.
• A watershed moment was in 1894 when a Jewish journalist named
Theodor Herzl reported on the trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish
officer in the French army.
• Herzl concluded that the only solution to antisemitism was to establish a
Jewish state.
• He organized modern political Zionism, which is a Jewish nationalism
dedicated to self-determination for the Jewish people in their ancient
homeland, the Land of Israel.
Zionism 2
• While Jews had long dreamed of returning to their ancient homeland,
most felt that this could not happen until God led them there.
• Herzl popularized the idea that Jews could reestablish their homeland as
an expression of nationalism rather than strictly on the basis of religious
belief.
• Jews around the world began donating money to purchase land from Arab
and Ottoman landowners.
• Eastern European Jews began immigrating to these properties and
developing the infrastructure of a modern nation with schools, hospitals,
and theaters, as well as agricultural communities.
• On the eve of the first wave of Zionist-inspired immigration in 1882, the
traditional, religious Jewish community in Palestine numbered about
24,000, or 5 per cent of the population of 500,000. By the conclusion of
the second wave in 1914, the number had grown to 85,000.
World War One
• During 1915-1916, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry
McMahon, convinced Husayn ibn `Ali, the patriarch of the Hashemite
family and Ottoman governor of Mecca and Medina, to lead an Arab revolt
against the Ottoman Empire, which was aligned with Germany.
• McMahon promised that if the Arabs supported Britain in the war, the
British government would support the establishment of an independent
Arab state under Hashemite rule.
• But Britain also tried to enlist Jewish support by promising to create a
Jewish national home in Palestine. In 1917, the British Foreign Minister,
Lord Arthur Balfour, issued a declaration announcing his government’s
support for the establishment of “a Jewish national home in Palestine.”
• A third promise, in the form of a secret agreement, was a deal that Britain
and France struck between themselves to carve up the Arab provinces of
the Ottoman Empire and divide control of the region.
• Therefore at the conclusion of the war, both Jews and Arabs felt betrayed.
The British Mandate
• After WW1 Ottoman Syria was divided between the British and the
French. The region known as Palestine came under the control of the
British as a mandate granted by the League of Nations.
• Britain had a dual mandate in Palestine: to encourage the formation of a
“national home” for the Jews and to protect the “civil and religious rights”
of the local Arabs.
• With the imposition of the Palestine Mandate, the borders of Palestine
were defined for the first time. It included land on both sides of the Jordan
River encompassing the present-day countries of Israel and Jordan.
• However, Palestine did not remain intact for long, because, in 1921, Britain
created an administrative entity called Transjordan as a political division of
the Palestine Mandate.
• From 1922, with the support of the League of Nations, the eastern part of
the Palestine Mandate became the Arab state of Transjordan (across the
Jordan)—today known as Jordan.
The British Mandate
Arab-Jewish relations
• In 1920 and 1921, clashes broke out between Arabs and Jews in which
roughly equal numbers of both groups were killed.
• In 1928, Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem began to clash over their
respective communal religious rights at the Wailing Wall / al-Buraq.
• On August 15, 1929, members of the Betar youth movement
demonstrated and raised a Zionist flag over the Wailing Wall. Fearing that
the Noble Sanctuary was in danger, Arabs responded by attacking Jews
throughout the country. During the clashes, 64 Jews were killed in Hebron
and he Jewish community there ceased to exist. During a week of
communal violence, 133 Jews and 115 Arabs were killed and many
wounded.
• Arab violence against the British reached its peak in the second half of the
1930s. climaxing with the Arab revolt which broke out in April 1936.
Jewish-British relations
• After crushing the Arab revolt, the British reconsidered their governing
policies in an effort to maintain order in an increasingly tense environment
and issued a White Paper limiting future Jewish immigration and land
purchases.
• The Zionists regarded this as a betrayal of the Balfour Declaration and a
particularly offensive act in light of the desperate situation of the Jews in
Europe, who were facing extermination.
• Relations worsened with the end of the war. Jewish anti-British violence –
carried out by violent fringe groups – intensified.
• On 15 February 1947 the British government announced that the problem
of Palestine would be handed over to the United Nations. On 29
November, a two-thirds majority of the United Nations General Assembly
voted for partition of Palestine; some days later the British Cabinet
approved the policy for withdrawal, and set the date of 15 May 1948 for
ending the Mandate and evacuating all British forces from the country.
Part two
• Life under the British Mandate for Arabs, Jews
and the British
The population of Palestine
• According to the 1921 British census a total of 752,048 people lived in
Palestine. Of this group, 78.34% were Moslems, 9.5% Christians (making
an Arab majority of 87.84%), and 11.4% were Jewish.
• The following twenty years saw a rapid increase in the general population.
By 1942, it had doubled to 1,620,005 people.
• Relatively, the Jewish community increased most, growing to 29.90% by
1942. The Moslem percentage decreased to 61.44% in 1942 and the
Christian percentage to 7.85%.
• The vast majority of the Arab population were rural with a narrow stratum
of urban intellectuals, a disproportionate part of whom were Christians.
• The Jewish population was a highly diverse included long-time resident
Orthodox Jews, a private, mostly land-owning sector and labour Zionists.
The largest immigrant groups in the interwar period came from Poland
and Russia, comprising farmers, merchants, artisans and urban
professionals, secular Socialists as well as devout believers.
The population of Palestine
Health and welfare 1
• The period of the Mandate saw a transformation in terms of urbanization,
social development and improvements in health and education.
