"His Majesty’s Government view with favour the
establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people....".
With these eighteen words, Arthur James Balfour, British foreign secretary,
bound his country to a policy that would both confirm British rule in Palestine and ensure the failure of the Palestine Mandate.
The
Balfour Declaration, issued in the form of a letter
to Lord Rothschild on 2nd November 1917, was not the first
expression of British interests in Palestine. Indeed, British interests
multiplied in Palestine in the course of the nineteenth century: consular
offices were opened in Jerusalem in 1838, an Anglican bishopric was established
in Jerusalem in 1841, the Palestine Exploration Fund opened its doors in 1865
to promote archaeology, exploration, mapping and surveying of Palestine up to
the outbreak of World War I.
With the outbreak of World War I, and the Ottoman entry on Germany’s side, the Entente Powers began to consider the disposition of Ottoman territories in the
event of an Entente victory. With General Allenby’s entry into Jerusalem in December 1917, the partition of Ottoman domains was no longer a theoretical
matter. The British Government’s decision to support Zionist aspirations in Palestine can be traced to many causes, though the end result was to justify Britain’s claims to Palestine in the post-war settlement. Thus the Balfour Declaration was Britain’s first formal claim on Palestine — and a natural starting point for this collection of
British documents on Palestine and the Arab-Israeli conflict.
No subject commands more interest in the Middle East than the Arab-Israeli conflict. The bibliography on Palestine and Israel is vast and growing. No source has been more essential to historians of Palestine and the Arab-Israeli conflict than the Public Record Office (PRO) in Kew. This series places before scholars of Palestine and the Arab-Israeli conflict, for
the first time, the widest range of original source material from the Foreign
Office, Colonial Office and Cabinet Papers preserved at the PRO, from the
Balfour Declaration through to the
Black September War of 1970-1. This closing
date is imposed on us by following the thirty year rule governing the release
of government records in Britain.
The documents, filmed at the PRO, are presented as
filed without editorial intervention. Readers will find every document from a
given file, exactly as they would in the reading room of the PRO. Here the
major policy statements are set out in their fullest context, the minor
documents and marginalia revealing the workings of colonial administration and,
following the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, British diplomacy
towards Israel and the Arab states. The collection represents more than
200,000 pages of text on the politics, administration, wars and diplomacy of
the Palestine Mandate and the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The
Palestine Mandate
Britain
ruled Palestine for over thirty years. Between 1922 and 1948 British colonial
rule in Palestine was overseen by the League of Nations in a novel structure
known as a
mandate. The League of Nations awarded mandates over the former
colonial territories of Germany in Africa, Asia and Polynesia, and of the Arab
provinces of the Ottoman Empire, to Britain and France. While Britain and
France treated these territories very much as colonies in the old sense of the term, the
mandate system was defined more in keeping with Wilsonian principles of
national self-determination. The mandatory power was to instruct these newly
emerging nations in statecraft and oversee the introduction of institutions of
self-rule. The League recognised two categories of mandates; the less advanced
'class B' mandates for whom a longer period of trusteeship was envisaged, and
the more advanced 'class A' mandates for countries judged to have "reached
a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be
provisionally recognised subject to the rendering of administrative advice and
assistance by a mandatory power until such time as they are able to stand
alone". The Arab lands of the former Ottoman Empire, including Palestine, were defined as such 'class A' mandates.
In retrospect, the British Mandate in Palestine was an
unqualified disaster for all involved. The twice-promised land proved an
expensive colony. Attempts to establish the instruments of self-rule foundered
on Palestinian rejection of the terms of the Mandate calling for the creation
of a
Jewish National Home. Palestinians refused to validate proposed bi-communal
structures through participation, thus stymieing all attempts to pass the
business of government to the local population. Tensions between the
indigenous Palestinian Arabs and the Zionist immigrants led to violence almost
from the outset, requiring the deployment of a large police force and the
dispatch of British troops to keep the peace. Much of British policy in
Palestine was dictated by the need to contain communal tensions.
The Passfield White Paper
which followed the 1929 riots, the outbreak of the
Arab Revolt in 1936 and the
Peel Commission report in 1937 recommending partition, the
1939 White Paper
recommending restrictions on Zionist immigration to Palestine and the rise of
Jewish terrorist attacks on the British are the main milestones on the
Mandate’s road to failure. The ultimate recognition of that failure came in
1947 when Great Britain asked the United Nations to resolve the situation in
advance of a
British withdrawal
set for 15 May 1948.
The documents selected for this project cover the whole
of Britain’s colonial experience in Palestine. The selection begins with the
origins of British rule in Palestine, from the politics behind the Balfour
Declaration and Britain’s military occupation of Jerusalem at the end of 1917
to the ratification of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine on 24 July
1922. It includes the complete
Palestine Sessional Papers
spanning the years
1924–48, files showing the workings of the Mandate from 1922 and the escalating
crises leading to the first partition plans in 1937-8. Subsequent selections
focus on the emerging Arab and Jewish organisations over the later years of the
Mandate (1937–46); documents relating to the end of the Mandate; the
Anglo-American Committee of
Enquiry and Report (1946);
the rise of
Jewish
attacks on the British (1946-8); and the United Nations resolution to
partition
Palestine in November 1947.
The Palestine War, 1947–9
The Palestine War lasted less than twenty months, from
the United Nations resolution recommending the partition of Palestine to the
final armistice agreement signed between Israel and Syria in July 1949. Those
months transformed the political landscape of the Middle East. Indeed, 1948
may be taken as a defining moment for the region as a whole. Arab Palestine
was destroyed and the new state of Israel established. Egypt, Syria and Lebanon suffered outright defeat, Iraq held its lines, and Transjordan won at best
a pyrrhic victory.
