Partitioning Palestine: British Policymaking at the End of Empire 9780226665818

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Partitioning Palestine

Partitioning Palestine British Policymaking at the End of Empire

PENNY SINANOGLOU

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

PUBLICATION OF THIS BOOK HAS BEEN AIDED BY A GRANT FROM THE BEVINGTON FUND

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2019 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2019 Printed in the United States of America 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19

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ISBN -13:

978-0-226-66578-8 (cloth) 978-0-226-66581-8 (e-book) DOI : https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226665818.001.0001 ISBN -13:

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sinanoglou, Penny, author. Title: Partitioning Palestine : British policymaking at the end of empire / Penny Sinanoglou. Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019016005 | ISBN 9780226665788 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226665818 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH : Palestine—History—1917–1948. | Palestine—History— Proposed partition, 1937. Classification: LCC DS 126.S53 2019 | DDC 956.94/04—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019016005 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI / NISO Z 39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments / vii INTRODUCTION

ONE

/1

/ Partition’s Pathways: Imperial and International Contexts / 18 T WO

THREE

/ Before Peel: Territorial Solutions to the Palestine Problem, 1929–1936 / 44

/ The Peel Commission in Palestine, 1936–1937 / 65 FOUR

FIVE

/ Negotiating Partition, 1936–1937 / 107

/ The Demise of Partition, 1937–1939 / 129

CONCLUSION

/ Partition Redux, 1939–1948 / 155

Appendix I: Mandate for Palestine / 183 Appendix II: Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations / 193 List of Abbreviations / 195 Notes / 197 Bibliography / 225 Index / 245

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

In 1925, a district officer in Palestine included in his routine report to higher-ups an account of the vehicle that had taken him throughout the district that week: “The chief defects in the car were as follows: the inlet pipe was clogged, the feed was consequently insufficient and on one occasion found to be nil; the sparking plugs were perpetually going wrong; the commutator was not in working order; over large stretches of the journey the car seemed incapable of progress on top gear and it proceeded by a series of paralytic jerks punctuated by a roar as of a gigantic coffee grinder.” When I came across this passage in the Israeli archives about a decade ago, I jotted it down because I found it funny, but now I see in it the best description of writing a book that I have ever read. The defects in the following work are mine, but that this particular car has reached its destination is thanks to the incredible number of people and institutions who have fueled and repaired it, kept its driver’s spirits up, and, when all else has failed, offered to help push it down the road. It is my great pleasure to have the opportunity to thank them. From the beginning, Susan Pedersen has been a steadfast guide to all things British and interwar international, a supportive mentor, and most important and rare of all, an honest critic. My debt to her is enormous. Robert Travers has, over the years, asked all the right questions; I am grateful for his sharp insights and for his friendship. Early on, the late Roger Owen offered his deep knowledge of Middle Eastern history and thus helped shape the eventual arguments of this book. I regret only that he did not live to see it in print. Through the National History Center’s Decolonization Seminar, Wm. Roger Louis and Dane Kennedy had an early hand in the project, and I am grateful that they have remained supporters ever since. At a more recent critical juncture, Deborah Cohen, most generous of

viii / Acknowledgments

souls, intervened, an unexpected kindness that I can only hope to repay by passing it on. Over the years, my work has been shaped by the comments and critiques of participants in the annual meetings of the American Historical Association and the North American Conference on British Studies and at a variety of conferences, workshops, and seminars at Cambridge University, Duke University, the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, Harvard University, King’s College London, the National History Center/Library of Congress, the National University of Singapore, New York University-Prague, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. It has also benefited from conversations with friends, and from the written feedback of those friends and colleagues on whom I have foisted drafts. Though this list is almost certainly incomplete, I would like to thank for their engagement and encouragement Sana Aiyar, Yoav Alon, Laura Beers, Lauren Benton, Antoinette Burton, Lucy Chester, Arie Dubnov, Matthew Edney, Mike Finn, Valeska Huber, David Kim, Jon Lawrence, Philippa Levine, Eleanor Newbiggin, Jason Parker, Susan Pennybacker, Sandy Polu, Jennifer Pruitt, Sumathi Ramaswamy, Laura Robson, Tsela Rubel, Phil Stern, Karen Teoh, Barry Trachtenberg, Hannah Weiss Muller, and Suzan Yalman. Nellie Boucher and Michal Shapira have been both invaluable colleagues and wonderful friends. My editor, Rachel Kelly Unger, along with anonymous readers for the University of Chicago Press, offered incisive questions and comments that improved the manuscript immensely. Susan Tarcov’s eagle-eyed copyediting saved me from numerous errors and infelicities of style. I am grateful for Kate Blackmer’s superb cartography and for our email conversations, which forced me to clarify details and arguments in ways I had not anticipated. For the financial support that enabled years of research and writing across three institutions and five countries, I thank the US Department of Education for a Jacob K. Javits fellowship, Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the John Clive Fund, the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, the Krupp Foundation, the Harvard Program in History & Literature, and the Richard W. Griffin Fund and the Publication Fund at Wake Forest University. That my research time was so productive is thanks to the archivists and librarians at the British Library, the Central Zionist Archives, the Imperial War Museum, the Israel State Archives, the League of Nations Archives, the Middle East Centre of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, the Bodleian Library, the National Archives of the United Kingdom, the National Archives of India, the National Archives of the United States, and

Acknowledgments / ix

the Rhodes House Library, Oxford. The interlibrary loan departments at Harvard, Princeton, and Wake Forest were likewise indispensable resources. Several families deserve special thanks for opening their homes to me during my research abroad: in Delhi, Babli and Naveen, Vipul and Sakshi, and Vidur and Gauri Kohli graciously offered their warm hospitality. In Jerusalem, Dror and Michèle Mevorach and their children welcomed me as one of the family. Though they are in fact family, I still want to thank Stella Chapman and Yani Sinanoglou for giving me truly a home away from home in London. Finally, I was immensely fortunate to find at Wake Forest a congenial place in which to finish this book, and I am grateful to my colleagues in the History Department for creating a wonderfully collegial working environment. My chairs, Simone Caron, Ron Bobroff, Tom Frank, and Monique O’Connell, and Dean Michele Gillespie likewise offered moral and material support that was crucial in seeing this project to completion. Beyond the strictly academic realm, I have intellectual and personal debts to acknowledge. Ruth Helman and Gail Sussman Marcus at the Brearley School taught me how to think historically and how to write, two feats that I look on with admiration now that I am a teacher myself. Since our days in high school history class, Rachel Labush has been a loyal friend and a model of how to engage the world with compassion. Jeremy Kadden has been a constant source of support, encouragement, and intellectual stimulation; our conversations about Palestine/Israel over more than twenty years have been critical to the development of many of my ideas, and his political savvy and experience have, I realize on reflection, deeply informed my approach to political history. He will, I suspect, disagree with much of what I have written, and I look forward to many more years of argument and discussion. Karen Bishop, steadfast and brilliant, has, through her own example, reminded me of language’s power and helped me to deploy it at critical junctures. On a more quotidian but no less profound level, she has kept me sane. My family—of both the blood and chosen variety—have offered a much-needed counterbalance to the solitary labor of research and writing with their lively conversation, laughter, and love. Ann Miller, Anne Boxall, and John Edmondson have all enlivened my work in ways they probably don’t realize. The Dadlani-Mirchandani clan, Preeti and Banu Dadlani, Mamta Dadlani, Gitanjali, Seth, Sana, and Shaan Dadlani Morris, Kanchan and Suresh, Ravi, Dhiraj, and Katherine, Hemant and Divya, Komal and Dipu, Dushyant and Priyana, and Juhi Mirchandani deserve my heartfelt

x / Acknowledgments

thanks for bringing excellent food and music and an infectious joie de vivre into my life. My parents, Wendy Darby and Yani Sinanoglou, were my first and remain my most respected teachers. I have never known a livelier classroom than our dining table, or a more exciting intellectual sparring partner than my brother Andrew, and now his wife Iman. Stella Chapman has nourished body and soul over many summers. The love and unflagging support of my family has made everything possible. Finally, my gratitude goes to my wife, Chanchal Dadlani, who has seen this project through from start to finish and whose own work has inspired me. She has patiently listened to my ramblings, read drafts, asked important questions, and more than once has lifted me out of despair. She has traveled, cooked, danced, and laughed with me, keeping me firmly rooted in the joy of the present even when I was contemplating the past. And now, most important, she has joined me on an adventure into the future. Sanjay will think this a terribly dull book, and meager compensation for the hours one of his mothers spent at work, but I know he will enjoy seeing his name on the page. To Chanchal and Sanjay, then, this book is dedicated.

Introduction

In his 1939 memoir of the peace conferences following World War I, former British prime minister David Lloyd George rejoiced in the territorial integrity of Palestine. Decrying the “carving knife” of the secret Anglo-French Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, Lloyd George recalled with relief that postwar negotiations had prevented the Holy Land from being “mutilated and torn into sections.”1 Yet, despite this victorious rhetoric, envisioning partition—that is, imagining a division of territory and sovereignty—was a remarkably persistent feature of British policymaking for Palestine. After percolating for many years through official and unofficial channels in the form of conversations, memoranda, and maps, partition emerged into public view in the form of a proposal put forward by a Royal Commission in the summer of 1937. Lord William Peel, the commission’s ailing, industrious chairman, a former secretary of state for India, and the grandson of former prime minister Sir Robert Peel, led a group of similarly distinguished politicians and academics. In their exhaustive, authoritative report published that July, the Peel commissioners formally recommended the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, with select areas to be maintained under British control. But partition did not fare much better than Lord Peel, who died in September 1937 as debate raged over the partition plan. By the time Lloyd George was penning his memoirs in 1938–39, partition was suffering death by a thousand cuts. It came as no surprise when the White Paper of May 1939 declared partition unworkable. Resurrected in modified form during and after World War II, partition became the favored policy of the newly established United Nations, which voted in November 1947 to divide Palestine as part of the plan to handle Britain’s handover of the territory. The Arab-Israeli war of 1948, however,

2 / Introduction

established a new reality on the ground, and so the UN partition plan, like all the plans that had preceded it, only ever existed on paper. Partition, then, was both a constant thread and an unrealized vision in policymaking for Palestine under British rule from 1920 to 1948. This book asks why partition was simultaneously so appealing to British policymakers and so difficult for them to enact. To answer this question, we will trace the development of the partition idea in Palestine from the conversations over cantonization that took place in Palestine and London in the late 1920s, through to the 1947 United Nations plan, which attempted an internationally supervised partition of Palestine into independent Arab and Jewish states as Britain prepared to withdraw from the territory. At the center of this story are the events of 1936–39 when, against the backdrop of an Arab uprising in Palestine and a deteriorating political situation in Europe, partition was publicly proposed, debated, and dismissed. Though the British Government initially supported the Peel Commission’s 1937 partition proposal, strategic concerns and intense opposition from key quarters led Britain to turn rapidly away from partition. The magisterial Peel Report, written in large part by the Oxford professor Reginald Coupland, was followed in 1938 by the work of a technical commission, the Woodhead Commission, which had tellingly been nicknamed by residents of Palestine the “Re-Peel” Commission.2 Its members produced a damning and, ironically, split report on the immense difficulties of drawing a partition line. Finally, on the eve of war, Britain issued the 1939 White Paper declaring partition “impracticable” and instead proposing new policies, including sharp numerical and temporal limits on Jewish immigration, designed to establish a single independent state of Palestine within the coming decade. In the midst of the war, however, as British officials began long-term planning for a Palestine policy, discussion immediately reverted to partition, which gained support from within the War Cabinet. In the postwar period, territorial solutions ranging from cantonization to partition were ultimately internationalized, first in the Morrison-Grady plan of 1946, a joint Anglo-American effort to establish postwar Palestine policy, and finally in the United Nations 1947 resolution. Taking a broad view of the local, regional, imperial, and international forces shaping partition planning, this book argues that such planning reveals the tensions of maintaining imperial control in an era of imperial uncertainty and transformation and in the glare of international scrutiny. For British administrators, partition had the potential to satisfy a range of local and international actors eager to see progress toward self-government; it would thus remove both a material drain on Britain’s resources and a moral

Introduction / 3

stain on its reputation. It would also, crucially, solidify Britain’s position in the region. Partition plans of the 1920s and 1930s envisioned retaining British control over symbolic and geostrategic assets, such as Christian holy sites, airfields, oil pipelines, broadcasting stations, and a deep-water port in the Mediterranean. On the other hand, partition would almost certainly require forced population transfer; would be unacceptable to some international and local actors; and might cause regional and even global instability, thus endangering Britain’s reputation and strategic position in the world. Ultimately, then, the imperial imperatives that first drove British officials to imagine partition later hindered them from implementing it. As British imperial power waned after World War II, partition shifted from a tool of imperial control to one of internationally managed decolonization. As we will see, however, the earlier history of partition planning meant that the United Nations depended on the literal and conceptual blueprints laid down by British imperial thinkers and ended up replicating much of the imperial thinking about Palestine in its partition plan of 1947.

Drawing Lines before the Mandate Palestine began its life as a modern territory at a moment of cartographic and geopolitical rupture, when the Great Powers drew lines on the map of the Middle East as part of the peace agreements ending World War I.3 In this sense, European ideas about civilizational hierarchy, and imperial practices of territorial division and definition, were part and parcel of Palestine’s political and geographic origins.4 A League of Nations mandate comprising two former Ottoman districts (sanjaks) within the larger province (vilayet) of Beirut, and the special governorate (mutasarrifiyya) of Jerusalem, Palestine was sliced from Ottoman cloth and stitched together by international agreements in an era when the victorious imperial powers exerted control through minorities treaties in Eastern Europe and the Balkans and mandates in the Middle East, Africa, and the Pacific.5 Returning briefly to the events that gave geographic and political definition to mandate Palestine is useful on two counts: first, because we see the establishment of what were to become the central political problems of the mandate, and second, because in the debate over what lines were drawn and how, we witness the entanglement of political and geographical concepts that would spur partition planners throughout the mandatory period. At the San Remo Conference of 1920, the Allied Supreme Council discussed, among other topics, the former Ottoman territories in the Middle East that were to become League of Nations mandates, held in trust for

4 / Introduction

the world until such time as they could function as independent states. The resolution of April 25, 1920, established Britain as the mandatory power for Palestine and Mesopotamia (Iraq), and France as mandatory for Syria, but it left the precise boundaries of these new territories to be determined.6 It also confirmed, after some protracted and tense discussion between British and French representatives, that Britain, as the mandatory power, would “be responsible for putting into effect” the Balfour Declaration of November 1917. This declaration, the delegates at San Remo were reminded somewhat sharply by Britain’s foreign secretary and former viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, had been adopted during the war by the other Allied Powers and had indicated Britain’s support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”7 Concerned by the prospect that France would take advantage of unfixed boundaries to extend its influence southward from Syria into the area east of the Jordan river (referred to as Transjordan or Transjordania), Lord Curzon articulated a policy of administering the area as “independent but in closest relation with Palestine.”8 Yet these bonds to Palestine loosened as officials, including Palestine’s high commissioner, Herbert Samuel, and the new colonial secretary as of 1921, Winston Churchill, negotiated first with local notables and then with Sherif Hussein of Mecca’s son Abdullah to ensure that British control extended across the Jordan. Despite the wishes of some, like Samuel, who wished to keep alive the possibility that Transjordan would be a province of Palestine, and thus open to Jewish settlement, Britain’s primary objective was to keep the area between Palestine and Iraq free of French influence at the lowest possible cost. Between 1920 and 1922 it became clear that these aims could most easily be achieved by exempting Transjordan from the kind of direct mandatory rule established in Palestine.9 Following the Cairo Conference in March 1921, British legal advisors added an article to the draft of the mandate text allowing Britain to “postpone or withhold” unspecified provisions of the mandate in the areas between the east bank of the Jordan river and the as yet unsettled eastern boundary of Palestine. On July 24, 1922, the executive body overseeing the mandates, the League of Nations Council, approved the mandate text, which thus linked Transjordan to Palestine and simultaneously made clear that it was a separate area potentially subject to different policies. That separation was made complete when, on September 16, the council ap-

Introduction / 5

proved a memorandum submitted by Britain’s representative on the council, Lord Arthur Balfour, explicitly excluding Transjordan from all articles and parts of articles pertaining to the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine.10 This episode is instructive as an early example of how territory and policy were enmeshed, and thus of the immense ideological stakes of defining and redefining territorial units. Opposed at the 1921 Zionist Congress, this “first partition” became central to the political program of Revisionist Zionists, who urged throughout British rule that the mandate be “revised” to reincorporate illegitimately excised Transjordan.11 Despite this opposition, it is clear that in the period before borders were set, and when the text of the mandate was still open to amendment and revision, British policymakers were able to make arrangements that best suited British interests with relatively little obstruction from Zionists, Arabs, or the League of Nations. This license was to diminish markedly once the mandate text was fixed, and proposals for the territorial division of Palestine after 1922 were deeply shaped as much by the divisions written into the mandate and manifested in the development of local communities as by British strategic interests.

The Palestine Mandate To grasp the ideological and material conditions that made partition both attractive and contested, we must start with the mandate text, where unity and fragmentation sat uneasily side by side. On the one hand, the mandate was for “the territory of Palestine,” which was referred to throughout as “the country.” Article 7 directed the mandatory power to enact a (single) nationality law. In other words, implicit—though crucially, not explicit—in the mandate was the understanding of national territorial unity. On the other hand, the mandate made textually explicit and reified ethnoreligious and political divisions, even as it obscured others. Political structures mapped out in the mandate, and those subsequently established by the British, reinforced these divisions. At the heart of the mandate lay objectives for which Britain, as the mandatory power, was responsible. These were to establish a Jewish national home, in accordance with the Balfour Declaration, and to develop selfgoverning institutions in keeping with Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant, which defined the mandates carved out of the former Ottoman empire as having “reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time

6 / Introduction

as they are able to stand alone.”12 The first census carried out by the British mandatory government in Palestine in 1922 reported a total population of 757,182, of whom 83,794, or 11 percent, were Jews.13 Given that Jews were in a demographic minority in Palestine, and that the non-Jewish majority was largely opposed to the establishment of any kind of Jewish national home in Palestine, these two provisions of the mandate were, practically speaking, incompatible. If Britain were to develop self-government for the entire country, as directed by the mandate, the nascent Jewish national home would almost certainly be destroyed. Similarly, the mandate imposed contradictory requirements on the mandatory power with regard to land. Britain was charged with facilitating the “close settlement” of Jews on the land, but without harming the interests of the non-Jewish population. When Jewish individuals and, even more importantly, Jewish land colonization associations bought land, particularly from Arab absentee owners holding large plots, they expelled Arab tenant farmers. Land owned by the major Jewish land associations was neither to be worked by non-Jews nor sold again. In effect, such land became permanently alienated and its peasant farmers lost their livelihoods. Though Jews never held anywhere close to a majority of land in Palestine, land registries from the period 1920–45 indicate that some 900,000 dunums of land were purchased by Jews or Jewish colonization associations, and these lands, along with government concessions, encompassed some of the richest agricultural land in Palestine.14 Finally, Jewish immigration posed a related problem for British administrators. Article 6 of the mandate directed Britain to facilitate Jewish immigration “under suitable conditions” in connection with the establishment of the Jewish national home. Determining those conditions was a constant source of friction, especially after the so-called Churchill White Paper of 1922 established the “economic capacity of the country at the time to absorb new arrivals” as the test for setting immigration numbers.15 Arabs continued to demand the complete cessation of Jewish immigration, while Jewish Agency officials wrangled with British officials over immigration quotas. The net average annual Jewish immigration rate between 1919 and 1939 was 8.5 percent of the Jewish population, an unusually high percentage in global terms.16 Immigration, land sales, and representative government were intrinsically linked. More Jewish immigrants increased the Jewish population and its economic activity, including land acquisition, which then increased the Jewish Agency’s demand for immigration certificates. As if anticipating the political conundrums contained in the very conception of the obligations in Palestine, the mandate linguistically erased

Introduction / 7

Arabs as a group and created a blueprint for governing structures that would similarly ignore Arab nationalism. The only possible suggestion of Arab nationality occurred in Article 22 of the mandate, which stipulated that English, Arabic, and Hebrew were to be the official languages of Palestine. As it happened, few British officials throughout the mandate period were conversant in either Hebrew or Arabic, with the result that in order to be heard at the official level in Jerusalem or London, to say nothing of Geneva, Palestine’s inhabitants had to use English or French. The nod to an Arabic-speaking community was, furthermore, completely overshadowed by a focus on religion throughout the rest of the mandate text. Though not stated explicitly, religion appeared to be the organizing principle of the Palestine mandate, mimicking, at least in its conception, the Ottoman millet system.17 Jews were unusual in being named in the text as both a national and a religious group, whose interests were to be represented to the mandatory government by an official Jewish agency. The rest of the Palestinian population—never enumerated or broken down by religion or sect—was classified as belonging to “other sections” and “various peoples and communities” whose “personal status . . . [and] religious interests shall be fully guaranteed.”18 Religious conscience and religious sites were to be protected, and each (presumably religious) community was given the right to conduct education in the language of its choice. Religious divisions were thus written into the mandate text, with civil rights accruing not to individuals but to religious groups, and political rights appearing to extend exclusively to the national-religious category of Jews. In essence, the mandate mimicked and inverted the minorities treaties being put into place across Eastern Europe and the Balkans, giving minority-style protection to the majority and national rights to the minority. What the mandate text thus created was an ideological and physical space for Zionism, the Jewish nationalist movement, while foreclosing any immediate prospects for Palestinian Arab political development or, more strikingly, for any kind of unitary Palestinian national self-determination.