• Substantial public health programs, including widespread inoculations,
helped bring infectious diseases under control, however these overall
trends mask variations amongst the different groups who made up the
population.
• The institutions managing health and education can be divided into three
major groups: the British administration, the missionary bodies (of
different religious orientations and geographical provenances) and the
Zionists.
• Due to the Jewish immigrant's higher degree of education and
hospitalization, His Majesty's Government regarded its duty in the matter
of welfare as rather different from that for an ordinary colony, not
accepting any financial responsibility towards facilitating the
establishment of the Jewish national home in Palestine.
Health and welfare 2
• While some British sanitation measures benefitted all parts of society, the
relatively few British educational and medical institutions were directed at
Muslim or Christian Arabs.
• The central pillars of the Jewish healthcare system during this period were
the Hadassah Medical Organization, founded by the American Zionist
women’s organization Hadassah in 1921, and the Workers’ Sick Fund
(Kupat Cholim), founded by Jewish agricultural settlers in the early 1910s.
Mostly under the direction of these two organizations, a massive effort to
educate the Jewish public in health and hygiene had taken place.
• While officially all institutions were open to all inhabitants of Palestine,
regardless of ethnic and religious background, the hostilities of 1929
ended the potential for health services as a unifying force. Hospital
attendance lists reveal that by the 1930s, hospitals were ruled by habits
approaching voluntary apartheid.
Colonial medicine and ‘Orientalism’
• Health and welfare provision in Palestine can be seen as an example of
colonial medicine.
• British efforts to deal with the health of the population of Palestine were
closely linked to their economic interests. Health was not an end in itself,
but rather a prerequisite for colonial development.
• However what made the British Mandate period unique was the side-byside coexistence of the British administration, the Zionist bodies with their
health organizations, religious-related health institutions, and other
international health enterprises, each with its own agenda.
• Another complicating factor came within the Zionist welfare movement.
The Zionist desire to distance itself from the East produced not only a
distinction between Jews and Arabs but also between “Western,” that is,
European Jews and “Oriental” Jews, that is those from the Middle East and
North Africa. The response of these Zionist medical workers to anti-Jewish
orientalism was by setting up traditional Jews as oriental, in contrast to
the modern Zionist Jews who were described as Western.
The British and ‘Orientalism’
• In his famous book Orientalism Edward Said argued that a long tradition of
romanticized images of Asia and the Middle East in Western culture had
served as an implicit justification for European and American colonial and
imperial ambitions.
• Many of the British who came to Palestine came with a pre-formed vision
of the Holy Land almost invariably shaped by reading and listening to the
King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, and influenced by a
traditional of scriptural illustration and Orientalist art.
• A place of romantic adventures, long and complex history and colourful
landscapes, the Middle East was geographically near Europe but
unimaginably foreign.
• The peoples of the East were assumed to be incapable in their irrationality
and technological backwardness of deciding their own best interests, and
were therefore to be guided by Britain, gently if possible, firmly if
necessary, towards a better future.
The British and ‘Orientalism’
The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (1854–60) is a painting of a biblical scene
by the British artist William Holman Hunt who travelled to the Middle East.
The British, the Arabs and the Jews
• The British in Palestine were a disparate group, some formed by the public
school and Oxbridge imperial tradition, others by churches and missionary
culture, still others of humbler social origins in the military or police.
There were also British businessmen in Palestine. Most British expatriates
socialized exclusively within their community.
• The British tended to project upon the Arabs of Palestine expectations and
feelings absorbed largely from a romantic tradition of Orientalism. The
Palestine Arabs were felt to be attractive by virtue of their physical
courage, pride in their traditions, and above all the courtesy and generous
hospitality. But the British also displayed a casual contempt and feelings
of superiority towards the Arabs.
• Jews, whether of Oriental or European origin, seemed to most British
observers more threatening and less appealing and in the last days of the
Mandate they were often feared and hated by their British rulers. The
majority of British officials posted there had no great sympathy for the
establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine.
Part three
• The British Mandate, the mandate system and
colonialism
Colonialism and the mandate system
• During the Mandate, Palestine was part of the larger British colonial
empire, although mandates were a quite particular form of colonialism.
• The mandate system, developed in the aftermath of World War I to
manage German colonial holdings and the territories of the Ottoman
Empire, was a colonial form that was intimately connected to the idea of
the nation-state.
• While in practice the mandate system may have felt very similar to other
forms of colonialism to the populations subject to them, its distinct form
did make a difference.
• The language of legitimacy deployed by the mandatories (when it was
deployed) was not that of a general ‘civilizing mission,’ but of a civilizing
mission specifically connected to the idea of future independent states.
The uniqueness of Palestine
• Palestine was unique because of its specific ‘dual’ mandate.
• Distinguished from other mandates where European powers were
supposed to shepherd the native population to independence, in Palestine
the British had taken on an additional obligation to promote a Jewish
national home.
• On the other hand, both the Balfour Declaration and Article 6 of the
Mandate Charter included explicit pledges to preserve the rights of
Palestine’s indigenous population.
• In this way, the British had undertaken what became known as a "dualobligation": to help bring about the establishment of the Jewish national
home and to safeguard the rights of the Palestinian Arabs in the process.
• A great deal of British policy and practice over the course of the Mandate
was comprised of efforts to manage, however imperfectly, these
conflicting obligations. At the same time, it was only these conflicts (and
the conflict on the ground which resulted from them) that seemed to
justify the perpetuation of the Mandate at all.