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Y320: From Colonialism to Independence: The British Empire 1857–1965

Depth study: Palestine 1914–1948 — the Mandate in crisis and the British withdrawal

  • 3 things to know
  • Unit group 3

Overview

Recall questions on violence before 1936, Jewish immigration and land purchase, Palestinian leadership, the Arab Revolt, the Peel Commission, the White Paper of 1939, Britain’s decision to leave, the UN plan and the consequences of 1948.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Your recallNot started
Key term

What were the effects of Zionist land purchase and labour policy?

Evaluation

Who led the Palestinian Arabs, and how effective was that leadership?

Numbers

What were the immediate consequences of 1948, and how do historians disagree about them?

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    What violence occurred in Palestine before 1936?

    Model answer

    Riots at the Nebi Musa festival in 1920 and in Jaffa in 1921 killed dozens, and in 1929 a dispute over access to the Western Wall triggered a week of attacks in which over 130 Jews and more than a hundred Arabs died, including the massacre of the ancient Jewish community at Hebron; inquiries blamed Arab fear of dispossession, and the Passfield White Paper of 1930 proposed restrictions that the government withdrew under Zionist pressure the following year.

  2. 2

    How did Jewish immigration change in the 1930s?

    Model answer

    Nazi persecution and the closing of other destinations transformed a trickle into a flood, with more than sixty thousand arriving in the peak year alone, so that the Jewish share of the population rose from about eleven per cent at the census of 1922 to around thirty per cent by 1939, a change that convinced Arabs they faced becoming a minority in their own country.

  3. 3

    What were the effects of Zionist land purchase and labour policy?

    Model answer

    Land bought by the Jewish National Fund was declared inalienable and could never be resold or leased to Arabs, and the Histadrut campaigned for the exclusive employment of Jewish workers, so purchase removed both the land and the livelihood of tenant families and created a separate Jewish economy rather than a shared one; official inquiries reported a growing class of landless Arab labourers.

  4. 4

    Who led the Palestinian Arabs, and how effective was that leadership?

    Model answer

    Britain appointed Hajj Amin al-Husayni Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921 and president of the Supreme Muslim Council, which gave him patronage and religious authority, but Palestinian politics was crippled by the feud between the Husayni and Nashashibi factions, and the militant alternative offered by Izz al-Din al-Qassam ended with his death in a skirmish in 1935.

  5. 5

    What happened during the Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939?

    Model answer

    It began with a general strike and a boycott organised by the newly formed Arab Higher Committee demanding an end to immigration and land sales and a national government, and after a pause for the Peel Commission it resumed as a rural guerrilla campaign; Britain deployed some twenty thousand troops, demolished houses, imposed collective fines, hanged over a hundred men and exiled the leadership, killing several thousand Arabs and leaving Palestinian society militarily and politically broken by the time war came.

  6. 6

    Summarise the Peel Commission's recommendations of 1937 and the reaction to them.

    Model answer

    It concluded that the mandate was unworkable because the obligations to the two communities were irreconcilable, and proposed the first partition: a small Jewish state in Galilee and the coastal plain, the rest joined to Transjordan, a British corridor to Jerusalem, and the transfer of some 225,000 Arabs; the Arabs rejected it outright, the Zionist movement was divided but accepted the principle, and Britain shelved it a year later.

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