Political, Economic, and Social Conditions in Mandate Palestine Throughout British mandatory rule, officials had to contend with the fact that the reality of politics both within and outside Palestine did not match, and indeed had never matched, the myth of the mandate.19 It was evident that the majority of the Palestinian Arab population was opposed to Jewish settlement. Substantial parts of the population were also, and per-

8 / Introduction

haps more significantly, active participants in and supporters of an Arab national movement that crossed the international borders recently drawn across the former Ottoman empire. Just weeks before the meetings at San Remo in April 1920 that ensured the Balfour Declaration’s inclusion in the mandate, Palestine had been convulsed by riots in which 9 people were killed and 251 injured.20 These followed a political demonstration against Zionism and in support of the Sherif of Mecca’s son Feisal, who had been proclaimed king of Syria at a meeting of the Syrian Congress in March 1920. A British secret report on the riots identified one of their causes as the disappointment and anger of Palestinian Arabs, who had been encouraged, toward the end of World War I, to think “that whether they were to be permitted to unite themselves to the great Arab State forming on their borders or no, they at least, under the mandate of one of the Great Powers, would be permitted to work out their own salvation and be masters in their own house.”21 A delegation of representatives of the Palestine Arab Congress, which visited London in the summer of 1921, articulated demands that the Jewish national home project be suspended and that representative government be introduced in Palestine.22 Arab political opposition to the mandate took various forms over the 1920s and 1930s and included establishing political parties and committees, sending delegations to London and Geneva, and petitioning the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League.23 Violent uprisings in 1929, 1933, and from 1936 to 1939 were manifestations of widespread public opposition to British policies, including, particularly in the latter uprising, Britain’s violent suppression of Arab nationalist organizing. Such upheavals were both embarrassing and expensive for the British administration. Collectively, these actions gave the lie to the mandate’s portrayal of Palestine’s Arabs as an apolitical collection of religious communities. The language used in official documents and in the memoranda, notes, and conversations of administrators pointed to British acceptance of the reality of Palestinian Arab nationalism. Much of the statistical literature produced by the Palestine Government and the Jewish Agency on immigration, land purchase, and land settlement divided the communities along racial lines (i.e., as “Jews” and “Arabs”), in contrast to the language of the mandate text, census data, and records of births and deaths, which classified the population by religious affiliation.24 Since immigration and land were central to the conflict in Palestine, the vast majority of political discourse linguistically divided the population of Palestine in two, referring to “Arabs” and “Jews” and generally eschewing the modifier “Palestinian.” This was also reflected in the names of political organizations; the body

Introduction / 9

claiming to speak for Palestine’s Arabs during the 1936–39 revolt, for instance, was known as the Arab Higher Committee, and although its official title was the Jewish Agency for Palestine, the body representing the Jews of Palestine was referred to most commonly as the Jewish Agency. These collective labels had meaningful political implications. Calling the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine “Arabs” rather than “Palestinians” or “Palestinian Arabs” linked them to the larger Arab community, a connection that served their interests, when, for example, neighboring Arab countries began to advocate on behalf of the Palestinian Arabs, but also undermined their cause by allowing the argument to be made that “the Arabs” had already received a number of independent states and so should not object to the national aspirations of “the Jews” in the small area of Palestine. It also elided the very real internal differences, of religion, political orientation, and class, among others, within a monolithically constructed Arab bloc. In the process of asserting their membership in the Arab nation, for instance, Palestinian Christians came under pressure to unlink their religious communal and political identities for fear of becoming politically marginalized.25 Similarly, the erasure of the “Palestinian” modifier made “the Jews” of Palestine linguistically indistinguishable from “the Jews” of the larger world and presumed a perfect congruence between Jews and Zionism that did not exist.26 Particularly when attached to labor and the economy, the language of Arabs and Jews obscured what collaboration and exchange did in fact exist within the Palestinian economic sphere.27 Finally, the creation of these new categories almost entirely erased the long history of Jews who had been resident in Palestine when it was an Ottoman territory.28 In sum, this bifurcated language indicated that there were no “Palestinians,” a state of affairs that the 1936 Peel Commission, which first publicly proposed a partition plan, decried. This is not to say that the difference between the broadly construed Arab and Jewish communities was imaginary, but rather to point out that the communities were created, their boundaries policed, and their internal coherences intentionally overstated by their leaders and British officials alike. Owing to extremely uneven access to human and financial capital, to differing political legitimacy in the mandate text, and to divergent governing structures, political acumen, and contacts, the Jewish and Arab communities in Palestine grew further apart at a rapidly increasing rate over the first two decades of Britain’s mandate, so that by the time the Peel Commission was visiting Palestine in 1936–37, it received evidence and impressions of a country already divided. At an institutional level, the mandate provided Palestinian Jews with a

10 / Introduction

basic political structure that they quickly augmented and developed into a sophisticated apparatus for shaping policy. From the start of the British mandate, the Jewish community was politically organized, with a representative assembly (Asefat ha-Nivharim) from whose ranks a national executive council (the Va’ad Leumi) was drawn. Within Jewish political life, there was a proliferation of parties, and with them party politics, but the establishment of the Jewish Agency under the terms of the mandate ensured that, for the most part, a single coherent Jewish political position was relayed to the Palestine Government. The Va’ad Leumi ran like a shadow government, complete with departments of education, health, and labor, while the Jewish Agency played a role somewhat akin to that of a department of foreign affairs, acting as the liaison between the Jewish community and the Palestine Government and focusing on the critical issues of immigration, land acquisition, and land settlement. Official recognition of Jewish political and organizational structures helped Zionists learn statecraft, but it also crucially helped Zionist voices shape the way in which Palestine was thought about and managed by the British. Owing to the structures of the mandate, which made no provision for an Arab agency paralleling the Jewish one, no Arab shadow government gained experience under British rule. Arab labor, health, and education were provided for and regulated by the Palestine Government, not by Palestinian Arab organizations. Though Palestinian Arabs formed a variety of political movements and bodies, no Arab political organ was ever recognized by the British as representative or as speaking in an official capacity, and Palestinian Arab contact with British high officials was comparatively infrequent. The Palestine Arab Congresses, which met seven times between 1919 and 1928, repeatedly petitioned both British officials and the Permanent Mandates Commission, yet these representations were interpreted as coming from unofficial “interests.”29 The only organizational structure created by the mandate to serve part of the Arab community was the Supreme Muslim Council, which oversaw the administration of Islamic endowments (awqaf) and was headed by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a position invented and largely controlled by the British, who chose the young and relatively weak Haj Amin al-Husseini to be the first holder of this office.30 Whereas the Jewish Agency served to align race, religion, and nationality and provided the Jewish community with a unified political voice, the Supreme Muslim Council could make few claims to represent Palestinian Christians or other Palestinian Arabs and was constructed explicitly along religious sectarian rather than national communitarian lines.31 When Palestinian Arabs attempted to estab-

Introduction / 11

lish nationalist organizations, or organize national strikes and protests, they were met with violence.32 Haj Amin formed the Arab Higher Committee, an executive group that brought together for the first time a full range of Palestinian Arab political parties and notables, at the start of the 1936–39 uprising, but after the assassination of Lewis Andrews in September 1937, the British outlawed the committee and put out a warrant for Haj Amin’s arrest. The Mufti fled to Lebanon, and the other members of the AHC who were in Palestine were captured and sent into exile in the Seychelles. Members who were abroad at the time were prohibited from returning. Thus, British rule not only failed to provide institutional scaffolding for Arab nationalism as it did for Jewish nationalism but also actively suppressed it. The extreme imbalance in political power and access to national political legitimacy between Arab and Jewish Palestinians manifested itself in economic and social disparities, which then reinforced and widened the political gulf that British policymakers encountered. Immigration was an excellent example of this cycle. Jewish political lobbying helped to ensure that significant rather than symbolic immigration quotas would be issued by the Palestine Government. The Jewish Agency’s ability to collect and collate data, and to persuade the Palestine Government on the basis of this data, resulted in quotas that were higher than might have been politically prudent from a British perspective. The result was a massive inflow of human and economic capital: between 1922 and 1939, the Jewish population of Palestine rose from about 80,000 (approximately 10 percent of the population) to about 450,000 (approximately a third of Palestine’s total population). The effects of Jewish capital investment and immigration on the economy were striking and largely benefited what many scholars have coined the “Jewish economy” of Palestine.33 The annualized growth rate of the Jewish economy between 1922 and 1947 was, by one estimate, 13.2 percent, while the Arab economy grew at a rate of 6.5 percent.34 While the division of the economy along ethnoreligious lines is problematic and, as recent scholars have shown, oversimplifies what was in fact a set of interconnected economic spheres, these numbers do tell us something both about the relative economic gains of Jews and Arabs and about how British officials viewed the population of Palestine.35 Political and economic power naturally shaped relative standards of living. With the political apparatus of an officially recognized Jewish Agency, the Jewish community was able to create adjacent institutions to oversee the organization of its labor, education, and health care, while those same areas for Arab residents were in the hands of the Palestine Government.

12 / Introduction

When the Peel Commission visited Palestine in 1936–37, it heard of disparities in wages and working conditions, education and literacy, and access to medical care. Ninety percent of Jewish children under the age of eleven and 70 percent of those under fourteen were in school, compared with 27 percent of all Arab children.36 Jewish spending on healthcare outpaced that of the Palestine Government four to one, despite a Jewish population a third the size of the Arab population being served by the Government’s public health programs.37 Together, these kinds of statistics not only highlighted a gap between Arabs and Jews but also suggested to the Commissioners that the Jewish community in Palestine was indisputably modern and suitable for independent governance. Given the gulf between the communities that was both reflected in and accelerated under the mandate, the point might well be argued that partition was inevitable. But such an argument overlooks evidence of forces and policies that pushed against partition: the powerful assumption of territorial unity in the mandate, the strenuous efforts of many British politicians and officials to work against partition and to create a single polity, and of course the fact that Britain never managed to implement partition. British politics and policymaking were sufficiently fragmented to make building consensus around partition—or any other significant policy—a long and hard process. The bureaucratic, institutional, and political structures of the British empire ensured that policy was the product of substantial discussions, debates, and power struggles between different factions within the British establishment—from high-ranking politicians in London down to district officers in Palestine—that took place within a constantly shifting domestic, international, and imperial context. Taking seriously the contingent nature of policymaking in the British empire and mandatory Palestine allows us to recover how, in the eyes of many British officials, partition had become imaginable by the late 1920s, desirable by the mid-1930s, impossible by the late 1930s, and seemingly unavoidable by the mid-1940s, but it also reminds us that this trajectory was neither inevitable nor uncontested.

Reframing Partition The assumption that partition was built into the very DNA of the mandate and was thus bound to become policy might explain why, despite a rich and detailed scholarly literature on Palestine under British rule, on partition in other parts of the British empire such as Ireland and India, and indeed on partition as a world-historical phenomenon, so few studies have

Introduction / 13

focused on the development of British partition planning in Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s.38 Conversely, both the 1939 White Paper and, eventually, the 1948 war meant that partition, as it had been envisioned first by British and later by international planners, never took place. Partition as a nonevent, as it were, might also explain why the Peel Commission and its report are frequently mentioned in studies of mandatory rule but have never received the kind of sustained analysis this book undertakes. Such an analysis is possible only because it builds on the foundations laid by the work of earlier scholars, many of whom have studied Zionist, and to a lesser degree Arab, approaches to partition. Tracing the movement from mono- to multinational state in Palestine, Shmuel Dothan briefly analyzed cantonization and partition plans in the context of what he called the “struggle for Palestine” between Arabs and Jews.39 Itzhak Galnoor and Yossi Katz expanded on the politics of partition within Jewish and Zionist circles but, in common with Dothan, paid less attention to the development of partition by British officials.40 In more recent scholarship, discussions of British partition plans have tended to take the form of brief narratives, and the plans have not been examined in detail or analyzed in the broader contexts of international and imperial systems of governance and thought. A chapter in Roza El-Eini’s comprehensive book on the impact of British mandatory rule on the Palestinian landscape analyzed partition proposals in an attempt to identify underlying assumptions about land and population and to determine the British role in forming the literal and metaphorical landscape of a partitioned Palestine.41 In his book on boundary-drawing in Palestine, Gideon Biger briefly examined partition plans for their significance as implicit legitimations of the earlier delimitation of Palestine’s borders and recognized that little scholarly attention had been paid to these “paper plans.”42 In addition to those works that specifically mention or analyze partition, this book is indebted to the extensive literature on mandate Palestine, and particularly to the scholarship analyzing Britain’s impact on, and relationship to, the ethnonational conflict.43 Where it differs from its predecessors is in the questions it asks and the resulting frameworks within which it locates mandate Palestine. Much of the work on British policy tends to interpret the mandate period as the first stage of the coming Arab-Israeli conflict, that is, as a proto-nationalist struggle between Arabs and Jews for control over land, resources, and public opinion. Indeed, most scholars writing about the mandate period until recently were also specialists in the postwar history of Israel. As a result, the predominant aim of their works was to

14 / Introduction

track how British policy shaped the clash between Zionists and Arabs and contributed to, or hindered, future Israeli and Palestinian state formation. This book inverts the question, asking instead what drove and constrained British policymaking around partition. While ethnonational conflict was, in many ways, at the heart of the problem to which partition was a potential solution, the fact of opposition between Zionist and Palestinian Arab aspirations is not, as noted earlier, sufficient alone to explain the course of partition. In addition, this book argues, Palestine’s place in the British empire, its status as a League of Nations mandate, and its existence as an object of international interest all shaped the course of partition in the interwar period and after. In turning its attention to these factors, this book takes its cue from recent scholarship on mandate Palestine, which has sought to redirect the focus away from the Arab-Zionist conflict and toward such topics as the experience of Arab minorities, ecology and development, and the economy under mandatory rule, and in the process has recovered some of the overlooked continuities and discontinuities between the Ottoman and British empires.44 Comparatively little attention has been paid in either the foundational historiography of mandate Palestine or the newer scholarship to the imperial frameworks of British policymaking.45 Beyond studies of the immediate imperial endgame, historians of the British empire have tended to leave Britain’s empire in the Middle East, and especially the political minefield of Palestine, to historians of the Middle East, and this book represents an attempt to write Palestine back into British imperial history and vice versa.46 Thinking about Palestine in an imperial context, this book argues, is essential for understanding the emergence of partition. It also suggests that the history of mandate Palestine can deepen our understanding of British imperial power, which some scholars have recently argued faced almostconstant resistance and dissent from both indigenous and domestic actors, and which others have shown was produced in an arena of confusion and contradiction.47 This book takes the theme of contestation into the realm of high imperial politics, where partition planning was both a reaction to and a symptom of the challenges that imperial planners faced. It thus recovers the contingencies of empire from within the center of imperial power and planning, arguing that the limits of that power were evident in disjointed and highly contested policymaking and that British power in Palestine did not so much rise and fall as fluctuate over the mandate period. A small but excellent body of scholarship exists that places Palestine in imperial and international diplomatic context, but that work is focused on the post–World War II processes that led to the end of the mandate

Introduction / 15

and decolonization.48 On the interwar period, the seminal works on Palestine barely mention its status as a League mandate or consider the impact of international oversight and pressures on British policymaking.49 Recent work on the League mandates system and internationalism suggests that mandatory status mattered and that it constrained, if not the actions, then certainly the discourse of the mandatory powers.50 In the case of partition, this book demonstrates, it is fruitful to examine the role of international organizations in shaping Palestine policy well before the end of World War II when, in the 1920s and 1930s, conversations at Geneva helped spur as well as stymie British planners. Placing partition planning in this international context reveals how interwar internationalism fundamentally supported imperial ideology and practice through a finely crafted language of rights and a new international bureaucratic system. Finally this book is immensely indebted and seeks to contribute to the renewed attention historians are paying to the complex processes, roots, and outcomes of the formal decolonization of the European empires.51 Partition plans were, in part, early decolonization plans, inasmuch as they envisioned portions of Palestine as sovereign or semisovereign states operating outside formal British rule. Predominantly, however, partition manifested a colonizing and imperial logic. For one, it encoded the political legitimacy and territorial aspirations of, and thus laid the cartographic groundwork for, the nascent Zionist state, which operated on a settler colonial model, albeit with largely non-British settlers. Along with the legal system, this geopolitical framework was one of the most significant legacies left by British mandatory rule to the modern Israeli state.52 Partition plans carved out territorial and political space not only for Zionism, but also for the maintenance of key British strategic assets, and in this regard we can see that they were designed precisely to shore up British imperial power. This book thus argues that partition, a technique and pattern that scholars have usually associated with decolonization and national independence, was also a deeply imperial tool, developed by British officials to sustain rather than to dismantle imperial power. It suggests that we might benefit from flipping the “imperialism of decolonization” on its head, to recognize alongside it a “decolonization of imperialism,” that is, the selective decolonization that constituted a key strategic maneuver of late imperialism.53

Structure To tell the story of partition as an evolving policy, shaped by multiple forces both within and outside Palestine, this book contains five chapters.

16 / Introduction

Chapter 1 situates policymaking for Palestine in the overlapping spheres of imperial and international influence, delineating both Britain’s changing understanding of the problem with Palestine and the institutional and conceptual contexts in which partition developed. Colonial Office practices of moving personnel across the empire and fostering transimperial problemsolving and policymaking shaped how British officials and intellectuals gradually turned to partition. Likewise, dialogue conducted at the League of Nations in Geneva reinforced the divisions of the mandate and made it impossible for Britain to navigate between the competing factions without the kind of radical alteration of the mandate text that partition would effect. Finally, the emergence of partition as a favored technique owed much to the relative strength of Britain’s Zionist interlocutors and reflected the imbalance in international political influence between Zionism and Arab nationalism. Tracking these various forces as they played out in practice, chapter 2 begins a new narrative analysis of policymaking and partition in the mandate period. Starting with the little-known roots of the partition concept in Palestine, this chapter demonstrates that well before the famous 1937 Peel Commission partition proposal, officials in London and Jerusalem were already exploring territorial solutions ranging from cantonization to partition, largely in response to concerns over fulfilling the terms of the mandate. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the work of the 1936–37 Peel Commission, which was sent to Palestine in the wake of violent Arab uprising in 1936 to investigate the source of the troubles in Palestine, and which ultimately recommended that Palestine be partitioned. These chapters reveal how the commission moved from hearing virtually no public evidence about the possibilities and pitfalls of partition, to debating and eventually making public a partition plan. Paying attention to the interrelated forces of international norms, public opinion, local events, and imperial experience that had shaped the emergence of partition proposals, chapter 5 then follows debates from the publication of the Peel Report to the issuing of the 1939 White Paper, which definitively shifted British policy away from partition. Though Britain would never again formally propose partitioning Palestine, the partition concept lurked beneath a number of economic and legislative policies in Palestine during World War II, and the idea of partition was resurrected toward the end of the war. The conclusion considers these afterlives of partition in the twilight of empire. Most famously, the 1947 United Nations partition plan used the Peel Commission plan as its blueprint, and key personnel from within Palestine were involved in drafting preliminary internationally sanctioned partition plans.

Introduction / 17

A contribution to imperial and decolonization history, this story enriches our understanding of imperial policymaking at the end of empire. It recasts partition, which we associate primarily with decolonization, as having been forged in an effort to retain imperial control. The book illuminates a critical piece of the history of mandate Palestine, which was to have a lasting impact on its future structure, and also draws our attention to the underlying assumptions, principles, and ways of thinking that shaped and constrained British policymaking. Eventually, although the United Nations adopted partition as an internationalized tool for decolonization, the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 and British withdrawal from Palestine meant that a formal partition under international auspices never took place. However, some eighty years after the Peel Commission’s report, we see in the paradigm of a two-state solution that the concept of partition has become firmly entrenched in the political landscape of Israel/Palestine. Recovering the history of partition planning reminds us that we are neither the first to imagine this concept nor likely the last to wrestle with its complexity.

ONE

Partition’s Pathways: Imperial and International Contexts

At a meeting of the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations, convened in July 1937 to examine the possibility of partitioning Palestine, the former chief secretary of the Palestine Government, J. Hathorn Hall, said that he “did not think that Palestine had ever been a local problem . . . A speech in the House of Commons, a resolution at Zurich, often had greater repercussions than anything that might happen in the country itself.”1 Similarly, this chapter argues, partition was the product not just of local but also of imperial and international forces. Palestine was ruled by those who drew on their experiences in one of Europe’s most extensive empires. It was also simultaneously a League of Nations mandate, subject to international oversight, and owing to its religious and ethnonational significance, to unusually high levels of international scrutiny and lobbying. While there were material and political factors specific to Palestine that made partition initially appealing (and ultimately unworkable) for British policymakers, partition was also substantially shaped by myriad extra-Palestinian forces. These included the pressures and currents of British and Zionist popular politics to which Hall referred; British imperial practices and networks; British foreign policy interests, particularly concerning neighboring Arab states; and the textual requirements of the mandate reiterated through discussions of the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations in Geneva. These factors and constraints were neither static nor independent, and so in order to understand partition’s trajectory we must be aware both of the interrelation of these forces and of the relative importance of particular concerns or pressures over time. To lay the groundwork for a close examination of the rise, fall, and resurrection of partition plans in the following chapters, this

Partition’s Pathways / 19

chapter maps out the main contexts in which policymaking took place and the key forces that guided partition planners.

Palestine and Partition in the British Imperial Bureaucracy As a League of Nations mandate, Palestine existed in a conceptually and legally unusual space that, as we shall see, inclined policymakers toward partition. The specific obligations incumbent upon Britain in the Palestine mandate represented a significant divergence from prior imperial experience and practice. Although white settlers populated many areas of the empire, Jewish immigrants to Palestine were distinct from Britain’s white settler population in Africa, Australia, and North America in several important ways: their presence in Palestine was due to an explicit scheme to build a “national home,” and they constituted not only a nonnative but also a predominantly non-British and nonimperial group.2 Jewish immigrants to Palestine were largely East European, and, by the mid-1930s, German. Few were British or from other parts of the empire, and though many of the highest-ranking Zionist leaders were English speakers, increasingly the Jewish population in Palestine spoke Hebrew. On many counts, then, the Jewish settlers in Palestine could not be included in the imagined imperial community. As Colonial Secretary William Ormsby-Gore put it, when urging the Mandates Commission to allow Britain to explore the possibility of partitioning Palestine, “Palestine was unlike any other country with which the British empire had to deal . . . The task of the mandatory Power in Palestine was unique. The country was unique: the difficulties were unique.”3 For all Palestine’s “unique” attributes, however, it was administratively part of the imperial world. British officials who had worked around the empire from Cyprus to India staffed all the highest and many of the midand lower-level positions in the Government of Palestine. British judges headed Palestine’s civil courts, and officials in London oversaw Palestine’s bureaucracy, approved its laws and regulations, and managed, albeit at a distance, to shape policy and practice in the mandate. To understand where partition came from thus requires, in part, that we understand Palestine as a territory embedded in the bureaucratic networks that bound the British empire together. As in many other British imperial protectorates and possessions, Palestine was ruled by a high commissioner who was appointed by the British monarch and whose rule, from 1921 on, fell under the purview of the British colonial secretary.4 Prior to this date, Palestine was under the domain of

20 / Chapter One

the Foreign Office, and the transition was neither uncontested nor neutral. In early 1921, the new colonial secretary, Winston Churchill, oversaw the creation of a Middle East department within the Colonial Office.5 This department, established with Sir John Shuckburgh, formerly of the India Office, as its head, consolidated the administration of territories in the Middle East that previously had been under either the Foreign or the India Office. This shift was significant from the perspective of future partition planning for Palestine.6 For a variety of reasons, ranging from jockeying for professional control to advancing deeply held political convictions, Colonial Office bureaucrats were more committed to upholding the Balfour Declaration and less concerned about Arab reactions, both in Palestine and in the Middle East more broadly, than were their counterparts in the Foreign Office.7 Zionist links to these career civil servants were strong and persistent; the Zionist leader, Chaim Weizmann, referred in 1929 to having “been in intimate contact for the last ten years” with Sir John Shuckburgh.8 Along with Shuckburgh, a small, stable group of officials, including Cosmo Parkinson and O. G. R. Williams, continued to work on Palestine policy throughout the 1920s and 1930s. As a result, even as governments changed, the department supervising Palestine was sympathetic to the Zionist cause.9 As the next chapter demonstrates, these close links between the Colonial Office and Zionist leaders also ensured that senior officials were familiar with the ideas of territorial separatism developing in Zionist circles in the 1920s. By the mid-1930s, much of the appeal of partition for the Colonial Office was that whatever the objections of a small Zionist fringe, it looked to be a policy that would fulfill the Balfour Declaration and save the Zionist project from being completely obliterated in a unitary state under majority rule. On the other hand, the Eastern Department of the Foreign Office was by and large focused on regional stability, and thus concerned primarily with Arab anti-Zionist and anti-British sentiment. Although from 1921 the Foreign Office no longer had direct jurisdiction over policy for Palestine, international events in the region in the mid-1930s brought Foreign Office expertise to bear on the territory. After the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, and once neighboring Arab states intervened in Palestine during the 1936–39 uprising, the Foreign Office, under the direction of its Eastern Department head, George Rendel, sought to reassert its influence over Palestine policy. The Foreign Office argued that Britain’s primary aim should be to pacify Palestine and retain it as a strategic outpost rather than to oversee the creation of a Jewish national home. Policy was not simply created in London by career officials and politi-

Partition’s Pathways / 21

cians. It was also, substantially, developed and debated by those administrators on the ground who struggled in the most immediate ways with the tensions of the mandate. At the level of local administration, the structures and institutions of the Palestine Government would have been familiar to anyone in the British imperial civil service: advised by an executive council consisting of a chief secretary and attorney general, along with a changing set of other executive officeholders, the high commissioner oversaw provincial governors, who were themselves served by a group of district officers. The high commissioner also appointed heads of departments ranging from agriculture to railways. Mandatory rule had many points of resemblance with British rule elsewhere, particularly in its hallmark use of indirect rule, adoption of preexisting bureaucratic, legal, and financial structures, and requirement that the territory pay its own way. Governance was meant to flow through village headmen (mukhtars) in Arab villages, and towns and cities had largely elected (though sometimes appointed) councils, which were the primary points of contact for district officers. While the Muslim segment of the Arab population had a figurehead in the British-appointed Grand Mufti, the Jewish population was represented politically by the Jewish Agency. Most of the Palestine Government’s bureaucratic and legal apparatus was borrowed from the Ottomans: courts, tax and banking codes, land registries, and more were all based on Ottoman precedent with British revisions and additions.10 British officials who served in the Palestine mandate were drawn from the ranks of the imperial civil service (including the Indian civil service), the diplomatic corps, and at the highest levels, from among the political elite in Britain. As many of the men charged with developing policy in Palestine had broad experience in managing Britain’s empire, it is perhaps not surprising that they sought out imperial analogues to guide their policy proposals. Thinking across the empire was second nature to many of them, and they applied familiar practices of surveying land, regulating the post, and providing education, for instance, at the same time as they sought analogues to help untangle tricky political questions of immigration, political representation, and apportioning financial resources. Territorial solutions, including partition, had been tried and tested with remarkable success in other parts of the British world, and combined with the existing inclination to see the populations in Palestine as politically irreconcilable, this imperial orientation drew policymakers to partition. Senior officials in London, high-ranking members of the Palestine Government, and those civil servants on the ground thus approached partition in ways that were deeply informed by imperial bureaucratic structures and

22 / Chapter One

priorities. This did not mean that they all came to the same conclusions about partition, but it does suggest that in trying to understand partition’s course, we need to pay attention to practices of imperial secondment and transfer, to imperial careers that developed across multiple territories, and to the knowledge and experience various administrators had of prior British imperial partitions. In other words, while taking seriously OrmsbyGore’s contention that Palestine was unique, we also need to look to the ways in which it was not. Legions of administrators, both in Palestine and in London, thought through the Palestine problem by placing it side by side with other imperial situations that seemed to them similar in critical ways. The broad concept and details of partition in Palestine owe much of their genesis to these men thinking across but also, crucially, working across the empire. Partition planning was a process both intensely local and fundamentally transnational, a product of both abstract thought practices and practical hands-on experience across the British empire.

