Britain and Palestine

From this recent post, presenting thoughts about Britain and the Arab world in 1964 at length.

The Arabs’ grievance against Britain for her treatment of Egypt from 1882 to 1956 has been surpassed, in intensity and in justification, only by their grievance against us for our treatment of Palestine since 1917. In whatever way the Balfour Declaration of 1917 is to be interpreted – whatever may have been the meaning of “a national home for the Jewish people” and of “the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” – we were taking it upon ourselves to give away something that was not ours to give. We were promising rights of some kind in the Palestinian Arabs’ country to a third party. We followed up the Balfour Declaration by insisting on our being given a mandate for the administration of Palestine, and also insisting on having the Balfour Declaration written into the document. At the same time we acquiesced in this mandate being placed in the “A” class, a type of mandate that committed the mandatory Power to giving independence to the population of the mandated territory as soon as they were politically ripe for it. Since, at that date, the population in Palestine west of Jordan was 90 per cent. Arab (in Transjordania the percentage was still higher), the fact that the mandate for Palestine was an “A” mandate was an implicit undertaking that, whatever the Balfour Declaration might mean, Palestine would eventually become an independent state with a decisive Arab majority in its population.

The Palestinian Arabs did not trust British intentions. We repeatedly assured them that our intentions towards them were entirely honourable and equitable. These British assurances that the Palestinian Arabs were going to receive fair treatment from us were only less numerous than our previous assurances that Egypt was going to be evacuated by us. We did eventually have to evacuate Palestine as well as Egypt: but we left Palestine in circumstances that brought upon the Palestinian Arabs a national calamity that has been greater than the worst that they had feared.

The responsibility for the tragedy that has overtaken the Palestinian Arabs is shared by Britain with Germany and the United States. In setting himself to exterminate the Jews in Europe, Hitler played into Zionism’s hands. The Zionists were now able to direct towards Palestine so great a Jewish urge to find refuge there that Britain lost control of the situation in Palestine. This, however, was mainly Britain’s own fault. We were taken at a disadvantage in this unexpected emergency because, from 1917 to 1933, we had deliberately refrained from making up our minds about how we were going to interpret the Balfour Declaration. The crucial question was: Were we going to set a maximum figure for Jewish immigration into Palestine, and, if we were, what was our figure going to be? Were the Jewish immigrants to be allowed to become a majority of the total population or not? We ought to have known our answer to this question before issuing the Balfour Declaration in 1917. We left it still unanswered when we were ejected from Palestine in 1948.

Even so, we might perhaps have saved the situation in Palestine in the 1930s, and so have saved the Arabs and the Jews from coming to blows with each other there, if we had replied to Hitler’s atrocious assault on the Jews in Germany by at once throwing the doors of our own country wide open to German Jewish refugees. In this emergency, Britain – and America too – opened her doors only just ajar, and this rather dilatorily and grudgingly. In this ungenerous response to the German Jews’ dire need we, like Hitler, played into the Zionists’ hands. The full force of the tide of Jewish emigration from Germany was now channelled towards Palestine. This was disastrous for the Palestinian Arabs, and it was also unfortunate for the Jewish refugees themselves.

If they had been given asylum in Britain and the United States – which could have been done without any awkward political, social or economic consequences for those two countries – they would have then obtained for themselves and for their descendants the lasting security that Israel seems unlikely ever to be able to give them.

America took upon herself a further share of the responsibility for the Palestine tragedy when President Truman forced the British Government’s hand after the end of the Second World War, at a moment when Britain was exhausted. Thus America’s responsibility, as well as Germany’s, is considerable. Yet, when their full share of the aggregate responsibility has been assigned to these two countries, Britain’s share remains incomparably greater than either of theirs. The Palestinian Arabs would never have been dispossessed, and the relations between Arabs and Jews would never have become so utterly hostile as they are today, if Britain had not made the series of moral errors and political blunders that she did make in her dealings with Palestine from 1917 to 1948.

Britain and the Arabs: The Need for a New Start, International Affairs, Vol 40, No 4, October 1964