Arab public opinion, unprepared for defeat, let alone a
defeat of this magnitude, showed that faith in its politicians was lost.
Within three years of the end of the Palestine War, the Prime Ministers of
Egypt and Lebanon and the King of Jordan had been assassinated, and the
President of Syria and the King of Egypt overthrown by military coups.
No event has marked Arab politics in the second half of
the twentieth century more profoundly. The Arab-Israeli wars, the Cold War in
the Middle East, the rise of the Palestinian armed struggle and the politics of
peace making in all their complexity are a direct consequence of the Palestine
War. It is thus not surprising that the Palestine War is central to the
documents in this collection.
Files have been selected which cover the aftermath of
the UN Partition Resolution, the 'civil war' that erupted between Jewish
combatants and Palestinian urban centres, resulting in the Haganah’s conquest
of Tiberias, Haifa, Safad and Jaffa, the termination of the British Mandate and
the proclamation of the State of Israel on 15 May 1948. Documentation covering
the course of the war in 1948 and the armistice agreements of 1949, as well as
regional consequences of the war, such as the
coup led by Colonel Husni
al-Za`im against the Syrian government of President Shukri al-Quwwatli in March
1949 has also been selected.
The Arab-Israeli Conflict
Britain’s
role changed dramatically following the end of its Mandate in Palestine. No
longer the colonial power, Britain had to establish diplomatic ties with the
new Jewish state. Britain was relatively slow to give recognition to Israel, unlike the United States and Soviet Union who granted almost immediate recognition. Britain’s early relations with Israel were strained when the Jewish state renewed hostilities with Egypt in December 1948 and five British reconnaissance airplanes were shot down above Sinai
by the Israeli Air Force in January 1949. Open conflict between Israel and Britain was narrowly averted, and de facto recognition granted on 30 January 1949.
Britain’s relations with the Arab world were strained by the
role it had played in the loss of Arab Palestine. This posed particular
problems for Britain’s allies in the region most directly involved in the
Palestine War – Egypt, Transjordan, and to a lesser extent, Iraq. The Egyptian government had been gravely weakened by the military’s performance in Palestine. Its troops, widely expected by the Egyptian public to deliver Palestine from
the Zionist threat, managed to retain only a finger of land called the Gaza
Strip on the southern coastline of Palestine. The army of Transjordan, the
Arab Legion, had fared better in the war, holding off Jewish attempts to take Jerusalem and retaining the West Bank. Yet the Hashemite kingdom was widely suspected of
harbouring territorial ambitions in Palestine – suspicions that seemed to be
confirmed when Transjordan annexed Jerusalem and the West Bank. Britain’s Arab allies were tarnished by their association with the old colonial power.
The new borders of the Jewish state, particularly with Egypt and Jordan, were vulnerable to infiltration as thousands of refugees crossed back to recover
property from abandoned homes, to tend farms and to vent their fury on the
occupiers of their land. Relations between Israel and its Arab neighbours
between 1949 and 1956 were characterised by these '
border wars'. The regional
instability following the fall of Palestine was marked by the
assassination of
the Lebanese Premier Riyadh al-Solh (Jordan, 1951), the
assassination of King
Abdullah of Jordan (Jerusalem, 1951) and files on the Free Officers’ Coup in
July 1952. The Egyptian monarchy was overthrown and the young Colonel Gamal
Abdel Nasser rose to lead both Egypt and the Arab Nationalist cause generally.
Central to the Arab Nationalist agenda was the liberation of Palestine, a cause
to which Nasser, a veteran of the Israeli siege of Faluja in 1948, dedicated
much of his charged rhetoric. Files also cover the on-going border disputes
between 1952 and 1954 and the Cold War during 1955.
These trends were taking place as the pattern of
geo-politics was shifting from the old colonial order of the inter-war years to
the new order of the Cold War. The power of Britain and the European states
was eclipsed by the rival superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. The crossroad was reached at Suez in 1956, when Britain and France colluded with Israel to wage war on Nasser’s Egypt over the Suez Canal. One of the defining
moments of the end of the British Empire in the Middle East, the Suez Crisis is
covered by the inclusion of Foreign Office and War Office files.
The
later 1950s and the 1960s marked the point of highest activity in the Cold War
in the Middle East. The Arab-Israeli conflict became a proxy theatre of the
superpower rivalry, in which American support for Israel was matched by Soviet
support for Syria and Egypt. This was most apparent in the
June War of 1967,
when the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan were shattered by surprise Israeli
attacks. Israel swept through the Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula, Jerusalem and the West Bank, and the Golan Heights in the six days of the war. The defeat
proved the undoing of 'Nasserism', though it inspired Palestinians to take the
initiative in seeking to liberate their homeland. The PLO, founded in 1964
with Nasser’s encouragement, embarked on its own course after 1967. The
Palestinian armed struggle resulted in the fragmentation of the movement among
inimical factions and confused the liberation of the Palestinians’ homeland
with a more general ambition to social revolution in the Arab world. The
contradictions of the Palestinian armed struggle were made most apparent in the
Black September War of 1970-1 in Jordan, which saw the displacement of
Palestinian combatants from Jordan to Lebanon.
The
thousands of documents selected for this collection reflect on the key
developments of Palestine and the Arab-Israeli conflict over the years
1917-71. Although they represent but a fraction of the millions of documents
on Palestine and Israel held in the PRO the careful selection process used in
compiling this collection seeks to provide the most comprehensive coverage of
issues that bedevilled the British authorities who ruled Palestine and their
successors in Israel and the Arab world.
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