Partition in the British Empire Scholars have identified and studied flows of information, people, and ideas aiding both nationalist and nonnationalist anticolonial movements in the British empire, particularly in the period around World War I, when rebellions destabilized British rule in Ireland, India, and Egypt.11 Some have conceptualized the connections between parts of the empire as forming a network, others a web, and still others a layered set of webs.12 However one describes their contact, the fact remains that anticolonial leaders drew inspiration from each other, much to the consternation of British imperial administrators, who soon turned to their own imperial networks and knowledge in an effort to halt these movements and exchanges.13 The formation of the Interdepartmental Committee on Eastern Unrest, which began meeting in 1922 to survey and discuss ways to combat nationalist movements in India, Egypt, and Turkey, as well as pan-national movements such as Bolshevism and Pan-Islamism, is one example of British reactions to a perceived global threat to the empire.14 In coordinating a wide range of regional and local knowledge, Britain aimed to mirror those networks it set out to destroy.15 Less well studied are instances in which British administrators drew on their individual and collective imperial experience in an attempt to solve a local problem or to shape forms of governance and administration, rather than simply to put down an insurgency or disrupt a nationalist movement.16 Partition planning in Palestine is a case that bridges long-range problem-

Partition’s Pathways / 23

solving and reaction to short-term crisis. As we will see in the following chapters, British officials began to envision territorial division well before the crisis of the 1936–39 Arab uprising, but the crisis itself galvanized them to turn vague explorations into concrete policy proposals. That they could make this shift in the space of a few years was possible only because partition was not new. It already existed as a set of concepts and practices to which administrators in Jerusalem and London could refer because they had already been tried in different forms in the British empire in the first two decades of the twentieth century. When faced with a particular set of political problems in Palestine that appeared to fall into a familiar pattern of ethnoreligious conflict, British politicians and administrators instinctively turned to what seemed, at least on the surface, to be their analogues in Ireland and India. In the case of Bengal, partition had been implemented, unsuccessfully and therefore temporarily between 1905 and 1911, in order to weaken political agitation and assert imperial control. In Ireland in 1920, Britain sought to permanently align religion, political sovereignty, and territory through partition. By the time it became clear that Palestine was going to be a serious political, moral, and economic problem for Britain, partition had found its place within the range of possibilities to which administrators might turn. The partition idea in Palestine had initially developed out of a very different set of analogizing impulses, however, as administrators, particularly in Palestine itself, saw the conflict between Arabs and Jews in terms of that between native Africans and white settlers. Drawing on notions of trusteeship, these officials set out to protect Arab cultivators from Jewish settlers by setting up land reserves or cantons and ensuring that Jews would not achieve political dominance in any kind of joint legislature. This impulse to frame what was essentially a political problem in terms of its impact on small agriculturalists dovetailed with the already existing solution of partition by suggesting a territorial answer to the conundrum of Palestine. As Palestinian Arab nationalists asserted themselves through the mid- to late 1930s, British officials turned away from comparisons to Africa, whose natives were assumed to have no nationalist impulses, and made stronger connections to Ireland and India, where policies had been developed to cut off or contain nationalist blocs. Before turning to Britain’s experiments with partition in Bengal and in Ireland in the early decades of the twentieth century, it is worth defining the sort of partition under discussion here, and the purpose and limits of connecting partitions that occurred under British authority. As we have seen in the period immediately surrounding World War I, British officials

24 / Chapter One

had the experience of drawing new borders and boundaries in the former Ottoman empire that divided and subdivided territories previously considered unitary. In addition, in their own empire, British officials had been party to partitions that resulted in the creation of two or more areas under new authority or sovereignty and that concomitantly created at least one non-British party claiming such a partition line and its resulting territories to be illegitimate or unnatural. Though the partition of Ireland and the proposed partition of Palestine shared the important characteristic of creating, or intending to create, at least one new independent state, the partition of Bengal is included in this section because its (unstated) aim was to splinter political resistance to British power by encouraging the development of religiously affiliated politics and weakening the possibility of an all-India political resistance. It prefigured the creation of religiously divided constituencies and the eventual partition of India in 1947. The partitions of Bengal and Ireland were not identical, nor did they result from some uniform tendency to fragment along religious lines. On the contrary, each case developed from a complex set of internal political circumstances, aims, and maneuvers, and territorial division was proposed and implemented by a specific cadre of individuals. Furthermore, the existence of partition in one part of the British empire did not guarantee its adoption in another. From the vantage point of Palestine’s administrators, however, India and Ireland appeared as parallels to Palestine, and thus the partitions and constitutional divisions undertaken in each place provided a potential path to follow. In addition, as we will see below, certain imperial administrators in fact moved from territory to territory, acting as agents carrying both theory and practice. Tracking the processes by which the conceptual and material inclinations toward territorial division moved across the British empire can help us understand why and how partition arose as a particularly appealing option in Palestine by the late 1920s.17 The partition of Bengal between 1905 and 1911 was ostensibly undertaken in order to rationalize and simplify the administration of a province that covered a large area, contained a population of approximately 42 million people in 1901, and was, by many accounts, undergoverned.18 Although British officials had discussed rearranging the provincial boundaries of Bengal for over a decade, it was the political advantage of such a move that finally tipped the balance toward partition. As the Indian viceroy, Lord Curzon, argued, partition was a measure that would “divide the Bengali-speaking population; that would permit independent centres of activity and influence to grow up; that would dethrone Calcutta from its place as a centre of successful intrigue,” and that would damage the power

Partition’s Pathways / 25

of the Congress Party.19 Bengal was thus divided, its eastern portion combined with Assam to form one province, and its western part combined with Bihar and Orissa to form another. Muslims constituted a majority in the new eastern province, while non-Bengali Hindus numerically dominated the western province. Curzon’s partition thus fragmented the political unity and power of educated middle- and upper-class Bengalis in the Congress Party, who correctly read partition as an attempt to weaken the swadeshi movement. From the vantage point of later events in Palestine, the partition of Bengal is significant because it manifested the concept of dividing territory and political representation along religious lines.20 Although the partition of Bengal was eventually reversed in 1911 in response to massive protests, the principle of representation by confession became entrenched in Indian politics and law. The Muslim League was founded a year after Bengal’s partition, and in 1909 the Indian Councils Act (commonly known as the Morley-Minto Reforms) created exclusively Muslim electorates in provincial and central legislative elections and reserved seats for Muslim representatives on these legislative councils. The provisions, coded as protections for religious minorities, were developed and entrenched in the Indian political system through both the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms of 1919 and the new constitutional framework developed in the 1935 Government of India Act. Though the partition of India was still more than a decade away, electoral politics were in essence partitioned over the early part of the twentieth century. Shortly after the passage of the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, the Government of Ireland Act (1920) made official the territorial partition of Ireland and the independence of part of the United Kingdom. The immediate descendent of the Home Rule Bill of 1914, the act’s roots went back well into the late nineteenth century and the Home Rule movement started by Isaac Butts in the 1870s and championed by Charles Stewart Parnell from 1880.21 It provided for two devolved parliaments, one to sit in Belfast and represent six counties of Ulster, and the other to sit in Dublin and represent the remaining twenty-six counties of Ireland. After the Irish Dáil passed the treaty with Britain in 1922, six counties of Ulster remained part of the newly renamed United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, while the rest of the Irish counties became the Irish Free State and were given dominion status. Partition, in this particular case, was given its final legal stamp of approval many months after it had started to become a reality on the ground, and many years after it had first been discussed by British lawmakers, many of whom were also key members in discussions

26 / Chapter One

over the Balfour Declaration and later British policy in Palestine.22 British administrators had been laying the groundwork for a separate administration in Belfast during 1920, while the idea of partitioning four counties had been floated as early as 1911.23 Again, the logic of religious and political affiliation underlay the territorial division, with the Protestant majority in Ulster refusing to become a minority in Ireland as a whole under Catholic majority rule. From the British perspective, Ireland’s partition, unlike Bengal’s, was remarkably successful, despite a civil war in the new Irish Free State and lingering popular irredentism. Ireland was peaceful relative to its earlier state and, most important, no longer represented a drag on British economic and military resources and a persistent thorn in the side of British politics. Through the late 1930s, “partition seemed to have provided a relatively painless way out of the Irish problem.”24 In Ireland, partition was used to decolonize and, most important, to disentangle the Irish question from domestic British politics. By contrast, as a method of imperial control, partition had proven to be a blunt instrument in Bengal that aroused more opposition than it defeated. The principle of dividing political representation, and therefore indigenous political power, along religious lines, however, was a more subtle tool that survived the reversal of Bengal’s partition in 1911, thrived in Government of India Acts through the mid-1930s, and eventually came to full fruition in the partition of India in 1947. The movements described above relate only to colonial administrators, but similar networks and paths existed for lawyers, judges, and other law officers.25 There are also two other important groups whose experiences, though not in country-specific administration, helped to connect disparate parts of the empire. Military men moved around the empire and frequently transitioned into civil administration at all levels, from the lowest district officer to the position of governor or high commissioner. As a result, techniques of counterinsurgency, surveillance, and defense developed in one area often found their way to another. Finally, politicians and intellectuals roamed the empire, if not in actuality, then in theory. They were the most likely to make facile comparisons between, for example, Ireland and Palestine, but also the most prone to thinking through the philosophical underpinnings of governance at opposite ends of the globe.

The Intellectual Framework for Partition Imperial ways of thinking about the role of religion and race as they related to self-government and nationalism formed the intellectual framework in

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which Palestine’s administrators thought through the issues they faced. Elements of governance in British Palestine appeared to take their inspiration from Frederick Lugard’s principle of indirect rule as elaborated in his influential work on British rule in Africa, published the same year that the League endorsed the Palestine mandate. The mandate for Palestine, and indeed the entire mandates system, formalized the Lugardian notion that Britain was to be a trustee “to civilization for the development of resources, to the natives for their welfare.”26 The British invention and establishment of the Supreme Muslim Council and the office of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem seemed designed to enable a Lugardian form of indirect rule by creating a chief, in this case the Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and a ruling council in whose hands authority over the Muslim community could be placed.27 Unlike the Jewish Agency, which increasingly played the role of a shadow government, the Supreme Muslim Council was, as Ronald Hyam describes indirect rule, “not concerned with nation-building. It was designed to facilitate control rather than constructive change, law and order rather than effective modernisation.”28 The British persistence in classifying the inhabitants of Palestine by religious affiliation, and the related refusal, evident in the text of the mandate, to see the Arabs as a national group, owed much not only to the principles of indirect rule but also to the dominant British view of Egyptian society as described in Lord Cromer’s authoritative work Modern Egypt. In great detail, Cromer offered his “evaluation of Egypt as a mélange of different religious and racial communities” that could function economically, politically and socially only under British rule.29 The power of religious and racial divisions was such, Cromer believed, that only the British could be counted on to rule impartially and justly. This type of thinking allowed for a convenient slippage from denying nationalism to claiming that even if nationalist sentiments were present, no Egyptian could rule justly over such a diverse population.30 A similar process was at work in British thinking about Palestine: as we learned in the introduction, Palestinian Arab nationalism was written out of existence in the mandate and strenuously denied by British officials through the early 1930s.31 When its existence could not possibly be ignored after the start of the 1936–39 uprising, it was viewed as an immature racial nationalism that if given full expression would violate minority rights.32 The similarities between British ways of seeing Egypt and Palestine were no doubt due to pervasive imperial notions of race, religion, and nation, but they also traveled with the movements of imperial administrators. Some key members of the Palestine Administration in its early stages had spent

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formative years in Egypt. Gilbert Clayton, who had served in the Egyptian army and later as an advisor to the Egyptian government, was chief secretary to the Palestine Government between 1922 and 1925 and briefly acting high commissioner. Ronald Storrs, civil governor of Jerusalem and Judea from 1920 to 1926, had served in the Egyptian civil service and as oriental secretary at the British Agency in Cairo before the war. Palestine was also steeped in imperial knowledge in an even more direct way. Commissioners sent to Palestine over the decades to investigate the causes of violent unrest, the amount of land available for settlement, or the possibility of partition were largely men with a great deal of imperial, and even wider international, experience. They implicitly, and frequently explicitly, placed Palestine in a much wider context, suggesting parallels to other cases and drawing upon their experiences elsewhere to suggest solutions for Palestine. The investigatory commissions created a substantial literature on Palestine that both reflected and shaped thinking and policy. As the last chief secretary of the Palestine Government noted in exasperation, “If all the books of statistics prepared for the nineteen commissions that have had a shot at the problem were placed on top of one another they would reach as high as the King David Hotel.”33 The major commissions of the 1920s and 1930s were those investigating the 1921, 1929, and 1933 violent disturbances (the Haycraft, Shaw, and Murison Commissions), the 1930 HopeSimpson Commission on questions of immigration, land settlement, and development, and the Peel and Woodhead Commissions of 1936–37 and 1938 respectively (covered in chapters 3–5). The changing composition of these commissions is instructive, as is the ever-increasing length of their reports. The Haycraft Commission consisted of three members, all from within the Palestine Government, and produced a 64-page report on the causes of the 1921 Jaffa Riots. The 1930 commission, in contrast, was chaired by Walter Shaw, a retired chief justice of the Straits Settlements, and produced a report that ran to 211 pages. The commissioners included the Liberal MP R. Hopkin Morris, who had visited Tanganyika in 1928 as part of a delegation sent by the Empire Parliamentary Association, and the Labour MP Henry Snell, who went on to serve as parliamentary undersecretary at the India Office in 1931 and the joint committee on Indian constitutional reform in 1933–34. The choice of John Hope-Simpson to undertake a deep investigation into questions connected to land meant that a whole range of imperial and international experiences were used to frame the case of Palestine in a way that linked race/religion and land. Hope-Simpson had been a member of

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the Indian Civil Service for twenty-seven years and chaired the 1924 Indian colonies committee on Indian immigrants in the empire, which acted as an advocate for Indians, particularly those trying to acquire land in the “white highlands” of Kenya. From 1926 to 1930, Hope-Simpson held the position of vice-president of the League’s Refugee Settlement Commission in Athens, where he dealt with the Greek refugees of the 1920–22 war and helped to oversee the forced population exchanges between Greece and Turkey. Hope-Simpson’s expertise on questions of land use and yield, developed through his experience with the settlement of refugees in Greece, was critical to his evaluation of the situation in Palestine. His report argued that there was virtually no surplus land available for new immigrants, and he urged the restriction of Jewish immigration and areas of settlement and intensive agricultural development of the entire country. Reflecting his involvement in the Greco-Turkish exchanges and prefiguring the population movement recommended by the Peel Commission, Hope-Simpson noted that agricultural development would require relocating Arab cultivators in order to increase the size of their landholdings.34 Hope-Simpson’s work in the empire and for the League revolved around questions of land and development with a crucial admixture of racial and religious politics.

Imperial Analogy-Making and Partition Early cantonization and partition plans in Palestine were in part the result of the movement of ideas and personnel outlined above. Within easy mental reach, British officials in Palestine and London had recent examples of land sale restrictions based on race (Kenya), forced population transfer (Greece-Turkey), and territorial divisions implemented to create particular political outcomes, either by establishing more homogenous constituencies (Bengal) or by creating new states altogether (Ireland). They were also operating in a professional context in which experience gained in one territory was deemed applicable to another, and in which transterritorial movement and thinking were actively encouraged. It is therefore unsurprising that in thinking about a way out of the Palestine problem, British officials turned for inspiration and direction to analogous situations and solutions outside Palestine. Archer Cust, Douglas Harris, and Reginald Coupland, the three men who, as we will see in the following chapters, were instrumental in the process of developing partition plans for Palestine and presenting partition in the 1937 Peel Report, all drew on imperial examples and experience when crafting their plans. As an academic, Coupland had a particularly

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well-developed tendency to make connections across national and imperial boundaries and to develop theories that could be applied to multiple cases. Despite the struggle within the Peel Commission over partition (covered in chapter 4), Coupland’s fellow commissioners were sympathetic to his way of thinking and may indeed have been swayed because the comparison to Ireland seemed so apt. In comparison to the membership of the earlier commissions covered above, the Peel Commission’s members covered the widest geographical range. Peel had served as secretary of state for India from 1922 to 1924 and again for seven months in 1928–29. He had chaired the Burma roundtable conference in 1931–32, which separated Burma from India and simultaneously gave it a larger measure of selfgovernment while leaving ultimate power in British hands. Peel had also served as a member of the joint select committee on Indian constitutional reforms, which made the recommendations that later became the Government of India Act of 1935. Sir Horace Rumbold had held diplomatic posts in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, served as a chief delegate at the second Lausanne peace conference, and acted as chairman of the international

1.1. Sir Reginald Coupland, 1943 Credit: Howard Coster, National Portrait Gallery

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1.2. The Peel Commission in the garden of the King David Hotel, 1936. From left: Sir Harold Morris, Professor Reginald Coupland, Lord Peel, Sir Horace Rumbold, Sir Laurie Hammond, Sir Morris Carter, J. M. Martin (secretary to the commission), P. G. Heathcoat-Amory (secretary to Peel). Credit: G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, LC-M33-9229

commission on the Greco-Bulgarian frontier in 1925. Under the leadership of these two men sat four others with a wide range of imperial, legal, and academic experience. Sir Laurie Hammond was governor of Assam from 1927 to 1929 and a member of the Joint Committee on Indian Constitutional Reform that resulted in the 1935 Government of India Act, which among other things ended the practice of diarchy and proposed a federated system for India. Sir Morris Carter served as the chief of Tanganyika Territory from 1920 to 1924 and was chairman of the Kenya Land Commission of 1932–33. Carter’s experience on this commission is significant since its aim was to evaluate the status of land ownership and tenure by native Africans in Kenya and to assess claims by Africans to alienated land held by nonnative inhabitants. Coupland came to the commission having written extensively on the imperial relationship between Britain and her dominions, the British empire in East Africa, and the disintegration of the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires in the face of emergent nationalism. From Coupland’s perspective, Britain had successfully forged a unit out of its own three nations

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(England, Scotland, and Wales) and had then effectively navigated the pitfalls of national separatism in Canada and South Africa.35 In a 1933 speech, Coupland sounded remarkably confident in Britain’s ability to continue its unifying streak in the Middle East, boasting, “It is British policy and British influence alone that prevents the Middle East from being like the Balkans.”36 Several years later, Coupland seemed less certain. In a section of the Peel Report that he undoubtedly wrote, the theory is presented that “where the conflict of nationalities has been overcome and unity achieved—in Britain itself, in Canada, in South Africa—one of the parties concerned was English or British, and that, where that has not been so, as in the schism between the Northern and Southern Irish or between Hindus and Moslems in India, the quarrel, though it is centuries old, has not yet been composed.”37 When the director of education in Palestine, H. E. Bowman, explained the structure and limitation of Government-funded education in his evidence before the commission, Coupland was struck by the fact that the Palestine Government was unable to educate Jews and Arabs in the same classroom or even to insist that they be educated in English in separate classrooms.38 In addition to his academic writing on the empire, Coupland had served as a member of the 1924 royal commission on the superior services in India, which recommended the increased Indianization of the Indian civil services, and had been an advisor to the Burma roundtable conference of 1931 also under Lord Peel’s direction. Not surprisingly, he was quick to see connections between India and Palestine and requested material from the India Office including Harris’s report on the Sind-Bombay separation. This separation of the Muslim-majority province of Sind from the Hindumajority Bombay presidency was finally effected in 1936 but had been highly contentious and disputed, particularly on financial grounds, since the late 1920s. Harris and Coupland evidently saw eye-to-eye on the applicability of the Indian examples, and in the final report of the Peel Commission, they were used to support the call for a Jewish subvention to be paid to the new Arab state.39 India additionally served as a broad imperial benchmark in the report, which noted that as far as the Jewish national home was concerned, “Crown Colony government is not a suitable form of government for a numerous, self-reliant, progressive people, European for the most part in outlook and equipment, if not in race. The European communities in the British empire overseas have long outgrown it. The evolution of self-government in India left that stage behind in 1909.”40 The only way to give Europeans in Palestine the same degree of self-government as Indians in India was to partition.

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Coupland also saw the similarity with Ireland, which Britain had partitioned in 1922. In a secret interview the Peel Commission held with Winston Churchill, Coupland said that in his opinion “[Palestine] is very like Ireland in the nineteenth century. The majority of people were refused Home Rule because the minority were in the way  .  .  . Presumably Arab nationalism sees it cannot get the self-government which Iraq, Syria, TransJordan and Egypt have all got, for one reason only, because the Jewish National Home is there.”41 He declared himself “one of those who thought that the partition of Ireland was a good thing under the circumstances and for all time”42 and presented partition as “a compromise” that would allow the British to keep their promise to the Jews without having to put down violent Arab uprisings and deny Palestine self-government. Between his conviction that the conflict was intractable and his belief that something could be done about it that had been done before in other parts of the empire, Coupland became a firm proponent of partition, building on both his own and others’ earlier experiences. The threads of analogy that connected Palestine to the empire were, it turns out, remarkably strong. But they were also quite pliable, allowing administrators to change tack from Kenyan-style plans to restrict land sales or set up native land reserves to a more Bengali- or Irish-style partition. In the world of late 1930s British imperial planning, partition was seen as a way to reduce the costs associated with policing restive populations while simultaneously retaining critical imperial assets such as ports, oil pipelines, airfields, and, in the case of Palestine, symbolically loaded religious sites. Taken together, the resilience and flexibility of imperial analogies go some way toward explaining partition’s appeal.

The Mandate, Publicity, and Partition at the League of Nations Partition, as we have just established, was in part the product of the patterns of movement, experience, and thought, institutional priorities, and bureaucratic structures of the British empire. But British officials also turned to, and away from, partition in response to other forces. We return, then, to Hall’s contention that Palestine was not a local problem, and to OrmsbyGore’s claim that Palestine was unique. Though both men certainly overstated these claims, it is clear that partition’s course was also influenced by the inherently transnational and international politics of and about Palestine. Partition plans were developed in a context of intense international publicity and lobbying. The divisions written into the mandate text, and

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manifested, as we saw in the introduction, on the ground in Palestine, were articulated in the public pronouncements and petitions of Zionists and Arab nationalists and their supporters from Britain, Palestine, and throughout the Jewish and Arab diasporas in Europe, South America, and elsewhere. In Britain alone, pro-Arab and pro-Zionist lobbying groups produced pamphlets and newsletters, books and memoranda, while their members wrote letters to newspapers, petitioned the League, gave public speeches, and lobbied members of Parliament.43 In Palestine, members of the Jewish Agency collected, collated, and interpreted data, published reports, and, with the advantage of the Jewish Agency’s position as an official advisory body, lobbied Palestine Government and League officials. Palestinian Arab leaders attempted to foster pan-Arab and pan-Islamic contacts to deploy in the publicity wars, though, as we will see, they met with considerably less success than the Zionists. Historians frequently overlook the fact that Palestine was not a British colony, perhaps because it was run largely as if it were one. And indeed, we can imagine that much of this international lobbying would have existed, and exerted its force on partition planning, even if Palestine had not been a League mandate but instead a British colony with a stated commitment to establishing a Jewish national home. And yet Palestine’s status as a League of Nations mandate had real legal, bureaucratic, and policy implications that distinguished it from territories that were simply part of the British empire. The difference the League made was that it subjected British policy to yet another set of institutionalized constraints and forces, and ones that were internationally legitimated. In Geneva, discussions over Palestine not only were widely publicized but also included the (mediated) voices of petitioners and the interests of other states. Conversations in Geneva established a public narrative about British mandatory rule, shaped in part by a variety of non-British interests that British officials could neither fully control nor dismiss as obviously partisan. The League of Nations did not officially weigh in on British partition planning until after the publication of the Peel Report in the summer of 1937. But partition was appealing to British officials by the 1930s not just because it would resolve a conflict in Palestine, but also because it would resolve one in Geneva. The Mandates Commission of the League, which was charged with overseeing British administration, reflected and amplified the Zionist-Arab conflict, both through the politics of its members and through its review of petitions about Palestine. It thus reinscribed in the international arena a narrative of mandatory failure, a narrative that was then widely publicized, embarrassing Britain and further fueling the con-

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flict. The Mandates Commission also, crucially, held Britain to a mandate text that by the late 1920s appeared more and more impossible to satisfy. Partition would almost certainly require a wholesale revision of the mandate, thus freeing Britain from its internal contradictions. Separately, by the mid-1930s, partition had the added appeal in international terms of potentially opening Palestine up to much higher rates of Jewish immigration. This prospect was of course desirable for those Jews attempting to flee Europe, and for their humanitarian supporters, including those working in the League’s High Commission for Refugees Coming from Germany.44 But it was also enticing for anti-Semitic East European governments in the League Council, such as those of Poland, Hungary, and Romania, which articulated in Geneva visions of Palestine as an outlet for their unwanted Jews.45 The institutional structures and processes of League oversight meant that although policy for Palestine was made in London and Jerusalem, it was also scrutinized, shaped, and debated in Geneva. Through its bureaucratic procedures, correspondence, and publications, the Mandates Commission probed the functioning of mandatory administration in Palestine and publicly dissected and analyzed the myriad problems it found. The commission also produced and disseminated a steady stream of published material on Palestine and ensured that whatever controversy and conflict might unfold on the local level would receive detailed treatment and comment from the League that would be read around the world.46 The commission’s nine (later ten, after Germany secured a seat in 1927) members met twice yearly in Geneva to discuss the annual reports submitted by the mandatory powers for each of their mandated territories, review petitions received from residents of the mandated territories or other interested parties, and question representatives of the mandatory powers on the reports and petitions received. In the intervening months, the commissioners received from the mandates section of the League Secretariat a steady stream of press clippings and summaries, memoranda and petitions.47 Several commissioners, as we will see, had regular social contact with Zionist leaders and made visits as private individuals to Palestine. Despite having no real investigative and certainly no legislative power, the commission both generated and amplified conversation, creating in the process a narrative about the situation in Palestine to which British officials in London, in particular, paid close attention. While relations were—at least on the surface—cordial, and there was a professed spirit of cooperation between the Mandates Commission and Britain, the commissioners refused to serve as a simple rubber stamp for British policy and practice. As

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a result, even the heavily edited published minutes of the sessions held in Geneva contain contentious exchanges. Moreover, the archival files of the Colonial Office and the League of Nations reveal that British colonial officials were frequently convinced that the relationship was in fact adversarial and that the commission was overstepping its mark. Even before later explosions of violence led to special meetings of the commission exclusively devoted to Palestine, British officials were already growing weary, in the words of one Colonial Office administrator, “of sending our best men to Geneva to justify ourselves before the Mandates Commission.”48

Petitions In short, while the commission solicited and took seriously official British narratives about Palestine, it also brought other voices if not to the table, then at least into the room, and those voices told a story of ethnonational fragmentation. The League began receiving petitions concerning Palestine even before the commission met for the first time, and between 1924, when it turned its attention to a petition sent by the Palestine Arab Congress, and 1940, when it examined a petition from a Czechoslovakian Jew prevented from returning to his home in Palestine, the commissioners read, debated, and questioned British representatives about hundreds of petitions from or about Palestine. Some of these were apolitical in nature: a complaint from an individual Jerusalem merchant unfairly denied a flour-importing license, for example, or an individual plea for the right to travel, practice law, or redeem goods held in customs. The majority, however, were written by organizations or groups of individuals with an explicitly political agenda. Of these, many were the products of orchestrated campaigns designed to ensure that floods of “individual” petitions reached Geneva. After minor altercations at Jerusalem’s “Wailing” Wall in September 1928, for example, the commission received nearly fifty petitions in three weeks.49 At its extraordinary session devoted to Palestine in 1937, which followed the beginning of the 1936 Arab uprising, the commission examined, in one way or another, 158 petitions (one of which was composed of 148 virtually identical petitions from across Poland).50 Petitions from Palestine made up over 40 percent of the total received by the commission during its years of operation, the largest total of any territory (with petitions from French mandate Syria a close second).51 Sheer volume alone would doubtless have had an impact on the ways in which the commissioners, and by extension, British officials, approached the mandate, but the fact was that large numbers of petitions mirrored

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political divisions on the ground in Palestine. Arab petitioners complained that no progress was being made toward self-government and sometimes argued that the mandate itself violated Article 22 of the League Covenant, even though such a claim of mandatory illegitimacy risked having the petitions thrown out as inadmissible. Jewish petitions charged Britain with shirking its duty to establish the Jewish national home by failing to move quickly or forcefully enough particularly in the areas of immigration and land settlement. As the flow of angry and discontented communications increased across the 1920s and 1930s, British representatives struggled to maintain that all was well in Palestine. The stacks of paper confronting the commissioners told a different story. The volume of petitions pointed to the intensity of debate and feeling over Palestine, but it was also a sign of the authority with which an array of individuals and groups invested the Mandates Commission. By virtue of being a supposedly impartial advisory body of the League of Nations, the commission appeared to exist above the cacophony and chaos of politics and public opinion. In contrast to the constant stream of news, analysis, and ideologically freighted rhetoric about Palestine emanating from other sources, the commission’s published statements on Palestine offered coherence, gravitas, and the appearance of impartiality born of disinterested social scientific investigation. In reality, the Mandates Commission was embedded in the politics of Palestine. Two members of the commission consistently took up the larger points about political rights raised by Arab petitioners, even when the petitions explicitly challenged the legitimacy of the mandate. One was the Spanish liberal professor of law and social reformer Leopoldo Palacios, who was committed to the ideal of self-government. The other, the Marquis Theodoli, was the commission’s Italian chairman and had married into one of the most prominent aristocratic families in Beirut, the Greek Orthodox Sursock clan, which had substantial land holdings in Palestine and had sold a great deal of land to the Jewish National Fund immediately after the war.52 From the mid-1920s, other key members of the Mandates Commission, most notably the Swiss professor of law William Rappard, the Dutch vice-chairman, D. F. W. Van Rees, and the Belgian member, Pierre Orts, began to support Zionist claims that Britain was failing to meet fully its obligation to establish a national home for the Jews in Palestine. In 1925, Rappard represented the University of Geneva at the official opening of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a trip arranged by Chaim Weizmann, though for the sake of appearances the official invitation came from Palestine High Commissioner Herbert Samuel.53 After this

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trip, during which he saw the Zionist project in action, Rappard underwent a transformation, becoming a staunchly pro-Zionist voice on the commission.54 Orts, a lawyer who had served in the Belgian foreign and colonial ministries and had gained extensive experience in the Congo, was also a Zionist ally. Weizmann later wrote of Orts’s “sympathetic and critical appreciation of our efforts” and fondly remembered visiting Orts at his home in Brussels.55 By the 1930s, the commission was overwhelmingly sympathetic to the Zionist position, with only Palacios and Theodoli dissenting on the Arab side. As the next chapter will show, British officials began developing early cantonization and partition plans in the late 1920s, just as the volume of petitions to the Mandates Commission concerning Palestine increased dramatically, as the tone of questions from the commission to British representatives became more pointed, and as it became clear that the commissioners were themselves entangled in the politics of Palestine.

The Constraints of the Mandate British discussions over potential territorial solutions also accelerated in the early 1930s, after it had become clear that the League and Britain were diverging in their understanding of the meaning of the mandate text. Though wrangling over the requirements of the mandate was to be a persistent feature of British-League interactions throughout the 1930s, the events of 1929–30 encapsulate the ways in which League oversight constrained British policymaking. At their session conducted after the riots of 1929, the commissioners devised an interpretation that, on its surface, appeared to maintain the dual obligation of the mandate, privilege neither side, and provide Britain with a blueprint for policies moving forward. The mandate, they wrote in their report to the League Council, contained two separate elements that needed to be disaggregated: the “objects of the mandate” and the “immediate obligations of the Mandatory.”56 The objects, in other words the longer-term aims of the mandate, were to establish a Jewish national home and to establish self-governing institutions. There was no time limit for achieving these aims, because the economic conditions necessary for establishing the Jewish national home and the “political maturity” necessary for independence lay almost completely outside of Britain’s control. This did not, however, absolve Britain of its “immediate obligations,” which were to “place the country under such conditions as [would] secure” the objects of the mandate.57

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Though the report did not spell out what this rather abstract reasoning meant in practice, it was clear from a reference to “crystallising the Jewish National Home at its present stage of development” that any suspension of Jewish immigration, or any efforts to restrict land sales or settlement, were incompatible with the Mandates Commission’s interpretation of the mandate. Similarly, “rigidly stabilizing the public institutions of Palestine in their present form” would contravene Britain’s obligations.58 But while British policymakers were not contemplating the latter, the former measures were perpetually on the table,59 and indeed Jewish immigration had been suspended only days before the commissioners met in Geneva. What clearly emerged from the turbulent 1930 meeting of the Mandates Commission was the growing gulf between British and Mandates Commission approaches to Palestine. In the face of repeated violent unrest, British policy was evolving in the direction of placating the Arab population by curtailing and eventually suspending Jewish immigration, land purchase, and settlement. The commission, on the other hand, was insistent that the terms of the mandate allowed for no such restrictions. Therefore partition, which appeared on its surface to be a geographic solution to the Palestine problem, was also motivated by a fundamentally textual problem: discussions at the League made it clear that British policy would be hemmed in for the indefinite future by the mandate text and that likewise the mandate text would motivate political claims-making by Arabs and Zionists within Palestine and around the world, as well as by a range of other parties with an interest in Palestine. Thus the British turn to partition was driven not simply by a desire to redraw borders or reapportion sovereignty, but also at a deeper level by a need to remove some of the constraints imposed on Britain by the mandate text. Partition would, in effect, rewrite the mandate, leaving key geostrategic assets in British hands, while also squaring the circle of British commitments to Jews, Arabs, and the larger international community.

Zionism and Arab Nationalism Closely linked to the British and international institutions in which policy was made and debated were the political organizations of the two protagonists in Palestine. Running parallel to the uneven political and economic power of the Arab and Jewish populations in Palestine outlined in the introduction was an imbalance in international political influence between the two nationalist movements. As with the data from Palestine, this

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imbalance is not, in and of itself, enough to explain partition’s trajectory, but it does underscore how Zionist support for partition came, for a time, to shape British attitudes, and why, despite clear Arab opposition, the Peel Commission felt free to propose partition in 1937. It also suggests that the defeat of partition between 1937 and 1939 represented a turning point after which policy was dictated primarily by pragmatic concerns over regional and international security. In addition to building on the foundations set in place by the text of the mandate, the Jewish community in Palestine also drew tremendous political power from the larger Zionist movement, which had representatives in London, Geneva, and New York. Zionists benefited from a worldwide fundraising mechanism and maintained a powerful network of political contacts in major governments, most crucially Britain’s, and in international organizations. Chaim Weizmann, president of the Zionist Organization, was a tireless diplomat, meeting and corresponding with hundreds of influential figures in his quest to build a national home—and ultimately, a Jewish state—in Palestine.60 In the months during which the Peel Commission Report was being written, for example, Weizmann maintained a steady correspondence with, among many others, Professor Reginald Coupland of the Peel Commission; Colonial Secretaries William Ormsby-Gore and Leo Amery; and Permanent Mandates Commissioners Frederick Lugard and William Rappard.61 The latter figure became, in Weizmann’s words, “a helpful guide to us, and to me in particular, in the inner workings of the League, an intricate labyrinth leading to many dark domains in European and world politics.”62 Weizmann, in turn, provided Rappard with an understanding of the Zionist landscape, most literally during Rappard’s unofficial 1925 visit to Palestine.63 It was after this trip, during which he attended the opening of the Hebrew University and toured Palestine along with Lord Balfour, that Rappard became a staunch supporter of the Zionist movement and a critical ally of the Zionists working within the League. In contrast, the Palestinian Arabs had few powerful international or British interlocutors or allies and failed to develop successful national political organizations. Throughout the first decade of the mandate, Palestinian Arab leaders struggled to build strong political organizations that spanned both elite urban and rural peasant constituencies or to fund-raise effectively and were riven by political infighting between notable families.64 In addition to this infighting, one of the major fault lines that disrupted Palestinian Arab unity lay between men like Fawzi al-Qawuqji and Izzat Darwaza, who hoped to rejoin Palestine to a “Greater Syria,” and those such as the

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Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, who sought to develop an independent Palestinian nationalism.65 With neither institutional support from the British nor a cohesive national administrative body, Palestinian Arab leaders had almost no political influence over the framing of the Palestine issue at the League of Nations in Geneva and the working out of policy in London and Jerusalem in the early years of the mandate. Beyond the British context, Palestinian Arabs suffered from weak international political contacts and a lack of any organized mechanism for producing wide-reaching international propaganda. Perhaps the strongest and most effective champion of the Palestinian Arab cause came from outside Palestine in the form of the Syro-Palestinian Congress, whose Lebanese Druze secretary, Shakib Arslan, acted as an unofficial representative at Geneva, inundating the Permanent Mandates Commission with petitions relating to both the Syria and Palestine mandates. Arslan also presented the Arab case to the West, publishing La Nation Arabe, a monthly journal in French, and maintaining a rigorous schedule of travel and meetings with diplomats and politicians.66 Despite the efforts of Arslan and the Syro-Palestinian Congress, an anecdote relayed in the testimony of George Antonius before the Peel Commission reflected the fact that the Palestinian Arabs were fighting the war for international public opinion and influence over British policy with severe disadvantages. Antonius told the commissioners that when he had gone to Geneva in the late 1920s, he had been astounded to find that there was not a single officer or translator who could deal with Arabic sources, memoranda, or complaints. At the same time, Antonius reported, he saw “Jewish reviews and Zionist literature of every kind, everything properly docketed and read and minuted.”67 This demonstrated an inability to consider Arabic sources and an unwillingness to allocate resources to developing such a capacity, at a time when the Permanent Mandates Commission was responsible not only for the Palestine mandate but also for those of Iraq and Syria. The League was not the only arena in which Arabs suffered a disadvantage. In an undated memorandum written after Arab representatives gave oral evidence before the Peel Commission in mid-January 1937, Antonius detailed errors of translation that he had noticed the interpreter making both from English to Arabic and from Arabic to English. These, he noted, “were numerous and serious enough to have affected the meaning of the discussion, and in some cases they caused definite misunderstandings of material import.”68

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Palestinian Arab leaders, in particular Haj Amin, put their greatest energy into promoting ties with Muslims, particularly in India, and with the rulers of neighboring Arab countries.69 However, they were only occasional beneficiaries of the political work undertaken by neighboring Arab states and Arab or Islamic organizations on their behalf. In forging connections across the Muslim world, the Palestinian Arab leadership faced the dual problem of diverging, sometimes significantly, from its allies’ political aims, and of risking the alienation of Palestinian Christians. In December 1931, for example, an international Islamic congress was held in Jerusalem, underwritten by the Indian Muslim Shaukat Ali’s Khilafat Committee, and attended by representatives from twenty-two countries with large Muslim populations. Palestinian representatives hoped to gain allies in the fight against Jewish immigration, but instead the bulk of the conference was devoted to the concerns of the khilafat movement, which threatened to undermine any positive relationship between Palestinian Arab leaders and British officials.70 In the later 1930s, Palestinian Arabs built alliances with some of their newly stable and independent Arab neighbors, but by this point, some fifteen years into mandatory rule, the support they received was too little and too late to effect a sea change in the relative political strength of the Palestinian Arab community compared with its Jewish counterpart. The international positions of these two competing nationalist movements mattered when it came to British partition planning. Zionists had been thinking and writing about partition, as we will see in the following chapter, since before the advent of the mandate. By the early 1930s, some Zionist leaders increasingly saw the advantages of territorial separation and were thus able, over the course the decade, to subtly and explicitly influence British ideas and plans for cantonization and partition. In effect, Zionist openness to partition and the close contacts between Zionist leaders and British policymakers ensured, first, that British officials would even consider partition as a viable possibility and, second, that detailed British partition planning would take into account, to greater or lesser degrees, Zionist objectives. In contrast, though we know that there were Arab figures who became resigned to partition after the 1937 Peel proposal, the entire notion of partition was anathema to the vast majority of Palestinian Arab nationalists before this point. As a result, Arabs had not only few channels but also little incentive to enter into conversation with British policymakers in the late 1920s and early 1930s about the possibilities of territorial separation. They thus had no hand in shaping eventual proposals.

Partition’s Pathways / 43

Conclusion Recovering the threads that tied Palestine to the wider British empire makes it possible for us to understand partition as a pattern of imperial thinking as well as a reaction to local circumstances. The bureaucratic structures, careers, and intellectual pathways of the empire all helped shape British approaches to the Palestine problem and encourage the turn to the partition that we will see developing in the next chapter. The Colonial Office’s commitment to the Balfour Declaration, and its staffing of Palestine’s administration with men who connected religion and ethnic conflict to territorial division, both influenced partition’s emergence as a potential policy by the late 1920s. International forces, ranging from the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League to the Zionist Organization, highlighted the separation of populations on the ground, the growing political clash between Jews and Arabs, and the incredible difficulty of fulfilling the terms of the mandate. Arab nationalists both within and outside Palestine demanded self-determination, while the transnational Zionist movement demanded that Britain continue immigration and land policies designed to establish a Jewish national home. British officials struggled in vain to paper over or to substantially resolve those divisions, even before events in Europe put further pressure on the situation in Palestine. By the mid-1930s, rising antiSemitism in Europe increased legal and illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine, and growing Palestinian Arab anger made partition an appealing possibility, as it would allow for Britain to retain both control and honor. As the next chapter shows, against this backdrop of heightened tension, British officials in London and Jerusalem explored the possibilities of cantonization or partition from the late 1920s to the late 1930s in the hopes that a territorial split might resolve the problem of a mandate that was, in the words of the Mandates Commission, “divided against itself.”71

T WO

Before Peel: Territorial Solutions to the Palestine Problem, 1929–1936

From the early days of British mandatory rule it was clear that establishing representative government was going to be extremely difficult. In his opening statement at the 1924 session of the Permanent Mandates Commission, Palestine’s high commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel, surveyed political developments in Palestine and explained the hitherto unsuccessful attempts on the part of the British administration to establish a legislative council.1 It was decided, he noted, not to give in to Arab demands for a legislative council in which the number of Arab and Jewish representatives would be in proportion to their respective populations. To follow such a representative system would create an Arab “hostile majority” that would block the implementation of “certain terms of the mandate” to which that majority was opposed.2 Clearly, Samuel argued, self-government was not going to come quickly, and certainly not if the other terms of the mandate were upheld. But no matter, Samuel reassured his audience, perhaps throwing a sop to the former colonial governors among the commissioners as he pointed out that at any rate “an entirely Arab government was not likely to be an efficient one . . . Experience in the British Empire showed that, in the first place, a limited constitution could be created, and as that constitution proved effective, it could be developed.”3 In a startling admission of how British officials were attempting to square the circle of the mandate, Samuel made clear what a limited constitution looked like: The underlying idea pursued by the Government was that it should deal with the Arabs in regard to their possession of their land, their religion, their development generally, exactly as if no Balfour declaration has been made at all. The policy of the Palestine Government was therefore precisely the same

Before Peel / 45 as would be the policy of the British Government towards the local inhabitants in India, Ceylon or in any British colony.4

What was evident, though Samuel did not state it outright, was that the British were also planning to deal with the Arabs as if entire parts of the mandate, not just the Balfour Declaration, had ceased to exist. The “development of self-governing institutions” mentioned in the mandate appeared to be virtually suspended in favor of colonial-style “development.” Political self-determination, if it ever arrived, would arrive as in the rest of the British empire: some time in the distant future. This imperial pragmatism quickly ran up against two inconvenient problems: first, as the commission’s chairman, the Marquis Theodoli, remarked in response to Samuel, “the inhabitants of Palestine, comparing the position in that country with the position in Syria and Iraq, would be inclined to wonder whether the League of Nations and the Mandates Commission were fulfilling towards them their duties as regards the development of self government.”5 Palestine’s lack of representative governing institutions, he suggested, not only violated both Article 2 of the Palestine mandate and Article 22 of the League Covenant but also put Palestine out of step with its Middle Eastern neighbors. This disjuncture would only become further accentuated once Iraq gained its independence and joined the League as an independent state in 1932. Second, the Arab inhabitants of Palestine increasingly turned from wondering, as Theodoli had put it, whether their right to self-government was being violated to violently protesting that it was. In August 1929, tensions that had been simmering for some time over the Western Wall of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, a site sacred to both Jews and Muslims, finally erupted into violence that spread to cities and towns around the country. The riots constituted the most sustained and severe violence that had taken place under mandatory rule, and many historians have rightly seen them as a turning point in the Arab-Jewish conflict and in Britain’s approach to managing it.6 This chapter charts the development between the 1929 violent disturbances and the arrival of the Palestine Royal Commission in Palestine in 1936 of a potential answer to questions of nationality and representation that were becoming critical in Palestine. For those officials who believed that a unitary Palestinian nationality did not exist or could not be created, territorial division—in the form of either cantonization or outright partition—offered Britain a way to make nationality and statehood

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coterminous. Generally speaking, cantonization followed the Swiss model with the cantons joined together in a federation, whereas partition entailed a “clean cut” and the creation of new independent states. According to its advocates, territorial division would solve the three major problems afflicting British rule in Palestine: representative government, land sales, and immigration. The logic and form of territorial division were hotly debated in this period; from the point of view of its many detractors, a territorial solution to what quickly became known as the “Palestine problem” was deeply unjust, impractical, and would only multiply problems for Britain. A process of debate and concrete planning finally culminated in the report of the Peel Commission, which first presented a coherent partition plan on the public stage. Pre-1937 partition proposals largely have been overlooked, perhaps for the very reason that the partition plan proposed by the Royal Commission is seen in the obscuring light of hindsight, namely, as a precursor to the aborted postwar partition of Palestine under the United Nations. Many historians therefore frame the Peel Report as the major starting point for a narrative about partition, rather than as a statement embedded in a long-running dialogue about the range of configurations for the future of Palestine. Although the report itself referenced earlier ideas about the division of Palestine,7 scholars have tended to present the Peel Commission, and in particular one of its members, Professor Reginald Coupland, as the author of partition.8 In some accounts, Coupland is merely partition’s primary champion,9 while in others he is the idea’s creator and skilled salesman.10 Near-contemporary observers similarly linked the conception of partition to Coupland. An article in a Jewish American journal in 1946 labeled Coupland as “the originator of the idea of partition.”11 Reflecting on events in 1937 some thirty years later, a former Colonial Office official claimed that Coupland was “the chief influence over the Palestine partition scheme.”12 Undoubtedly Coupland’s was an influential voice in favor of partition, and he certainly possessed the rhetorical skill to persuade others. But he did not, as many accounts suggest, single-handedly create and shape the concept of partition. Coupland was partition’s author only inasmuch as he wrote the majority of the Peel Report and thus gave a coherent and eloquent form to what had previously been an inchoate set of shared ideas. Tracing the evolving roots of partition in conversations taking place between British officials in the 1920s and 1930s reveals a complex interplay at work between local Palestinian, British, imperial, and international

Before Peel / 47

forces and concerns. From the early years of vague proposals and rumor through the mid-1930s when plans became more formalized and clearly articulated, local Arab and Jewish actors, Zionist leaders, international heads of state, and British officials drawing on imperial analogies shaped both the concepts and the particularities of territorial solutions. Through these early stages of partition planning, the central concern was the problem that underlay the structure and function of the mandate, namely, the tension between the obligation to establish a Jewish national home and the obligation to institute representative government. How was representative government to be effected? Who was to be represented? Which groups in Palestine had legitimate claims to nationality and by extension to sovereignty? These were questions constantly raised and debated at the annual examinations of Palestine by the Permanent Mandates Commission in Geneva, and territorial division was one of several possible answers that British officials began developing. A separate question of significance for these officials was how Britain might retain control of key strategic assets in the event of a transfer of power, and as a result early partition plans envisioned both a devolution of power to Jews and Arabs and the maintenance of British authority in areas of geostrategic or symbolic importance.

Territorial Division in Palestine—Early Ideas and Conversations The earliest conceptions of territorial division for Palestine predate the establishment of the mandate by over a decade. Partition’s earliest proponents were Zionist thinkers who believed that the movement could attain its fullest expression only through political and concomitant territorial autonomy. Territorial separatism engaged both pragmatic issues of land acquisition and settlement and labor practices, and broader philosophical questions about the ultimate goals of Zionism.13 Leaders such as Zionist Organization head Chaim Weizmann and Zionist Executive representative in Geneva Victor Jacobson invariably spoke with Arab and British contacts about these new ideas, and so variations on partition quietly took their place on the outer edges of the range of possibilities for Palestine. By and large, however, suggestions for territorial separation came from individuals rather than organizations and appeared in forms that made them unlikely to be taken up in British policymaking circles. For example, one of the earliest British publications to mention partition was the philosophical travelogue published by the writer G. K. Chesterton after his trip to Palestine in the winter of 1919. In the midst of anti-Semitic musings on the plight of

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“the Jew,” Chesterton wrote that Weizmann had spoken with him about the possibility of cantonizing Palestine. According to Chesterton, Weizmann did not think that “Palestine could be a single and simple national territory quite in the sense of France; but he did not see why it should not be a commonwealth of cantons after the manner of Switzerland. Some of these could be Jewish cantons, others Arab cantons, and so on according to the type of population.”14 Nearly a decade later, a press summary in the Palestine Weekly vaguely mentioned a scheme to carve “out of the Holy Land a special enclave which should be wholly Jewish.”15 Although of great interest to Zionists, and to a lesser extent to Palestinian Arabs, such imprecise plans would have been unlikely to appeal to British officials, particularly in the early years of the mandate when, especially in comparison to the French mandate Syria and Lebanon, British Palestine was relatively calm. The first recorded interest by British officials in a form of territorial division for Palestine occurred in 1929 around the time of the failure of renewed attempts to institute a legislative council and of the violent Arab disturbances of that year. Whereas outright partition was the most common method of division discussed by Zionists, British officials initially considered cantonization based on the Swiss model. Eventually, officials rejected cantonization and turned to partition a few months into the violent rebellions of 1936. Political violence, it seems, brought previously marginal ideas to the center of British policymakers’ fields of vision, but these ideas were then debated and shaped over longer time frames in response to international and domestic political pressures rather than to sudden spikes in violence. Indeed it is worth noting that cantonization and then partition developed as potential British policies in a period that was remarkably peaceful apart from the bookends of 1929 and 1936. Contemporary American sources and later British ones both confirm that British officials began to explore various possibilities for cantonization in Palestine by the autumn of 1929. In November, Wallace Murray, the head of the US State Department’s Division of Near Eastern Affairs, wrote to Paul Knabenshue, the US Consul General in Jerusalem, about an idea in the department that the Jews might be given an autonomous region around Tel Aviv.16 Knabenshue responded that he found the idea “entirely impracticable” both because it would give the Jews the most fertile land in Palestine and also because following the principle of granting Jews limited autonomy in areas of maximum Jewish ownership of land or industry would necessitate handing over the Jordan valley on account of the Rutenberg hydroelectric concession, the Dead Sea potash works, and a large area around Safad and Tiberias. Knabenshue also mentioned that Jews and

Before Peel / 49

Arabs whom he had sounded out about this idea roundly rejected it, as had the British high commissioner, John Chancellor, who said that “at one time he had flirted with this idea and had soon rejected it as impracticable.”17 Not until early 1932 did cantonization make its way from conversations in Palestine and elsewhere to the desks of the Colonial Office in London. But the Colonial Office records from 1932 suggest that there had been some discussion of cantonization even in London in the late 1920s. We also know that in 1932 the World Zionist Organization’s representative in Geneva, Victor Jacobson, had drafted a secret internal memorandum detailing a proposed plan to create two sovereign states in Palestine.18 In February 1932, Revisionist Zionists opposed to the main Zionist leadership released letters and memoranda that they claimed proved that the ex-Khedive of Egypt, Abbas Hilmi, and the Mufti of Jerusalem were collaborating with members of the Zionist Executive to devise a new constitution for Palestine.19 The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) published the documents with the caveat that there was no proof that such planning was taking place or that the documents were authentic. One of the alleged proposals suggested dividing Palestine into two administrative districts whose formation and administration would roughly follow the provincial constitution in India. The Jewish district would be called the national home and would “be part of the state of Palestine as a whole but [would] be under a Constitution securing for the Jewish Community full autonomy for internal affairs, while at the same time it [would] guarantee them their due and proper share in the government of the whole country.”20 One of the leaked memoranda mentioned that the Palestine Arab Executive was still undecided about whether to divide the land based on the ratio of Jews to Arabs in the population and about how to solve the question of Jerusalem. The Revisionist response was unequivocal. Dividing Palestine would “wreck” the Jewish national home and could not be permitted. These plans were being put forward with the “connivance” of British officials trying “to avoid the odium and responsibility of directly destroying the Jewish National Home.” “It is our duty,” the Executive of the Zionist Revisionist World Union wrote, “to unmask before the whole world this deliberate plan which cannot be regarded as other than a conspiracy, under the pretext of a peace gesture, against a people which put its material and personal resources under the protection of the Mandate.”21 Despite the JTA’s contention that the Revisionist sources were at the very least incomplete, the release of these summary allegations sent a stir through Jewish communities around the world and provoked suspicion of Britain’s intentions in Palestine.

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On February 28, 1932, the Russian-language Jewish periodical Rassweit, published in Paris, ran an article claiming that British plans for dividing Palestine in cooperation with the Arabs, and particularly the Mufti, had been hatched in the autumn of 1931. The article contended that As far back as the beginning of last autumn, there was put into circulation at the Colonial Office and among the British officials in Palestine, a confidential memorandum the contents of which may be summarised as follows: (i) the present situation provokes the indignation of Jews and criticism at Geneva; (ii) it must not and cannot be changed so as to favour the Jews throughout the area of Palestine; (iii) it is useful to remember the White Paper of 1922, where it was stated that England had not promised to make the whole of Palestine into a Jewish National Home, but had only promised to establish such a Home “in” Palestine; (iv) hence the way out—one or several Jewish cantons; (v) it would be preferable to have this proposal emanate not from the Government but from the Jews or the Arabs; there are among the Jews influential groups which have long been sympathetic but which might fear to come into the open; there is a possibility to influence the Arabs in this sense through people whom they trust; (vi) whoever takes the initiative, the Government can easily bring quite enough pressure to bear on Jews and Arabs.22

In his letter covering a translated excerpt from Rassweit, Dr. Selig Brodetsky, head of the political department of the Zionist Organization in London, challenged the British government to refute the allegations, adding that the Jewish Agency was in no position to do so. Following the release of documents by the Revisionist Zionists, Colonial Office official O. G. R. Williams wrote in a file minute that “[i]t is useless to speculate as to the origin or motive of the suggestions. The idea of the segregation of Jews in a special area has been canvassed on various occasions.”23 Faced with two separate leaks or forgeries concerning partition in Palestine in less than a month, officials at the Colonial Office reviewed their files before issuing denials. One official noted that “[t]he registers (public and secret) have been searched for any document which might have given rise to this report that a scheme for the partition of Palestine (with Jewish ‘cantons’) was in circulation last autumn in the Colonial Office and among British officials in Palestine. Nothing can be traced.”24 Two years later, however, another official had a conversation about partition with a former official in the Education Department and Secretariat, George Antonius, who recalled “that when he was in Government services under Chancellor [high commissioner from

Before Peel / 51

1928 to 1931] this kind of proposal was mooted and after examination rejected.”25 Since the Colonial Office found no written evidence to substantiate these allegations, it was able to issue a credible denial. The statement was supported by pro-Arab groups in London and by the Zionist Organization, all of whom denied that there had ever been plans for a roundtable conference, a new constitution for Palestine, or any sort of cantonization or partition. Notes in the Colonial Office files, however, suggest that there had certainly been discussion, albeit verbal, in British official circles about the possibility of a division. The idea appears to have existed in diffuse verbal form well before its written articulation. One Colonial Office official wrote a minute in which he outlined several chains of hearsay in which both High Commissioner Chancellor and a member of the Jewish Agency were said to have mentioned a possible cantonization scheme before the autumn of 1931, but noted that he could not find anything in the files.26 Another file minute vaguely suggested that its author might have come across a letter or press cutting on cantonization in the past and warned that “[i]t would be dangerous to say that such a suggestion has never been mooted with the cognizance of His Majesty’s Government because it would be impossible to verify that some tentative démarche may not have been made in the past ten years or so.”27 It thus seems clear that territorial division had begun to figure—albeit sporadically and furtively—as a viable solution to what was already being seen as a possibly irreconcilable conflict, even if the documents suggested that British officials were not actively crafting a partition plan. Regardless of the authenticity of the plans revealed in the Jewish press in early 1932, the reaction to their publication certainly gave the Colonial Office a clear sense of what to expect if partition for Palestine became official policy. This clarity was obscured in the next few years as the Colonial Office witnessed the development of an ambiguous modus operandi between the principal actors in Palestine. In private conversations, Jewish and Arab leaders seemed interested in cantonization or partition, or at least not categorically opposed to it, while in their public pronouncements they refused to consider such divisions as viable solutions. In November 1933, Chaim Weizmann, who had resigned as head of the Zionist Organization in 1931 but was nevertheless just as diplomatically active as before, raised the possibility of partition in Palestine in a meeting with Vito Catastini, the head of the mandates section of the League of Nations Secretariat. This was certainly not the first time that a Zionist leader had suggested partition as a possible solution, and indeed the roots of partition in Zionist

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thought could arguably be traced back to the notion of transferring Arabs out of part or all of Palestine.28 Catastini’s apparent support of the partition idea perturbed members of the Colonial Office who felt that the subject lay beyond the League’s purview. Weizmann seemed to think otherwise, discussing his idea for a territorial division with the head of the Permanent Mandates Commission, the Marquis Theodoli, and with Italian head of state Benito Mussolini, who was beginning to style himself as a protector of the Jews and came out strongly in favor of partition.29 While opposed to interference by the League and by Italy, the Colonial Office showed considerable ambivalence on the partition issue. On the one hand, partition was considered impractical: it had been considered and rejected at some point under the Chancellor administration in Palestine.30 On the other, the prospect of a solution, especially one supported by at least some members of the competing factions, seemed too good to ignore. Weizmann was not the only important player to countenance a territorial answer to the Palestine question. In a letter to High Commissioner Wauchope, Assistant Under-Secretary of State Cosmo Parkinson noted that during his previous visit to Palestine, he had chatted over dinner with Ahmed Khalidi, the head of the Government Arab College in Jerusalem, who “had a similar idea in mind . . . His suggestion was that Palestine might be divided by a line drawn roughly east, from Jaffa-Tel Aviv and that the northern part might be given to the Jews and the southern part to the Arabs, but some kind of ‘internationalisation’ would, he thought, be necessary for Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth.”31 Other Arabs were reported to have raised the possibility of dividing Palestine into cantons in conversations with Parkinson and other officials, and Jewish leaders publicly rejected the plan.32 Parkinson alluded to a more open-ended state of affairs when he concluded: “I should be unwilling to reject, out of hand, any solution of the Palestine tangle, though there are obvious difficulties in a territorial division.”33 There were two principal reasons for the inconclusive tenor of British discussions on a division of Palestine between 1931 and 1934. First, the plans of which the Colonial Office was aware were amorphous in a context that called for a high degree of specificity, and, secondly, the political cost of antagonizing Arabs, Jews, and the League itself was high. No written material on the subject made its way into the Colonial Office files before 1931, but even thereafter cantonization and partition were regarded as exceptionally abstract ideas. More concrete proposals were emerging in Zionist circles, but if they were published at all, it was in Hebrew-language periodicals.34 The extreme shortage of Hebrew-speaking British officials meant

Before Peel / 53

that such proposals had little chance to make an immediate impact on the development of British thinking about territorial division.35 Conversations among British officials in London and Jerusalem therefore were tentative attempts to establish the ideological viability of territorial division rather than to address its complex practicalities. Officials repeatedly sidestepped the question of partition, in principle, by pointing out its “impracticability,” while asserting their inability to comment on something so vague. In effect, the division of Palestine could not be vetted on principle until it had been grounded firmly in facts, figures, and maps.

Early Cantonization Plans The year 1935 saw both the publication of a book in English containing a fairly concrete cantonization plan and the submission to the Colonial Office of a detailed memorandum on cantonization. In Palestine of the Arabs, the British director of the Palestine Information Centre in London, Mrs. Steuart (Beatrice) Erskine, noted that cantonization provided the best hope for Palestine, since Weizmann, an ex-official from British Palestine, and an unnamed Arab friend of hers all supported the concept. Erskine reprinted what was presumably a letter from her anonymous Arab source, laying out in some detail a plan for federated cantons. Among its most notable features was its proposal for what appeared to be a uniquely complex sovereignty. The proposed cantons were to be treated as sovereign states that would join the League of Nations, but these states would grant control over currency, transportation, security, customs, law courts, and religious sites to a central supreme council composed of Arab, Jewish, and British representatives. Geographically this plan consisted of rejoining Transjordan to Palestine and carving out a lopsided H-shaped Jewish canton running from the coast north of Jaffa up to near Haifa, east to Esdraelon and the western shore of Lake Tiberias, and then up to Rosh Pina and Huleh. A Jewish bloc south of Jaffa would be attached to the Jewish canton with Tel Aviv as its port and capital. The remaining area of Palestine plus Transjordan would constitute the Arab canton/state. Haifa would be a free port, and Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias, Safad, Bethlehem, and Nazareth would be classified as religious cities and put under the authority of the League of Nations.36 In February 1935, a former member of the Palestine Administration (and presumably the ex-official to whom Erskine had referred), L. G. Archer Cust, submitted to the Colonial Office a lengthy memorandum that he had written a month earlier when he was still an assistant district commissioner of Jerusalem. Cust had served in every district of Palestine over his twelve

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years of service, was aide-de-camp to the first high commissioner, Herbert Samuel, and private secretary to High Commissioner Chancellor.37 In his memorandum, Cust proposed the creation of three cantons and two mandated enclaves: the Arab canton would cover the hills and would preferably be joined up with Transjordan by the eradication of the “unnatural and unnecessary” border and ruled by Emir Abdullah of Transjordan;38 the Jewish canton would comprise the areas already heavily settled by Jews, namely, the Acre-Gaza coastal plain and the Jezreel and Huleh valleys; in a mixed canton would be the mixed cities of Tiberias and Safad as well as part of the Huleh basin; and finally Britain would retain its mandate over the holy cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, the vital port of Haifa, and possibly the chemically rich Dead Sea. The various cantons and enclaves would be joined together under a British-supervised federation. Cust’s proposal differed significantly from Erskine’s Arab friend’s in envisioning a larger Jewish canton, establishing a mixed canton, and giving oversight for holy cities to Britain rather than to the League.39 Cust’s memorandum extended well beyond drawing new lines across the map of Palestine. Perhaps even more interesting than his patchwork of cantons and enclaves was Cust’s articulation of the problem with Palestine and the analogues to which he looked for a solution. “Under present conditions,” Cust wrote, “despite the various political obligations that have been internationally guaranteed, there is no alternative to the indefinite continuance of non-representation and autocracy.”40 Writing at a time of relative peace in Palestine—the most recent significant unrest had taken place in 1929, and the start of the Arab revolt was still some eighteen months away—Cust framed the task in Palestine as one not of managing violence but of managing the promise of representative government and ultimate national independence. Shot through with an awareness that Britain’s promises were “internationally guaranteed,” the memorandum addressed Cust’s two primary fears, that the proposed legislative council would never materialize and that the Zionists would slowly acquire all the best Arab land. Cantonization, Cust argued, would circumvent the legislative obstacles facing the creation of a unitary Palestine and would ensure protection for Arab farmers. Jews would be prohibited from, and presumably would have no interest in, purchasing land outside the Jewish canton. The land issue was crucial in Cust’s estimation not only for fulfilling the internationally sanctioned mandate, but also, and perhaps more important, for preserving Britain’s global reputation. “For it is Britain’s just boast,” he wrote, “that throughout her empire its dependent peoples may

Before Peel / 55

feel assured that whatever may be their colour, whatever their state of civilisation, whatever the circumstances may be, they will inevitably enjoy the uniform standards of protection and fair play that are the unquestioned foundation of British Imperial Administration.”41 As a result of his concern over Britain’s imperial reputation, Cust turned to the empire to help him develop his cantonization plan, drawing a parallel between the situation in Palestine and in Britain’s African colonies, where a white settler population and native agriculturalists jockeyed for land. To support his turn to a territorial solution, Cust wrote: It is legitimate also to seek direction among the varied administrations that govern the destinies of the component parts of the British empire and to enquire whether a problem such as that which confronts the British Administration in Palestine exists in some form elsewhere and, if so, how it is being treated. The East African dependencies, for instance, notably Kenya and Nyasaland, are faced with circumstances that are not dissimilar. There also is the problem of a white immigration, for whose welfare the state must be responsible, that belongs to a far higher plane of civilisation than the indigenous communities into whose territories they have penetrated. The protection of these native communities from exploitation and dispossession by the wealthier and more enterprising immigrants is recognised as a cardinal duty of the Government. It has therefore been established by statute that only in certain areas may land be alienated from the indigenous cultivators, due regard being given in determining those areas to the suitability of the climatic and economic conditions for white colonisation as well as to the material needs of the previous occupants.42

By construing Jewish immigration as analogous to white settlement in Africa, and Arabs as parallel to African natives, Cust revealed a particular interpretation of the mandate. Despite the fact that Palestine was an “A” class mandate, meaning that its native inhabitants were civilizationally advanced and would need only a short time of tutelage before being able to govern themselves, Cust’s analogy implied that the Arabs of Palestine were in fact at the level of inhabitants in “B” class African mandates. His language reflected Lugardian notions of trusteeship and imperial tutelage and helped bolster his argument for cantonization: if Jewish and Arab civilizations were so far removed from each other, it would be only natural for them to inhabit separate physical spheres, so that the one group could develop and thrive and the other could be protected. From the point of

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view of British trusteeship, cantonization would provide clear boundaries for the application of protective land legislation, which would prevent the continued drain of land away from the Arabs. Despite its framing in British imperial terms, Cust’s cantonization plan was met largely with skepticism by the Colonial Office. While one official wrote that the proposal was “eloquent and interesting,”43 another raised the issue of security, noting that policing two new states would present significant challenges to the maintenance of law and order.44 Parkinson expressed the greatest optimism among Colonial Office officials, gamely declaring, “You can do almost anything if you are driven to it.”45 The Colonial Office’s main concern, however, was that Cust not “embarrass” the Government by publicizing his cantonization idea. Since Cust had only recently retired from fifteen years’ service in the Palestine Government, the Colonial Office feared that any proposals from him would be read as revealing official policy in the making, and so Parkinson strongly discouraged Cust from sharing his plan with anyone other than the former high commissioner, Chancellor. In an article published in The Near East and India eight months after his initial memorandum on cantonization, Cust included only one sentence on a type of federal system as a possible solution for Palestine.46 Not until nearly a full year after his departure from the Palestine Administration was Cust authorized to make his proposal public in a lecture delivered to the Royal Central Asian Society. Even then, he was told that in Palestine Jewish and Arab leaders who had heard about cantonization “all hated the scheme for different reasons.”47 Cust’s lecture at the Royal Central Asian Society in March 1936 elaborated on the plan he had sent to the Colonial Office and embodied the tension between a uni- and multinational state in Palestine. On the hand, he seemed to posit the existence of two nationalities in Palestine: “There may still be prevalent the conception of the upbuilding of a future Palestinian national unit . . . But there is no Jew so Jewish as the Jew in the Land of Israel . . . Similarly, and no less rightly, the Arab remains an Oriental, and regards himself as a member of the great Arab race whose past was so glorious.”48 On the other, however, elements of Cust’s language suggested a unified nation being riven by factionalism, as when he wrote, “To-day only the presence of a tremendous British force prevents a ghastly civil war breaking out again.”49 As if to dismiss the possibly shaky ideological foundations of cantonization, Cust repeatedly emphasized that “Palestine is in effect ‘Cantonised’ already.”50 Assuring his audience that cantonization would not require forced population movement because the two nations were already

Before Peel / 57

separated on the ground, Cust hammered home the concept that cantonization would make de jure what existed de facto. An exchange at the Permanent Mandates Commission in Geneva later in the spring of 1936 indicates the degree to which notions of territorial separation were being fostered by British economic policy on the ground in Palestine and beginning to percolate up to the mandates commissioners. In his review of the 1935 annual report, the attorney-general of Palestine, H. H. Trusted, noted in his summary of economic activities that the High Commissioner proposed that the different Government extraordinary works shall be divided territorially into exclusively Arab areas, exclusively Jewish areas, and mixed areas, and that the Director of Public Works shall, so far as possible, employ only Arab labour on works in Arab areas and only Jewish labour on works in Jewish areas. Subject to consideration of cost, works in mixed areas would be regarded as a reserve which could, if necessary, be used to adjust the balance of labour, as well as to meet any need for relief employment for either community.51

Several days later, in the course of discussions about land policy, the Portuguese representative on the Mandates Commission, Count de Penha Garcia, referenced this labor policy and commented that whereas in the past Britain had vacillated between fostering Arab-Jewish collaboration and recognizing the gap between the two communities, “[a]t present, it seemed as though the idea of separation was uppermost.”52 “If this policy were adopted in the matter of labour,” he asked rhetorically, “might it not also be better to adopt it in the matter of lands?”53 Trusted never answered this question. As de Penha Garcia was probing the mandatory government’s approach to territorial separatism, Cust spent much of June and July 1936 shuttling between Colonial Office officials, members of the Jewish Agency, and Arab leaders visiting London, in an effort to convince all three parties to agree to a cantonization plan, and in the process bringing notions of territorial separatism full circle to Zionist and Arab interlocutors. While Weizmann was willing to engage in detailed discussions with Cust, the four Arab leaders visiting London, Jamal Husseini, Shibli Jamal, Izzat Tannus, and Emile Khoury, expressed interest in the general scheme but claimed that they could not speak for Arab leaders in Palestine. Officials at the Colonial Office indicated to Cust that they did not want to be implicated in any cantonization proposals and that it would in fact be preferable for any

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such proposals to appear to come from a non-British source. Soon even Weizmann’s precision broke down, and he insisted that his discussions with Cust be regarded as “purely tentative” and a “very general basis for further discussion.”54 By the time the Colonial Office received word that Jewish Agency representatives in Palestine had vetoed cantonization in a meeting with the high commissioner, Cust’s grand plans appeared to be floundering.55 It is striking that officials were so intent on keeping the lid on Cust’s proposal, coming as it did on the heels of what we know were already long-running conversations about territorial solutions in Palestine, and that they were so dismayed when it was publicized. Years later, his insistence on airing cantonization would prevent Cust from being appointed to an intelligence position in Palestine during World War II. Pegged as a “consummate bluffer” who “was disloyal to the Government and insisted on trying to work on policies opposed to theirs,” Cust was barred from returning to the area he knew so well.56

From Cantonization to Partition Despite these initial obstacles, the idea of cantonization proved resilient. It was debated in the Colonial Office and Palestine Government throughout the summer and autumn of 1936, following the start of the Arab uprising. Although some high officials found the concept problematic (Ormsby-Gore told Weizmann it “would merely result in a repetition of the ghetto”),57 Douglas Harris and Lewis Andrews, two members of the Department of Development in Palestine, wrote up a cantonization plan in July 1936.58 Harris was a commissioner on special duty and irrigation advisor, while Andrews was the officer in charge of the Department of Development and later liaison officer to the Peel Commission. Seconded to Palestine from the Government of India, Harris brought experience designing complex arrangements for provincial autonomy and began trying to apply these in Palestine. The Harris-Andrews plan closely mirrored the Cust plan in proposing Jewish, Arab, and mixed cantons and enclaves. A later map (fig. 2.1) of the Harris-Andrews cantons was a graphic illustration of the plan’s jigsaw nature. Edward Keith-Roach, district commissioner of Palestine’s northern district, angrily dismissed it largely on the basis that even this excruciating division of Palestine into miniscule and oddly shaped bits and pieces did not properly reflect the territorial distribution of the population. Keith-Roach argued that the plan ignored large numbers of mixed villages, and even homogeneous villages had significant lands lying outside their

2.1. Douglas Harris, cantonization map, 1936 Source: Map accompanying memorandum by D. G. Harris, “Cantonisation in Palestine,” October 4, 1936, 1, TNA, CO 733/302/9. Credit: Blackmer Maps

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designated canton. Using extensive statistics commissioned exclusively for his antipartition memorandum,59 Keith-Roach demonstrated that approximately 27,000 Arabs would end up residing in Jewish cantons and that another 25,000 Arabs residing in Arab cantons derived much of their livelihood from land that would end up inside the proposed Jewish cantons.60 The total number of 52,000 Arabs negatively affected by cantonization represented more than half the total number of Jewish agriculturalists in all of Palestine. Finally, Keith-Roach pointed out, the best land overall would go to the Jews. All of these factors, he argued, meant that cantonization along the lines proposed by Harris and Andrews would violate Article 6 of the mandate, which charged the mandatory authority with facilitating Jewish immigration and close settlement on the land, but not at the expense of the rights of the non-Jewish inhabitants. Keith-Roach’s memorandum precipitated the final demise of the cantonization idea and therefore encouraged officials in Palestine, and later the Peel Commission, to champion its more extreme cousin, partition. Having read Keith-Roach’s arguments, Harris himself rejected cantonization in the strongest terms, pointing out that the kind of federation he had envisioned was possible only if undertaken voluntarily by preexisting self-governing entities.61 In a carefully constructed memorandum, Harris argued that legislation could address the three main problems of land sales, self-government, and immigration, without the many complications attached to cantonization. Legislation was already in force that mandated that a landholder retain at least a government-approved subsistence area from any sale. If the aim of cantonization was to prevent the creation of landless Arabs, the same end could be achieved either through this legislation or through the division of Palestine into zones, in some of which the sale of land from non-Jews to Jews would be prohibited.62 Similarly, Harris claimed, self-government could be more economically and practically established through a system of local government rather than through the creation of a new cantonal system. The latter would pose financial and political problems; economies of scale would make cantonal governments more expensive to run, and Britain would invariably have to financially support the Arab cantons. Large numbers of Arabs living under Jewish cantonal authority would create a political and security disaster. Cantonization would require the establishment of a central legislature, and this would lead to pitched battles over the representation of communities, the division of responsibilities between central and cantonal legislatures, and the division of financial and material resources. Harris proposed instead the estab-

Before Peel / 61

lishment of subdistrict councils similar to rural district councils in England. New, more homogeneous subdistricts would be created by altering subdistrict lines to more closely match “racial” demographics, though “mixed” subdistricts would still exist after this gerrymandering. According to Harris, this system, though imperfect, would present distinct advantages over cantonization: “There would be none of that definite segregation which cantonisation connotes, the authority of the central Government would remain supreme and the protection of minorities would continue to rest in its hands.”63 Finally, Harris noted that cantonization would only exacerbate the immigration problem, as the Jewish cantonal authorities would allow large numbers of Jews to immigrate, creating population pressure on the ground and financial pressure on the central exchequer.64 Far from alleviating conflict over immigration, cantonization would open the floodgates. In his final memorandum on the topic, Harris deftly defeated cantonization as a method of tackling the issues of land, representative government, and immigration. By enumerating the potential pitfalls of cantonization, and the available legislative alternatives to achieving some degree of resolution to the main problems facing the mandatory government, Harris made cantonization seem not only impractical, but also unnecessary. Unlike Keith-Roach, whose language and statistics gave greatest weight to the implications of cantonization for Palestine, Harris addressed the matter of wider public perception and opinion. Cantonization, he wrote, would mean “the definite abandonment of the ideal that the administration of Palestine shall be so ordered that Jew and Arab may live together in amity and concord.”65 Harris’s memorandum suggested that the benefits of cantonization could be had through legislation without the attendant political and public relations disaster. It is perhaps not coincidental that cantonization was defeated as the Arab uprising was in process. The transition from cantonization to partition as the favored model of territorial division over the summer and early autumn of 1936 appears closely linked to concerns over the definition and governance of the body politic. Cantonization would divide sovereignty incompletely, even as it drew clear boundaries through the land. A major purported catalyst for the uprising had been the failure to convene a legislative council, and in requiring a central governing body, cantonization would merely replicate the existing problem. After several months of unrest, it became clear to many British administrators that anything other than a “clean cut” would continue to complicate the definition, and practical governance, of a national entity. As one commentator put it:

62 / Chapter Two Certain matters, such as education, some categories of public works, and regional hospitalization might be devolved upon the cantonal administrations, working either with British advisers as was done in Iraq, or directly under a British Commissioner. Even this measure of decentralization would give rise to many serious practical difficulties of administration. But the creation of any central legislative or advisory body, representing the seat of Government, the various cantonal administrations, would, to my mind, be accompanied by almost precisely the same difficulties as those with which we were faced when trying to devise a Legislative Council. The same obstacles of racial representation, numerical proportions and special safeguards would be present.66

The existence of a central government would allow the conflict over representative government to persist and would draw Britain into further negotiations as the “neutral” party exercising oversight for a federation of cantons. Cantonization was thus effectively eliminated from the range of possible solutions available to the Peel Commission. But in drawing up a detailed cantonization map and then undermining the principle of cantonization, Harris opened the door to partition, which had been developed in Zionist circles, proposed by Weizmann to the Italians, and considered intermittently by British officials over the previous few years.

Conclusion As we will see in the following chapters, Harris transmitted many of the ideas of territorial separation that had been proposed and scrutinized in Palestinian circles over the 1920s and 1930s to the Peel commissioners, who ultimately proposed that Palestine be partitioned. The Peel Report thus gave a concrete and consequential shape to ideas that had been developing in diffuse form and were being debated in the Palestine Administration for years before the outbreak of the 1936 Arab revolt. A history of cantonization and partition before the Peel Report is instructive, for it allows us to reframe the Peel partition proposal as the culmination of years of debate and reflection about principles of nationality and statehood and their intersection with facts on the ground. The existence of territorial division as a persistent trend in British thinking about Palestine before the Peel Commission plan of 1937 demonstrates that the Peel Report and its partition plan were very much part of a dialogic continuum and were, indeed, far less individual or idiosyncratic productions than has been argued by contemporary observers and by many historians.

Before Peel / 63

Partition, it seems, was meant to offer a territorial solution to a deeply entrenched political problem whose demographic contours were shifting rapidly after the early 1930s. Much of the testimony heard by the Peel Commission centered on questions of equity in the administration of the mandate including what languages were used, how schools were funded, the administration of justice, and the allocation of immigration certificates. By recommending partition, the commissioners indicated that the struggle over sovereignty and the definition of the nation could be resolved only through a fundamental shift in the physical definition of the polity. The Peel Commission’s proposals championed a solution to the Palestine problem originally formulated and debated by those British officials physically closest to it. The fact that there is a prehistory to the Peel partition plan is significant on several levels. First, it suggests that what appeared to be a plan hastily drawn up in reaction to the violence of the 1936 Arab revolt was actually the product of years of discussion. This is not to say that violence had no effect on Britain’s Palestine policy, but rather that internal debates demonstrated a sensitivity to sporadic interethnic violence and to the prospect of its continuation over the long term. While the partition plan itself was not a reaction to the violence that began in 1936, the endemic nature of such unrest may have eased the mental and bureaucratic transition from cantonization to partition. Second, the early cantonization and partition plans call our attention to the degree to which men with direct experience in Palestine influenced policy and to the way in which local experience, national objectives, and international pressures interacted to produce policy proposals and revisions. Third, the plans confirm the conflicted and fragmentary nature of the policy-making process. Incomplete information, rumor, changing circumstances, and shifting political objectives all had their impact on the gradual emergence of territorial plans for resolving the Palestine problem and on the growing realization that cantonization was unequal to the task. In a related point, this history more fully illuminates the paths not taken and drives home the contingent nature of plans, policies, and statements. The discussions of 1931–36, and, as we shall see in the following chapters, the later ones surrounding the Peel partition plan, suggest that although British officials and policymakers tended to return repeatedly to variations on territorial and political division in the 1930s as a way of solving the Palestine problem, the details were vague and indeterminate, and partition was by no means the inevitable choice. Finally, the Peel partition plan’s deep roots suggest that the study of decolonization in Palestine, and

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undoubtedly in other parts of the British empire, would benefit from a broader chronological field. Restricting an examination of decolonization to the immediate period preceding the withdrawal of British forces from Palestine loses a vital piece of the story of decolonization, which arguably started as early as 1920 with the emergence of questions about nationality and self-determination. It also effaces the fact that partition, which eventually became a plan for granting independence from Britain, was originally designed as a tool for ensuring that Britain would continue its imperial control of key areas of Palestine.

THREE

The Peel Commission in Palestine, 1936–1937

On November 11, 1936, six members of a Royal Commission arrived in Jerusalem by car, driving to the King David Hotel through a city “gay with the flags of all nations” in honor of Armistice Day.1 The immediate trigger for the commission’s appointment had been the start of a violent and protracted Arab rebellion largely motivated by extreme discontent over the lack of a representative legislative body in a context of accelerating demographic change brought about by Jewish immigration from Europe. Although the Arab uprising of April 1936 was not the first in mandatory Palestine, it was certainly the most severe. Arab leaders reacted to what they regarded as the destruction of a scheme for a legislative council by Jewishinfluenced politics in the British Parliament at the end of March and, more generally, to an unprecedented surge of Jewish immigrants fleeing to Palestine from Germany after 1933. Setting aside their differences, they united to form the Arab Higher Committee and called a general strike. Boycotts of Zionist and British economic interests and work stoppages were the main weapons of an uprising that also quickly turned violent. Armed gangs, some from outside Palestine, attacked Jews in the streets, on trains, and in theaters. In contrast to the previous major disturbances of 1929, activists also struck at British officials, police, and soldiers. By mid-May, public security had deteriorated to such a point that Colonial Secretary J.  H. Thomas announced the government’s intention to appoint an investigatory commission. Only in mid-October, after the intervention of the rulers of Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, and Saudi Arabia, was the strike called off, by which time it had inflicted substantial economic damage. In 1936–37 alone, the estimated cost of increased security due to the Arab uprising was £1.5 million while the estimated lost revenue was £900,000.2 Although the

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Royal Commissioners had been appointed in August 1936, it was deemed too dangerous for them to travel to Palestine until the situation had stabilized in the late autumn. Finally, on November 12, High Commissioner Wauchope and the commission’s chairman, Lord Peel, formally opened the proceedings with as much pomp and circumstance as the Palestine Government could muster. Peel had made clear his desire that the commission be presented, through both language and ritual, as more significant than the stream of commissions, inquiries, and investigations that had come through Palestine in the past to little effect.3 As a result, the ceremonial opening was held in the ballroom of Government House with a massed military band, where attendees ranging from senior civilian and military officers to judges and local notables, all in formal dress, listened to the national anthem, a formal readings of the king’s appointment of the commission in English, Arabic, and Hebrew, and welcoming speeches. Wauchope and Peel’s opening speeches were translated into Hebrew and Arabic and then broadcast and published in pamphlet form. The four-hundred-page Peel Report, published nearly eight months after these ceremonies, provided by far the most comprehensive and wideranging analysis of the situation in Palestine to be produced by a British authority. The six commissioners, many of whom, as we have seen, had significant imperial experience, and others of whom were seasoned diplomats and labor specialists, had spent eleven months in Britain and Palestine reading letters, memoranda, and petitions—“until my eyes ache,” one commissioner complained.4 They also heard the oral testimony of British officials, Jews, and Arabs (though the latter boycotted the commission until a week before its departure), and toured Palestine and parts of neighboring Transjordan. The report they produced reviewed Palestine’s history, starting with the biblical story of Abraham; examined the minutiae of economic, social, and political life under the mandate; and offered suggestions for managing problems within the terms of the mandate. This breadth of inquiry in and of itself established the commission as unusual in the series of British investigations into Palestine. However, the report’s central recommendation, and the one for which it is best known, fell outside the bounds of the mandate altogether. After reviewing the operation of the mandate in light of complaints from Jews and Arabs, suggesting methods of satisfying both communities, and offering the advice that future outbreaks of violence should be suppressed by a proclamation of martial law, the commissioners wrote:

The Peel Commission in Palestine, 1936–1937 / 67 These are the recommendations which we submit for dealing with the main grievances under the Mandate put before us by the Arabs and the Jews; but they are not, in our opinion, the recommendations which our terms of reference require. They will not, that is to say “remove” the grievances nor “prevent their recurrence.” They are the best palliatives we can devise for the disease from which Palestine is suffering, but they are only palliatives. They might reduce the inflammation and bring down the temperature, but they cannot cure the trouble. The disease is so deep-rooted that, in our firm conviction, the only hope of a cure lies in a surgical operation.5

If the text of the mandate contained a question about nationality and self-determination, the text of the Peel Commission report proposed an answer. Despite its dearth of details concerning either the precise line of partition or the procedure to be followed in dividing Palestine, the report represented the first clear and public proposal of partition put forward by British representatives. It envisioned partitioning Palestine into an Arab state roughly in the east and south, to be joined with Transjordan; a Jewish state in the north and west; and a new permanent British mandatory area covering the holy cities of Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Bethlehem, the area of Lake Tiberias (the biblical Sea of Galilee), a corridor to Jaffa, a small enclave on the northwest coast of the Gulf of Aqaba, and for an indeterminate time the “mixed” towns of Haifa, Acre, Safad, and Tiberias (fig. 3.1).6 This new mandate, with the exception of the four mixed towns, would function differently from the existing Palestine mandate inasmuch as its aim would not be its eventual termination. “[W]hile it would be the trustee’s duty to promote the well-being and development of the local population concerned,” the commission wrote, “it is not intended that in course of time they should stand by themselves as a wholly self-governing community.”7 Perhaps not surprisingly, the Peel plan explicitly aimed at retaining British control over symbolic and geostrategic assets, such as Christian holy sites, airfields, military installations, and a deep-water port in the Mediterranean. It mentioned preserving “the security of the oil pipe line” and “dealing with the maintenance of naval, military and air forces.”8 With regard to economies, the Peel partition plan included treaty-based and financial workarounds for the potential disruption to the Palestinian economy that partition would represent. The commissioners aimed to preserve existing trade lines by suggesting that treaties between the Arab, Jewish, and mandated states should allow for the transit of goods in bond, for instance, between the Arab state and the deep-water port at Haifa, or

3.1. Royal [Peel] Commission Report partition map, July 1937 Source: Map 8, “Partition: Provisional Frontier,” accompanying Cmd. 5479, Palestine Royal Commission Report [Peel Report] (London: HMSO, 1937).

Credit: Blackmer Maps

The Peel Commission in Palestine, 1936–1937 / 69

between the Jewish state and the Egyptian border. To prevent the economic collapse of the new Arab state, the commission proposed both a subvention from the Jewish state and a grant of £2 million from Britain. Finally, the report urged the adoption of identical customs duties and saw as “essential” that a “commercial convention should be concluded with a view to establishing a common tariff over the widest possible range of imported articles and to facilitating the freest possible interchange of goods between the three territories concerned.”9 Again, perhaps not surprisingly, the Peel Report envisioned the new British mandatory government collecting, for an indeterminate period, all customs duties and distributing them to the relevant states. While the treaties that the commissioners sketched out would include “strict guarantees for the protection of minorities in each State,”10 the final section dealing with partition was the one to tackle the dreaded “exchange of land and population,” which, the commissioners acknowledged, was “the most important and most difficult of all the questions which Partition in any shape involves.”11 For land, the Peel plan assumed that landowners finding themselves in the “wrong” state would want to sell and proposed that the government of each state purchase from individuals in such a situation, at a price fixed by the British mandatory government, and with the assistance of a loan from Britain. On the matter of the 225,000 Arabs in the proposed Jewish state, and the 1,250 Jews in the proposed Arab state, the commissioners wrote: The existence of these minorities clearly constitutes the most serious hindrance to the smooth and successful operation of Partition. The “Minority Problem” has become only too familiar in recent years, whether in Europe or in Asia. It is one of the most troublesome and intractable products of post-war nationalism; and nationalism in Palestine, as we have seen, is at least as intense a force as it is anywhere else in the world.  .  .  . If then the settlement is to be clean and final, this question of the minorities must be boldly faced and firmly dealt with.12

Pointing to the Greco-Turkish population exchanges of the early 1920s, the commissioners suggested that, but for the small issue of land, these might provide a useful model. They noted that in northern Greece there had been surplus land to settle Greek refugees and that such a surplus did not exist in the proposed Arab state, but went on to express the hope that irrigation and development in Transjordan, Beersheba, and the Jordan Valley might allow for the resettlement of large numbers of Arabs and that

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this hypothetical development might be underwritten by the British people through a grant. The Peel Report did not suggest what might be done in the event that irrigation and development were found inadequate for creating land on which to settle nearly a quarter of a million Arabs relocated, as the report euphemistically put it, “voluntary or otherwise.”13 What went unnoted—presumably because these facts would have undermined this proposition—were the miserable conditions of resettlement in northern Greece, the violence and death toll that accompanied the so-called “population exchanges,” and the important detail that these exchanges took place between two already extant sovereign nations. In mapping out partition, the Peel Report articulated a comprehensive principle: the problem with Palestine could not be solved without a fundamental restructuring of the body politic and a concomitant relocation of bodies. The mandate was unworkable so long as Jews and Arabs could not be brought together in a joint, representative legislature. The continuation of the status quo therefore threatened to bring Britain into further disrepute. The prominent use of medical metaphors in the Peel Report is striking as part of a forcefully eloquent attempt to drive home the necessity of radical change. Could this conclusion be put any more graphically than to speak of the body politic as a diseased body requiring surgery? Although, as the previous chapter has shown, this partition proposal had long roots in earlier conversations and plans, the report was significant in making these ideas public and putting the prestige of a Royal Commission behind them. Public articulation naturally bred public reaction. Residents in Palestine were described as being stunned by the report, which they had expected to contain a miraculous palliative for all their ills. Restriction of immigration, sales of land, a more encouraging interpretation of the Balfour Declaration for the facilitation of Jewish immigration and cantonization had been freely discussed in the Palestine and world Press. It is natural therefore that the drastic and unforeseen proposal of partition in its existing form should come as a shock.14

In Britain, the report was met with some degree of surprise but was widely hailed as a “courageous and realistic approach to a thorny problem.”15 Historians have largely recognized the Peel Commission’s significance in the history of British mandatory Palestine.16 It is pointed out that the commission’s report synthesized a vast amount of information on Palestine and set forth a solution in clear terms unanimously agreed upon by

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six well-respected commissioners. Furthermore, the report is implicitly recognized as a major document because its impact extended well beyond the immediate circumstances in which it was issued. Although in the end Britain did not follow through on the commission’s recommendations, the partition plans outlined in the report became a touchstone for a range of people tackling the problem of Palestine. The Jewish Agency drew up an alternative partition plan based in large part on one of the suggested plans in the Peel Report,17 the Woodhead Commission of 1938 based its report entirely on the baseline established by the Peel Commission, and finally, nearly a decade after the Peel Report’s release, the United Nations proposed a partition of Palestine using the Peel proposals and maps as a blueprint. On closer inspection, however, this cursory treatment of the Peel Commission report as a turning point in the history of British mandatory Palestine is unsatisfactory. For one thing, it avoids an obvious question: What was the Peel Commission’s significance in its time? Reading history backward from 1948 frames the commission as visionary, but how did the commission look in 1936–37? What might we see as the commission’s significance if we move away from reading history backward and look at it in its own right rather than as a precursor to the Woodhead Commission of 1938 and the United Nations partition plan of 1947? How did the commission work and how did its personnel, structure, and methods both respond to and influence the turn to partition? Virtually no scholarly attention has been paid to the inner workings of the commission or to the material and process that went into the report, so not surprisingly these questions remain unanswered—and largely unasked—in the literature. This chapter and the following one undertake a close examination of the Peel Commission, treating its work as a dynamic process played out between a variety of actors rather than approaching the report as a static point on which events turned. This chapter examines the work of the commission from August 1936 through to the end of its hearing oral evidence in February 1937, while the following chapter takes the story from early 1937 through the publication of the report that July. The need to put the Peel Commission under the microscope, as it were, exists on both methodological and empirical grounds. The product of the commission’s work cannot properly be divorced from the process that produced it. That is, we cannot understand partition’s trajectory as a British imperial policy if we do not understand how it was conceived, debated, and refined by the body that made it public for the first time. The period from August 1936 to July 1937 is arguably as significant in the history of partition in mandatory Palestine as the report itself. Similarly, the evidence

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placed before the commission tells us much about the workings of the mandate in Palestine and the development of partition and represents a rich collection of documents that has been overshadowed by the report. In order to properly address the questions outlined above, this chapter analyzes the formation and functioning of the commission. First, it outlines the personnel and mandate of the commission and argues that these constitute an important framework in which the work of the commission took place. Second, it examines the processes by which evidence was brought to the commission, either in writing or orally, and highlights the major themes of the evidence. Finally, it offers an assessment of the Peel Commission’s work in Palestine based on the evidence in the earlier sections, arguing for a new interpretation of the commission’s place in the history of mandatory Palestine and of partition. As we will see, much of the commission’s work did not directly concern partition, and yet that voluminous work came to matter because it suggested that the commissioners had come up with partition as a last resort, a brilliant piece of outof-the-box thinking. This concealed the ways in which, in fact, imperial and international patterns and experiences deeply shaped the partition proposal. The open quality of the commission’s charge, combined with the heavy representation of imperial specialists on the commission, meant that imperial strategic objectives and techniques of rule were a constant reference. Likewise, the Jewish Agency’s experience advocating for a particular vision of Palestine before the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission meant that its representatives were well prepared to present certain kinds of evidence in a rhetorical style that was particularly accessible to the commissioners and to work behind the scenes to promote partition, which, as we already know, was far from a new idea.

Structures and Personnel The boundaries of the Peel Commission’s power were clearly delineated both through general legal mechanisms and specifically in the letters patent that established the commission. As a Royal Commission of Inquiry, the commission’s mandate was laid out in its terms of reference, which directed the commission to ascertain the underlying causes of the disturbances which broke out in Palestine in the middle of April; to enquire into the manner in which the Mandate for Palestine is being implemented in relation to the obligations of the Mandatory towards the Arabs and the Jews respectively; and to ascertain whether,

The Peel Commission in Palestine, 1936–1937 / 73 upon a proper construction of the terms of the Mandate, either the Arabs or the Jews have any legitimate grievances on account of the way in which the Mandate has been or is being implemented; and if the Commission is satisfied that any such grievances are well-founded, to make recommendations for their removal and for the prevention of their recurrence.18

In order to undertake this investigation, the Peel Commission was permitted to receive written evidence from any source and to hear evidence both in public and in camera from witnesses of its choosing. Officials in Jerusalem and London were expected to give evidence if requested. Though the legal specificities of appointing a Royal Commission are not of concern here, it is vital to note that the Peel Commission, once appointed, answered to no one and that its investigation could not be halted by the government. It was restricted only by its terms of reference, which were open to interpretation. On the other hand, neither the government in London nor that in Jerusalem was under any obligation to follow the eventual recommendations of the commission. In this sense, then, the Peel Commission (like all other Royal Commissions) was at once immensely powerful, inasmuch as it was politically independent and relatively unfettered in its access to witnesses, and completely powerless to legislate change. Both the framing of the terms of reference and the selection of the commissioners were fraught with difficulty and were the object of attention from various interested parties, both British and otherwise.19 On one side of the British equation stood the beleaguered High Commissioner Wauchope, who hoped for a lifeline to be thrown by a practically oriented commission packed with high-profile and highly respected members. Such assistance would ideally take the form of a forceful report outlining solutions to the crises of representative government, immigration, and land. On the other side sat the new colonial secretary, William OrmsbyGore, who had much broader geostrategic concerns in mind in the wake of the Abyssinian crisis. “My first concern,” he wrote to Wauchope, “is for the prestige and authority of British Government as such, particularly in the East, after the serious blow which our prestige has suffered as a result of the failure of the League, which is universally interpreted as our failure, to prevent Mussolini’s victory against our obvious will.”20 As a result, he wanted to leave the terms of reference fairly open in order to give the commission maximum maneuvering room in which to fix the Palestine problem. Amongst career civil servants at the Colonial Office, OrmsbyGore’s proposed terms of reference were cause for concern. Cosmo Parkinson feared that without a focused and delimited inquiry, the high

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commissioner would not “get from the Commission all that the H.Cr. apparently wants.”21 “Legitimate grievances” could be construed narrowly to mean specific complaints about particular laws, events or policies, or much more broadly, to encompass complaints about foundational principles, structures, and practices. As it happened, Parkinson was right and the Peel Commission chose to interpret its mandate broadly. It consequently asked questions that steered it away from offering quick and pragmatic solutions. Even small linguistic details revealed rifts between various British officials concerned with the Royal Commission and echoed many of the discussions within the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League over the terms of the Palestine mandate. Wauchope proposed that the preamble to the terms of reference note that investigations and suggested solutions were to acknowledge that “the obligations laid down by the Mandate in regard to these two sections of the population in Palestine are of equal weight.”22 Parkinson, in the Colonial Office, objected to this phrase’s inclusion for a precise and apparently significant reason. He understood this phrase to be borrowed from a 1930 White Paper that included a corollary to this statement, namely, “that the two obligations imposed on the Mandatory are in no sense irreconcilable.”23 While Parkinson saw the value of reassuring the Arabs via the first phrase of the mandate’s (and by extension the commission’s) commitment to equality in its treatment of Jews and Arabs, he was alarmed at the possibility that the commission would go back to the 1930 White Paper and discover the second phrase. In other words, he, and the Colonial Office officials who later agreed with him, did not want the noncontradictory nature of British obligations in Palestine to be written into the terms of reference for the Royal Commission. The door was being left open, at least rhetorically, for the commission to find contradictions in the terms of the mandate, something that the High Commissioner for Palestine had very little interest in allowing. The views of Colonial Office officials on the question of the Palestine mandate’s nature appeared quite clearly in the following minutes: “you have got to weigh the rights of the Jews and the rights of the Arabs and find the answer. They are, some people think [this was “of course” before it was crossed out], inconsistent, but the Commission will have to invent a solution which they will say is consistent.” This pessimism was not shared with Lord Peel. The note he received based on this minute was identical in its wording with the exception of the last sentence, which read: “They are, some people think, inconsistent, but the Commission will no doubt find a solution which they will be able to put forward as consistent.”24

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Once the terms of reference for the commission were settled, the next question was its composition. Among names vetted for membership on the commission were men with extensive imperial experience: Lord Willingdon, former governor-general of Canada and viceroy of India; former secretary of state for India and foreign secretary Sir Samuel Hoare; and former viceroy of India Lord Halifax. The Cabinet finally appointed six members, though their selection by no means went unchallenged. Members of the House of Commons protested the exclusion of MPs from the commission, while Eleanor Rathbone decried the absence of a female member.25 While the membership of the commission represented a conservative choice on the part of the Cabinet, it also reflected an array of interests and experiences and was collectively held in high esteem. Lord Peel, chairman of the commission, had his first experience of international conflict in 1897 as a special correspondent for the Daily Telegraph covering the Greco-Turkish war, though most of his later work concerned India. Among other important posts, Peel had served as secretary of state for India from 1922 to 1924 and again in 1928–29. He had also chaired the Burma roundtable conference of 1931–32 and was a member of the joint select committee on Indian constitutional reforms, which issued its report in 1934. In both his roundtable and joint select committee positions, Peel had worked on constitutional matters, navigating the granting of limited self-determination, while simultaneously ensuring ultimate British control over India and Burma. His work was marked by an ability to maintain calm and avoid controversy, and he was well known for his straightforward character and for being “a good fellow with plenty of common sense”26 and “a pleasant wit.”27 Peel’s (Jewish) personal secretary provided a more three-dimensional private portrait of him when she wrote to the Jewish Agency that it’s not a bad thing that he should have been in close contact with a fairly normal Jew these four years, and I should think he must have heard a certain amount about Palestine from Mrs. Dugdale, whose husband is a cousin of his. He also has a brother-in-law with a very Jewish name, but I don’t know. They’re good friends anyhow; he’s on quite good terms with Melchett, and he most certainly has no anti-Jew complex. Of that I’m certain. Don’t be misled for one moment in thinking that either he or Rumbold are dense—very much to the contrary, tho’ they may possibly give that impression in the first place. You’ll probably meet him, in which case say you’re a dear friend of mine. He think [sic] I’m “it!” He’s very keen on getting on with things, hates hanging about and all I hope is that on our side, at least, everything will

76 / Chapter Three be ready by the time they arrive. How my thoughts and hopes will go with them! And what talks he and I will have when they get back!28

In the case of the commission’s vice-chairman, Sir Horace Rumbold, the impression of denseness alluded to by Peel’s personal secretary was, as she noted, merely an appearance. Rumbold was a skilled and experienced diplomat, who had been posted in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Rumbold had served as a chief delegate at the second Lausanne peace conference and as chairman of the international commission on the GrecoBulgarian frontier, among other positions. Sir Harold Nicolson struck the same note, albeit more poetically, of warning about Rumbold’s appearance as did Peel’s personal secretary: The eye-glass in his eye, the vagueness of response, even the half-opened mouth indicated an attitude of mind which the English could recognise as post-Etonian but which the unwary foreigner sometimes mistook for lack of alertness . . . he had merely trained himself to appear more English than any Englishman had ever seemed before. And if his manner ever misled a foreigner into underrating his intelligence, that foreigner was quickly disabused.29

Peel and Rumbold headed a group of commissioners who shared their breadth and depth of experience. As we saw in chapter 1, representing the empire were Sir Laurie Hammond and Sir Morris Carter, who had held key positions in India and Africa respectively. Sir Harold Morris brought to the commission a wealth of experience as president of the Industrial Court from 1926 until nearly a decade after the Peel Commission returned to England. Finally, Professor Reginald Coupland, Beit Professor of Colonial History at Oxford, was a historian not just of the British, but also of the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, and was fascinated by imperial attempts to contain nationalisms. One thing many members of the Peel Commission had in common was that they had tackled questions of imperial governance and more specifically had closely examined both physical and legal boundaries between various groups within a given polity.

Forms of Evidence The evidence placed before the Peel Commission can usefully be divided into three categories; written evidence submitted to the commission before its departure for Palestine or in conjunction with oral evidence in Palestine,

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oral evidence given in public, and oral evidence given in camera. It is difficult to know to what extent all commissioners read evidence submitted in writing in the late summer and early autumn of 1936, but a brief survey of this evidence gives a sense of the commission’s scope as well as the general response to its mandate. Various individuals sent memoranda and letters to Lord Peel via the Colonial Office as early as the end of July 1936. These were unsolicited opinions of wildly variable quality and utility. One letter writer, for example, described himself as the architect of the Balfour Declaration and hailed the Palestine mandate as a solution to the Jewish problems of socialism and Bolshevism.30 On the other hand, the Chief Justice of Palestine, Sir Michael McDonnell, made clear his dislike of High Commissioner Wauchope in a long letter on the events of 1935–36 but provided Peel with a valuable nonofficial perspective on the disturbances.31 Other letters and evidence came from such figures as Sir Robert Waley-Cohen, a founder of the Palestine Corporation and a representative of Royal Dutch/ Shell, and Colonel S. F. Newcombe. By far the earliest institutional or collective response came from the Jewish Agency, which in its usual proactive manner wrote to the commission care of the Colonial Office, asking how it might most usefully communicate with the commissioners. In August 1936, exactly a month before a notice was published in the Palestine press inviting written evidence, the secretary to the Royal Commission, J. M. Martin, notified the Jewish Agency that the Royal Commission would accept memoranda from any organization or individual and noted that the submission of written evidence would not preclude the same party from being invited to give oral evidence. The restrictions on evidence were straightforward: no oral evidence would be heard before the commissioners left for Palestine, and unlike some earlier investigative commissions to Palestine such as the Shaw Commission, the Peel Commission would not hear counsel on behalf of any organizations or individuals.32 This invitation opened the proverbial floodgates. The Jewish Agency expended tremendous effort to collect and synthesize all manner of quantitative and qualitative evidence. Between August 1936 and July 1937 it inundated the Peel Commission with well-researched and tightly argued memoranda, which were precisely the kinds of materials it was accustomed to sending to the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations. Leonard Stein, a prominent lawyer from the Zionist Organization’s London office, drafted a main memorandum, running over three hundred pages, which covered important topics in mandatory government such as immigration and industry, as well as historical topics with contempo-

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rary relevance such as the Balfour Declaration and the McMahon letters.33 Under Stein’s direction, specialists on everything from malaria to education drafted supplementary detailed papers presenting the Zionist case.34 These documents were in addition to personal letters, phone calls, and visits and were supplemented by voluminous oral evidence presented both in public and in camera by Jewish Agency representatives and Va’ad Leumi (National Council) members to the Peel Commission in Palestine. In contrast to the Jewish Agency, which marshaled every piece of evidence it could, the Arab Higher Committee decided to boycott the commission. This decision was taken after Ormsby-Gore announced in early November 1936 that Jewish immigration to Palestine would not be halted for the duration of the commission’s visit, as the Arab Higher Committee had earlier hoped. The boycott was decided upon despite the entreaties of the high commissioner, and it continued for two months. Eventually, the AHC sent a delegation to Baghdad and Riyadh to sound out Palestinian Arabs’ friends and allies, including the kings of Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and was strongly counseled to give evidence before the commission.35 On January 6, 1937, the Arab Higher Committee announced an end to the boycott, and during its last week in Palestine the commissioners heard Arab evidence both from members of the AHC and from other Arab representatives. The memoirs of Auni Bey Abdelhadi, a lawyer trained in Istanbul and at the Sorbonne, a leading politician in the Istiqlal (Independence) party, and one of the founders of the AHC, reveal the pressure this timeline put on the already disadvantaged Arab representatives. Unlike his Zionist counterparts, who enjoyed both well-developed institutional mechanisms for gathering, collating, and processing data and ample time to write and send detailed reports, Abdelhadi scrambled in the days following the end of the boycott to prepare his evidence. He reportedly “asked a friend in Haifa to send him some economic information he needed for his upcoming testimony.”36 With only days to spare before his appearance before the commission, Abdelhadi received a “hurried study” on some key economic issues.37 Hastily prepared, and coming in at the eleventh hour, the Arab case faced numerous disadvantages.

Evidence Given In Camera Owing to the unstable situation in Palestine, the Peel Commission was significantly delayed in its departure from England. This unintention-

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ally allowed many of the logistical issues to be examined and debated at great length. During this time two matters connected to the secrecy of the commission’s proceedings were resolved. First, it was quickly decided that Government of Palestine officials would be asked to present evidence, but that in the event that they gave their evidence in camera, it would “not go further than the Commission.”38 In the event, some officials, particularly those with expertise in areas considered (perhaps naively) uncontroversial such as education and statistics, gave evidence in public. One official who was almost immediately exempted from giving public testimony was the high commissioner. This was justified on two counts: first, his evidence was likely to be extremely sensitive, and second, there was the sense that His Majesty’s representative should not be examined in public for reasons of prestige.39 In Jerusalem, unlike Geneva, the British could at least attempt to exert some measure of control over information and thus shape publicity. Concern in the Colonial Office and the commission over the secrecy of the proceedings was not limited to the evidence that would be given by British officials in Palestine. Perhaps the most contentious issue was whether or not the bulk of general oral evidence would be taken in public or private. High Commissioner Wauchope was first to raise the point in a letter to Parkinson. Although his primary concern might have been for the confidentiality of his own evidence, Wauchope put the entire question in terms of utility for the Royal Commission: “I do not believe that if evidence is taken in public the Commission will get anything of value from non-officials, while even certain officials will probably regard themselves as unable to express themselves with full freedom. In any event I feel no doubt that evidence taken in public would be incomparably less valuable than that taken in private sittings.”40 To support his point, Wauchope sent a note from the commissioner on special duty, Douglas Harris. Harris had sat before two Royal Commissions in India, both of which, he noted, took all their evidence in camera. Additionally, he had served as a member of two sensitive investigative bodies, the Sind Financial Inquiry Committee of 1931, and the Bombay Reorganization Committee of 1932, both of which were connected to the separation of the Muslim-majority province of Sind from the Hindu-majority Bombay Presidency. As Harris explained in his note, both committees provoked an intense amount of public and media interest and were fraught with ethnic and national tension. The difference was that the Sind Committee heard evidence only in public while the Bombay Committee restricted evidence to private sessions. The results were, apparently, striking:

80 / Chapter Three Where evidence was taken with Press and public in the room, every politician spoke rigidly to his party brief, and the Committee in consequence obtained very little benefit from non-official witnesses. Moreover the Press was a constant source of annoyance since it was apt to strip a few questions and answers from their context and give them sensational, and quite misleading, publicity. In the case of the Bombay Committee on the other hand much useful information was obtained from political leaders who were prepared, sitting in camera, to make admissions which they would certainly not have expressed in public.41

Not content to rely solely on Harris’s Indian experience to justify the taking of evidence in private, Wauchope appealed to international standards as well. It was his hope that the Royal Commission might adopt the practice of the Permanent Mandates Commission, holding its opening meeting in public in order to explain its goals and procedures and then continuing with private meetings.42 Two main parties disagreed with Wauchope’s proposal to keep meetings private. The Jewish Agency Executive expressed its doubts about holding the bulk of sessions in private, arguing that “to make secrecy the rule would tend to create an unhealthy atmosphere of suspicion and foster the spread of harmful rumours.”43 Evidently, the Jewish Agency’s overriding concern was that British or Arab sources would give evidence in camera to which the agency would be unable to respond since it was unaware of its content.44 But by putting its concern in terms of the public good (which, after all, suffered—sometimes materially—from the spread of rumors) and public interest in the commission’s work, the Jewish Agency made a compelling case for openness. For similar reasons, Lord Peel came to the same conclusion. He strongly disagreed with Wauchope and Harris’s advice, echoing the Jewish Agency when he stated that holding sessions in private “would create an atmosphere of secrecy and suspicion.”45 Peel had his own tactical reasons for advocating open proceedings. He argued that closed sessions were likely to upset the press whereas open ones would ensure that the press in Palestine remained on the commission’s side. In opposition to Harris, Peel also asserted that in fact open sessions were more useful in dealing with political figures in Palestine, since public statements would allow the commissioners to “pin down” leaders. Otherwise, he feared, politicians would say one thing in private sessions and another to the press or in public. Peel’s most compelling argument for public sessions was strategic. While he acknowledged it was highly likely that the commission would end up holding some private sessions, Peel urged that the commission start

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off with public sessions to earn the goodwill of the press and general population. Then, he wrote, “let us appear to be forced into” private sessions.46 Coupland, Morris, and Rumbold all agreed with Peel in writing, and so, against the advice of officials in Palestine, the commission went forward on the assumption that the majority of the evidence would be heard in public. As it happened, a large number of the commission’s sessions were held privately, and it is likely that its first meeting was in private with the high commissioner.47 Over the course of three months, from mid-November 1936 to mid-February 1937, the Peel Commission heard sixty-two witnesses in thirty-one public meetings (with some people giving evidence in more than one session) and held thirty-five recorded sessions in camera with an unknown number of witnesses.48 The vast majority of meetings were held in Jerusalem, at the Peel Commission’s headquarters at the Palace Hotel (fig 3.2), though the Revisionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, who was barred from Palestine, and the Labour politician and Anglo-Zionist Josiah Wedgwood were permitted to give evidence in London after the commission’s return. Of the public witnesses, eight were Government of Palestine officials, one was a British MP, thirty-eight were Jews (both Zionists and others) and fourteen were Arabs (both Muslim and Christian). All

3.2. View of the Palace Hotel, Jerusalem, site of the Royal [Peel] Commission offices, 1936 Credit: Central Zionist Archives, Zvi Oron (Orushkes) Collection, NZO/634435

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public evidence was compiled and published, but the complete books of private evidence that were bound for each of the six commissioners appear to have been destroyed.49 Several transcripts of secret sessions have survived in archives of private papers and most notably in the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, which incorporate the papers of the Jewish Agency and some original Government of Palestine files left behind when the British withdrew in 1948. One file of secret evidence in the Central Zionist Archives indicates the degree of importance the Jewish Agency placed on discovering the contents of in camera evidence. This file contains tiny photographs (1” x 2”) of a draft copy of the secret evidence of J. B. Macker of the Imperial Chemical Industries. The commission’s practice was to take evidence and then send a draft to the witness for corrections. These photographs were probably taken by a Jewish secretary or clerk in Macker’s office after Macker had hand-written corrections and were then forwarded by that informant to the Jewish Agency.50 The secrecy that pervaded the Peel Commission’s entire investigation is striking and speaks to the importance placed on controlling information in order to mold public opinion and carve out space for political compromise. The commissioners, with the exception of Reginald Coupland, who had developed a close bond with Chaim Weizmann, kept themselves remarkably insulated from Palestinian and British politics during their time working on the commission. Even the Colonial Office staff was frustrated by a lack of direct communication, though inevitably crucial information was relayed by the commission’s secretary, J. M. Martin of the Colonial Office. The main reason for creating a cocoon of sorts around the commission was its undertaking a task whose success depended on learning truths, especially from Palestine Government officials, that could not be spoken in public. The commission also played a quasi-diplomatic function, seeking to discern the true political needs and limits of the Jewish and Arab parties. This was best accomplished in privacy, and the Arab refusal to give any evidence in private can be seen as yet another rejection of the underlying political terms and structures of British mandate Palestine.

Content of the Oral Evidence Evidence given before the Peel Commission reveals much about the functioning of the mandate and, perhaps more important, about the mindsets of witnesses and commissioners. The evidence heard over several months covered a wide range of material from a variety of angles. Topics of inquiry

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and debate ranged from quotidian details, such as the language in which one could send a telegram from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem or the type of marker used to plot out land for settlement, to abstract questions concerning the meaning of the mandate, the fate of the Jewish people, and the history of the Arabs. Physical conflicts over resources or language disguised metaphysical ones over legitimacy, and at the root of every discussion about employment or healthcare, education or taxation, lay the question of rights. Which people had what kind of rights, and were those rights being violated? Every piece of evidence brought to the Peel Commission reflected upon this fundamental question, and partition emerged as a way of answering it. To understand the ways in which these arguments played out concretely, this section first breaks down the range of evidence thematically by topic, examining the main points made by various witnesses relating to each of three areas: land and immigration, economy and labor, and education and health. This has the advantage of conveying the tone of much of the inquiry, which was focused on facts and figures, on evidence, while simultaneously pulling together discussions on the same or similar topics that were often separated by days if not weeks. It then moves on to consider evidence that addressed the underlying principles, and indeed the very existence, of the mandate. The line between this type of evidence and the topical evidence was naturally porous, but in general evidence given on the meaning of the mandate text, the legality or morality of the mandate, or the historic ties of the Jews and Arabs to Palestine had a very different quality and texture than the evidence given on the functioning of the mandate. The latter evidence in large part assumed the mandate and sought to discover whether it was being fulfilled, while the former argued over its existence and construction. From both types of evidence, however, the same broad picture emerged for the commissioners: there was a significant gulf between Jews and Arabs in everything from daily economic, political, and social life to interpretations of the mandate, understandings of history, and expectations and hopes for the future. Most important, perhaps, the Palestine Government appeared in the evidence as underfunded and understaffed, unable to provide adequate government services or to inculcate in the population a sense of Palestinian, as opposed to Arab or Jewish, nationality. The Peel Commission hearings demonstrated the demoralization of British mandatory government, and in so doing, reinforced it. This picture of an effectively divided Palestine whose government could not create a sense of Palestinian national-

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ity highlighted the danger to Britain of continuing the status quo. British interests, above all, pushed the commissioners toward the preexisting idea of territorial division and justified their decision to recommend partition in the final report.

Land and Immigration The topic of land exemplified many of the ways in which the commission’s work revealed substantial weaknesses and fissures. Land was at the core of the mandate, essential to its functioning, a test of British governance and a hotly disputed resource. Virtually all of the evidence presented to the commission on the question of land and immigration revolved, either explicitly or implicitly, around Article 6 of the Mandate for Palestine, which stated: The Administration of Palestine, while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced, shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in cooperation with the Jewish agency referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes.

Nearly every phrase of Article 6 became contested in the course of the Peel Commission’s hearings: how much land, state, waste, and otherwise, was there in Palestine? What constituted “encouragement” by the Palestine Government, and who could be considered “closely settled”? And perhaps most important, what exactly were the “rights and position” of the unnamed “other sections of the population” and what were the “suitable conditions” governing Jewish immigration? The latter set of questions were seemingly answered by the 1922 (Churchill) White Paper, which explained in greater detail the British Government’s interpretation of the mandate. It concluded that what was intended was that “immigration cannot be so great in volume as to exceed whatever may be the economic capacity of the country at the time to absorb new arrivals. It is essential to ensure that the immigrants should not be a burden upon the people of Palestine as a whole, and that they should not deprive any section of the present population of their employment.”51 The “economic absorptive capacity” principle thereafter became the standard used by the Palestine Government to determine the number of immigration certificates given to the Jewish Agency every six months. Far from clarifying the

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situation, however, economic absorptive capacity merely framed the terms of the conflict over immigration. The Churchill White Paper ensured that Jewish representatives would amass huge quantities of data to prove that large numbers of new immigrants were economically necessary and desirable, while the Arabs would decry the economic ruin they faced as a result of immigration. Very early on in the commission’s hearings it became clear that even the basic facts needed to determine the economic absorptive capacity of Palestine were hard to pin down. Douglas Harris and Lewis Andrews, of the five-year-old Development Department, and Frederick Salmon and Maurice Bennett, of the Department of Lands and Surveys, gave evidence on questions of land that exposed how difficult and time-consuming it was for the Palestine Government to obtain reliable statistics about land area, quality, potential, and ownership. All the witnesses seemed to agree on a rough figure of 7 million dunums of cultivable land in Palestine, excluding the Beersheba District and the Huleh area. None, however, could provide the commission with firm numbers for the area of state lands, claiming that state lands were constantly being discovered in the process of settling titles to land. Bennett described for the commission the painstaking processes of determining the area of cultivable land in Palestine and of completing a cadastral survey. To assess cultivable land, teams of surveyors moved from plot to plot of planted land counting the number of olive trees, fruit trees, or vines on a given dunum (about a quarter of an acre) and comparing the total to an estimate of the optimal number of such trees or vines that could be grown on a dunum of land. In this way, cultivable land in Palestine was catalogued into sixteen categories, a process that took the Department of Lands and Surveys from 1928 to 1935.52 To assess ownership, multiple survey and settlement teams went from village to village marking out plots, recording claimants’ names, drawing up maps and plans, and finally deciding any title disputes. This latter process of land settlement, begun in 1927, had, by 1936, covered only one-sixth of the land classified as cultivable apart from Beersheba.53 Hammond suggested that at the current rate of work, land settlement would take the Palestine Government between thirty and forty years at the very least.54 Because of the slow settlement process, the area of state land, some of which the mandate text suggested should be settled by Jews, was in doubt.55 Using tax records, Bennett was able to provide commissioners with the area of state lands leased to tenants but acknowledged that this left a great

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unknown quantity of land out of the picture. Peel expressed frustration at being unable to have a figure that was of vital importance to determining how the mandate functioned: There is this word in the Mandate about including state lands. Unless we know what that is, it is impossible to know whether there is anything left for closer settlement. It is not quite helpful enough to say that here are these areas, some are leased, some not leased. Do not the Government know a little more clearly than that which of those lands are available? [Bennett] We know we have approximately 1,100,000 dunums, of which 700,000 dunums are leased under some arrangement with cultivators or tenants. [Peel] All that is so very vague. It makes such an immense difference with land. You say you have 10,000 acres, but have you any land for settlement? To say it has been leased means nothing . . . We must really get something more definite than that.56

Perhaps even more disturbing to the commissioners were the allegations made by Bernard Joseph, a legal advisor to the Jewish Agency, that the Palestine Government was inadequately protecting the state land of which it was already aware. Joseph told the stunned commissioners that Arab fellaheen (peasants) had been gaining titles to state land under the terms of the Ottoman Land Code that was still in effect for Palestine, merely by claiming that they had cultivated this land for ten years or longer. Furthermore, because villagers were given advance notification of the arrival of land settlement officers, they would often conspire to claim state land as private land. Even when informants brought such episodes to the attention of government, nothing was done, and in fact the government position of state domain officer had recently been abolished.57 Beyond the intricacies and difficulties of ascertaining facts about land in Palestine there lay the struggle over the definition of cultivable land and subsistence area. At the base of the Palestine Government’s figures, shaky as they already were, was a definition of cultivable land that was somewhat arbitrary. A surveyor in the field generally classified land as cultivable or not, and when asked by Peel whether such a person could judge the cultivability of land, Bennett replied simply, “He did his best and we think he can.”58 Furthermore, the Palestine Government’s measure of cultivable land was fairly narrow, requiring that land be productive with the application of labor of the average Palestinian laborer. This definition excluded land cultivable only after irrigation or other intensive and expensive interventions.

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Not surprisingly, the Palestine Government officials who gave evidence on the subject of land claimed that there was no cultivable state land available for further development. Maurice Hexter, of the Jewish Agency’s Colonisation Department, challenged this definition of cultivable land, arguing in his evidence before the commission that the “application of labor” of an “average Palestinian laborer” had no real meaning. Hexter drove home his point by noting that lands classified as uncultivable, such as marshes and sand dunes, were in fact being cultivated by Jews.59 In one example, Hexter cited an area of 600,000 dunums under cultivation, of which the Jewish Agency estimated 140,000 dunums would have been classified by government as uncultivable.60 In evidence gathered in camera, Peel acknowledged the difficulty of pinning down cultivable land when he told the witness, “We will not ask you for a definition of cultivable land. I have grave doubts as to whether it can be done.”61 Subsistence area was a similarly slippery concept. Salmon and Bennett claimed that they could not arrive at an accurate figure for the number of dunums needed for a man and his family to support themselves upon.62 Harris provided the commissioners with a range of figures depending on the quality of land in question but admitted that such figures were less than helpful since they were based on the last census conducted in 1931 and incomplete settlement data that made it nearly impossible to determine whether one person owned plots of land in more than one village.63 Rumbold, summing up the situation, exclaimed, “The search for the ‘lot viable’ seems as difficult as the hunting of the snark.”64 The picture provided by Jewish Agency representatives was, again, quite different from that painted by the Palestine Government officials. Arthur Ruppin, head of the Jewish Agency’s Institute of Economic Research, confidently told the commissioners that Jewish settlers were happily living on twenty dunums of irrigated land and that with the advances being made in irrigation and intensive agriculture in the Jewish Agency’s experimental stations, he felt sure they would soon be living on ten dunums.65 In contrast to Harris, who was generally pessimistic about boring for water, particularly in Beersheba,66 Hexter inundated the commission with statistics about successful bores, the production of water in cubic meters per hour, and the projected area of land that newly discovered water could irrigate.67 In addition to interrogating witnesses about the amount, quality, ownership, and future potential of the land in Palestine, the commissioners also spent time examining current states of land settlement and use. Attempting to assess the absorptive capacity of Palestine with regard to land, the commissioners inquired about the numbers and status of landless Arabs,

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by which they meant Arab cultivators who had been displaced from their lands when the land was sold to Jews. Lewis Andrews informed the commission that only 664 families of landless Arabs (accounting for 3,271 people) had substantiated claims to be included in the Register of Landless Arabs, and of those over half had been resettled on government land. The remainder had declined to be settled by the government and had found other means of livelihood.68 After being pressed by Peel, who seemed sure that this number came nowhere close to representing the number of landless Arabs created by the large amount of land bought by Jews up to 1936, Andrews conceded that perhaps there were at most 2,000 landless Arab individuals who had not submitted claims to the government.69 Though this question was never put directly to Jewish representatives, many of them addressed the economic position of Arab agriculturalists in Palestine. Hexter, for example, claimed that Arab cultivators had not been harmed by Jewish colonization, but on the contrary had benefited from selling £500,000 worth of produce to Jews in the year 1935.70 Arab witnesses, on the other hand, gave no evidence on the situation of landless Arabs, though several focused on the plight of Arab smallholders enticed to sell their land to Jews. This was likely because the Arab Higher Committee, recently created and soon to be outlawed by the British, did not have the benefit of departments of statistics and economics as did the Jewish Agency. In stark contrast to much of the Palestine Government evidence on land, in which basic concepts were murky and essential figures hard to come by, and Arab evidence, which was both impressionistic and came at the tail end of the commission’s time in Palestine, the evidence provided to the commission by the Jewish Agency gave the impression of an efficient, scientific, and optimistic settlement operation, hampered only by the inefficiency and lack of enthusiasm of government. In his evidence, Ruppin articulated land as the central focus of Palestinian Jews, noting that of £12 million spent by Jewish national institutions in Palestine since the war, £5.5  million had gone to land acquisition or agricultural settlement.71 Jewish settlement was presented to the commissioners as combining the best in scientific principles and ideological drive. Ruppin outlined the work of the Jewish Agency’s experimental agricultural station, where experiments were conducted to find and create optimal grains, plants, and livestock and where special breeds of cattle from Holland and poultry from America were being raised.72 He also detailed the financing of settlements and the training of settlers in cooperative farms where “the people did not feel that they were administered by the administrator, but in which they had a feeling that they were creating something by their own forces.”73

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Owing to rapid scientific advances and the continued development of intensive agriculture, Ruppin boasted that the Jewish Agency would “be able to make a small Palestine into a greater Palestine without territorial expansion, merely by increasing the productive power of the land.”74 In essence, Ruppin sidestepped the question of economic absorptive capacity (though many other Jewish Agency representatives dealt with it explicitly), presenting the commission with the vision of successful colonization absorbing large numbers of people on a small area of land. Both Ruppin and Hexter contrasted the energy and enthusiasm of Jewish colonists with the foot-dragging and obstructionism of the Palestine Government, precisely the arguments that the Jewish Agency had been making to the attentive and concerned audience of the Mandates Commission in Geneva. They contended that the government was not putting appropriate resources into the development of Palestine and settlement of Jews on the land, as dictated by the mandate. Ruppin described the government as “a neutral spectator of what we [Jews] did.”75 In contrast with Harris, who saw “the whole policy of the Government” from road building to swamp drainage as “directed towards close settlement,”76 Ruppin argued that there was little impetus from the government to promote settlement: “If Government would make up its mind to fulfill its obligations under paragraph six of the Mandate in the abovementioned sense it would be possible to open the way for a large Jewish settlement and at the same time to improve the standard of the Arab farmers.”77 When pressed by the commissioners to put his evidence in terms of grievances (which, after all, the commission was technically in Palestine to hear), Hexter drew up a twelve-point list characterized by complaints about what had not been done. The Jewish Agency’s demands were for more of everything: more funding and resources, more active policies, faster land settlement, and more secondary roads.78 Perhaps alarmed by the vision of a Jewish Agency constantly pushing government for more, Rumbold attempted to ascertain where the limit lay. After learning that the Jewish Agency calculated that there were 1.5 million dunums of irrigable state land, Rumbold proposed a scenario in which the government gave the entirety of that land to the Agency and asked Hexter whether he would “admit that that was the last possibility of settlement for Jews and that there was nothing more.” Hexter replied that it would depend on what possibilities existed both at that moment and later. Despite being vague, Hexter’s answer was clear enough: the push for more from the government would never end. Rumbold called it “an unending process, an unending vista of possibilities.”79

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Jewish representatives uniformly attacked the most important active obstruction facing Jewish colonization, namely, proposed legislation barring smallholders from selling off their land, while one Arab witness urged its adoption. Bernard Joseph took a multipronged approach, arguing that the proposed legislation was against the mandate, illiberal, and unnecessary. The restriction of land sales would, he said, “constitute a definite interference with our [Jews’] rights” under the mandate.80 Simply allowing Jews to buy land that anyone else could buy did not fulfill the Palestine Government’s obligation to encourage close settlement by Jews on the land, and thus restricting their ability to purchase land would certainly be in violation of the mandate.81 It would also constitute a violation of that sacred principle, “the liberty of contract of the individual.”82 This point seemed to resonate with Peel, who later summed up Joseph’s argument as being in favor of “free trade in land.”83 Finally, Joseph assured the commissioners that on a pragmatic level such legislation was unnecessary. For one thing “even if the Arabs were willing to sell freely, and the Jews always had money to purchase, if we go on at the same rate as we have in the past, which some people find so disquieting, it will take some one hundred and fifty years to buy half the land, excluding Beersheba, and I do not think that is a very terrifying picture.”84 Moreover, it was clear to Joseph that the Arab smallholder (whom he distinguished from the cultivator already covered under existing legislation) did not require protection, and he spoke in the language of imperial analogy to drive his point home to the commissioners: In my submission, the fellah of Palestine is not on the same level as the black native of Africa, who may be bought with a bottle of liquor, or some beautiful beads, but he is a shrewd, hard-headed, close-fisted bargainer. Anyone who has had to negotiate the purchase of land from an Arab, as I have had to do on many occasions, will know that he drives a very good bargain and he is armed with patience, he is in no great hurry to sell his land. He is not, in my submission, the type of person who needs this kind of benevolent protection which the white man feels should be given to the inferior races of Central Africa.

When Peel later sought to clarify whether Joseph thought Arab smallholders ought to be “protected against themselves,” Joseph’s answer was a resounding “no.”85 George Antonius, an Egyptian-born, British-educated Arab Christian, who was an official in the Palestine Government from 1921 to 1930, similarly used precedent in the British empire but to argue exactly the opposite

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point. Antonius noted that the British government had dealt with land tenure in other areas of the empire very differently than it had in Palestine, giving as examples the 1930 Native Lands Trust Ordinance in Kenya and the Punjab Land Alienation Act in India, about which he said articles had been published in the Arabic press in Palestine.86 Antonius suggested that these examples reflected the general principle at work in the British empire, namely, that “an agricultural community is entitled to every protection and even to protection against its own improvidence,” and stated that this principle was being violated in Palestine.87 In this way, Antonius presented the commissioners with a principle as broad as, but in opposition to, Joseph’s free trade in land and used the fact of imperial precedent to argue for its adoption in Palestine. The response of the commissioners was to question that principle’s applicability to Palestine. Coupland raised the point that the many land sales transacted by absentee landowners would not be covered under the kind of law Antonius was proposing, while Hammond, adopting one of Joseph’s points, suggested that legislation restricting land sales might not be permissible under the terms of the mandate. Thus, the text of the mandate was central in the gathering of evidence on questions of land, and by extension of immigration, which was the unstated topic at stake. Most of the evidence focused on defining certain phrases of Article 6 or on proving that the situation in Palestine either satisfied or violated that article. Antonius’s evidence, which relied on principles outside the mandate and potentially in contradiction to it, was not as well received as evidence that hewed to the mandate. The evidence brought before the commission suggested a government overwhelmed by the size and complexity of its work and by the demands of a well-organized, well-funded Jewish Agency adept at interpreting the mandate to its own advantage.

Economy and Labor What the evidence heard by the commission on the Palestinian economy overwhelmingly indicated was the existence of a sharp divide between the economic spheres and lives of Palestinian Arabs and Jews. It also brought to the fore once again the Palestine Government’s inability to obtain reliable data for the purposes of determining economic absorptive capacity, and its reliance on the Jewish Agency to undertake work that, in a plain reading of the mandate, was meant to fall on the government’s shoulders. Arabs attacked the Palestine Government for allowing in too many Jewish immigrants, protecting Jewish industry, imposing high taxes on Arab peasants, and keeping Arabs out of the higher ranks of the civil service,

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while Jews complained of Jewish underemployment in public works and services, poor government funding for Jewish public services, and low numbers of Jewish immigrants being allowed into the country. The overall impression left was of a hamstrung government halfheartedly supervising two diametrically opposed economies. Nearly all witnesses either explicitly or implicitly framed the Jewish and Arab economies as separate. Chaim Weizmann, president of the Jewish Agency and the Zionist Organization, spoke of the Jewish and Arab economic sectors as “somewhat watertight compartments.”88 Peel was struck when Eric Mills, commissioner for migration and statistics, told the commission that when figuring out the economic absorptive capacity of the country, he treated the Arab and Jewish economies separately and did not, in general, take Arab unemployment into account unless he could prove that it was being caused by Jews displacing Arabs from their jobs.89 Later in his evidence, Mills’s language betrayed just how deeply the notion of separate economies influenced his views, when he spoke of undertaking an economic survey of the “Jewish country.”90 Only one Jewish witness, Shmuel Tolkowsky, of the Jaffa Citrus Exchange, claimed to convey the opinions of both Arab and Jewish businessmen to the commission and alone among any of the witnesses meant Palestinians when he said “we” rather than Jews or Arabs.91 But Tolkowsky represented a narrow and fairly specialized segment of the economy—large citrus producers—and one in which Arabs and Jews were producing roughly on a par with each other by the early 1930s.92 Witnesses treated Arab and Jewish labor separately, in large part because Arabs and Jews tended to work separately, and for different wages, even if they worked in the same industries. In citrus plantations, for example, Jews might make from 17.5 to 20 piasters a day, while Arabs would receive between 8 and 10.93 Dov Hos, a representative of the Histadrut (General Federation of Jewish Labor), explained that the Histadrut organized separate unions for Arabs and commented on its attempt to bridge the economic, if not the cultural, gap between Arab and Jewish workers: We should live as two nations side by side, each having its own ideas, aspirations, literature, education and so on, but we have a very, very long way to go together, Jews and Arabs in general, and Jewish and Arab labourers especially so far as we can in the whole economic field and in a number of very complicated and grave problems the Jewish and Arab labourers can work together and establish co-ordination and co-operation between the Unions.94

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A representative from the Marxist Poale Zion (Workers of Zion) movement complained that government attempted to disrupt cooperation between Jewish and Arab workers, citing the ban placed on a mixed union formed in 1929.95 The “Jewish” economy held a somewhat analogous position to that of cultivable land in determining the biannual immigration quota. Economic absorptive capacity was taken to mean not only the ability of the rural economy to absorb Jews (as one might assume from the emphasis in Article 6 on the close settlement of Jews on the land), but also the ability of industry and the urban economy. To determine the capacity of the nonagricultural economy to absorb new immigrants, Mills relied not only on government statistics but also significantly on Jewish Agency data. Jewish Agency officials collected and collated information on everything from rates of unemployment to wages to the potential growth of various industries, which they then used to lobby the Palestine Government for immigration certificates. Peel observed that Mills therefore received extensive assistance determining the state of the economy from the Jewish perspective, but not from the Arab, since the Arabs lacked an Arab Agency or any quasi-governmental organization.96 An indication of the ideological slant of the statistics being given to the Palestine Government by the Jewish Agency was found in the statement of Siegfried Hoofien, general manager of the Anglo-Palestine Bank and member of the Standing Committee on Trade and Industry. Hoofien asserted in his evidence that the economic potential of Palestine to absorb immigrants was both large and incalculable: “we deprecate the idea that it is possible to put an ultimate limit, calculable today in exact figures, on the possibilities of urban colonisation.”97 The same officials who collected data and lobbied for immigration certificates were then entrusted by the Palestine Government to select new immigrants and guarantee their employment. Mills’s evidence revealed the striking extent to which the government turned over immigration control and oversight to the Jewish Agency, even though the agency was in an almost perpetual struggle with the government to increase the number of immigration certificates.98 Immigration was not the only area of economic life in which the Jewish Agency took on significant governing functions. As the representatives of the Histadrut detailed, Jewish organizations in Palestine provided workers’ health and accident insurance and pensions, in addition to providing medical care for the Jewish and parts of the Arab population and education for Jewish children. Jewish witnesses before the commission argued that the government should give larger grants to Jewish organizations not only

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because they claimed that Jews contributed disproportionately to the state coffers, but also because Jewish organizations, supported by Jewish donations or private “taxes,” provided services that the government was obliged to offer its citizens. Dov Hos argued that Jewish institutions “as a rule, perform duties which in other countries the Government is performing and in our opinion the Government should perform here. Therefore we suggest that Government, take health insurance, should either institute health insurance on a national scale, or as long as it does not it should contribute to our sick fund.”99 Jewish grievances concerning the economy and labor fell generally into two categories. The first encompassed complaints that the government underfunded Jewish institutions and hampered the growth of the economy through stingy immigration quotas, low wages for government work, and a lack of preferential tariffs (banned under the terms of the mandate) for products such as citrus.100 The second covered allegations that Jews did not receive their fair share of employment in government-funded public works and services. Moshe Shertok, head of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency, suggested that since Jews contributed roughly 37  percent of public revenue, they should receive at least 37 percent of employment in public works, with a higher percentage for works purely in Jewish areas or for Jewish services. Shertok elaborated a system of quotas for Jewish employment in government and public service ranging from road building  to railways. Peel’s exchange with Shertok was indicative of the ideals of the commissioners and the realities of an economy constructed along ethnonational lines: [Peel] You have been seeking all sorts of percentages and distinctions and fixings of percentages for Jews in all classes of labour, Government and otherwise, the civil service, the railways, and so on, but do you think that is a very healthy condition in a country, that every sort of public service should be measured out, as it were, to Jews and Arabs, according to their numbers or contribution to the financial resources of the country? Would it not be far better if they were treated, as many of them are, as Palestinians, as citizens of a country, and that all these distinctions of race should be, as far as possible, put aside? [Shertok]—In future I hope it will be so, but if that is adopted at present I have shown . . . the results are the virtual exclusion of Jews, or a very heavy under-representation of Jews.101

Shertok’s response indicated that as far as he was concerned, the rights of Jews to proportionate representation (and depending on one’s view, dis-

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3.3. Arab representatives outside the offices of the Royal [Peel] Commission, January 12, 1937. From left: Hussein al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem and member of the Arab Higher Committee, Ruhi Bey Abdelhadi, principal assistant secretary in the Palestine Government, Ragheb Bey Nashashibi, former mayor of Jerusalem and member of the Arab Higher Committee. Credit: G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, LC-M33- 9246

proportionate representation) trumped any idealistic impulse to smooth over ethnic differences with Palestinian nationalism. Arab representatives similarly presented the commissioners with a list of grievances stemming from their exclusion from government patronage but differed in their characterization of the economy. Dr. Hussein al-Khalidi, a former senior government officer in the Health Department and, at the time, the mayor of Jerusalem, decried the declining number of Arabs in government employment. Al-Khalidi blamed this decline on the fact that Arab senior officials were aware that they had no chance of moving up the ranks. This led to “a state of despair and lack of confidence in the goodwill of the Mandatory.”102 The testimony of Hassan Sidki Bey Dajani offered insight into the decline of Arab government officials, as he spoke bitterly of discrimination in the civil service against Palestinian (by which he meant Arab) officers.103 While Jewish witnesses spoke of a vital economy with virtually boundless potential, Arabs who came before the commission painted a grim

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picture of the (Arab) economy. This was due in great part to the plummeting prices of agricultural products, the main component of the Palestinian economy, on account of the Depression. Fuad Effendi Saba, a Christian chartered accountant educated in Beirut and the UK, told the commission that Arab farmers paid a disproportionate share of taxes through tithes, property taxes, animal taxes, and customs and excise, leading to their financial ruin. Furthermore, he claimed, the government protected Jewish industry, driving up costs for Arab consumers, and did not protect Arab industry, hurting small Arab industrialists.104 With reference to government protection of industry, Saba argued that by taking action to the detriment of the Arabs in favor of the Jews, government was violating the “suitable conditions” clause of Article 6.105 George Mansour, secretary of the Arab Labour Federation, corroborated Saba’s portrayal of the economy, noting in particular the low wages of Arabs as compared with Jews, high levels of underemployment and unemployment, and debt.106 Overall the Arab witnesses seemed to concur with Saba’s evaluation that the mandate was designed for the “economic annihilation of the Arabs.”107

Education and Health Evidence on education and health confirmed the existence of two separate, and unequal, spheres within Palestine. But perhaps more than any other areas explored by the Peel Commission, questions of health and education suggested both the possibilities for greater interaction between Arabs and Jews and the improbability of a future development of pan-ethnic Palestinian national feeling. In addition, statements made by an Arab representative about education indicated what had been hinted at in other types of evidence, namely, that the Arabs saw the Palestine Government, not only the Jews, as utterly foreign and incompatible with their desire for national self-determination. The difference in standard of living between Jewish and Arab populations in Palestine was hard for witnesses to quantify when discussing culture, family life, or even average wages. Expenditure on medical care and education, however, threw the gap between the two communities into stark relief. Colonel G. W. Heron, director of medical services, told the commissioners that the Palestine Government spent about £180,000 on medical aid for approximately 940,000 Arabs, while Jewish organizations spent close to £320,000 on medical services for a Jewish population of approximately 370,000.108 Though Jewish hospitals and clinics treated Arab patients, the numbers were too small to alter the fact that Jewish spend-

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ing on healthcare outpaced government spending by over four to one. Furthermore, this ratio did not take into account the existence of a private Jewish health cooperative, which Heron compared to Britain’s National Insurance. Not surprisingly, Heron reported infant mortality among Jews at 77 per thousand births, while among Arabs it stood at 148 per thousand births.109 Expenditure and results were similarly lopsided in education. While only 27 percent of Arab children were in school (15 percent in government schools and the remainder in private ones),110 90 percent of Jewish children up to the age of eleven and 70 percent of Jewish fourteenyear-olds were enrolled in schools, all of which were funded by the Jewish community.111 Disease control and sanitation were areas in which some witnesses and commissioners saw the potential to bridge the separation between Arabs and Jews. In answer to Peel’s suggestion that cooperation was possible in matters of sanitation, Heron responded with the example of Birkat Ramadan, the area of malarial swamps near Netanya, where the government used equal funds from government, Jewish, and Muslim sources to pay for swamp drainage.112 Cooperation in the areas of sanitation and the prevention of infectious diseases was most successful, for the reason that Professor I. J.  Kligler, chairman of the Health Council of the Va’ad Leumi, stated for the commission: “Health is rather different from education. In education you can segregate your groups and give them an education according to the means. Health is something which affects the whole population equally. You cannot eliminate typhoid from one section of the population and not from the other.”113 Cooperative preventative and palliative medical care, however, did not enjoy the same degree of success; Henrietta Szold, director of the Va’ad Leumi’s Social Services Department, told the commission, “We have made every attempt, especially in the health services of Hadassah, to bring about co-operation between Jews and Arabs and also in the social services. We have not succeeded. I do not know why.”114 Compared with diseases like typhoid and malaria, poor health or high infant mortality rates in the Arab population had a smaller effect on the Jewish population, and presumably, despite Szold’s assertion, fewer resources were devoted by Jewish organizations to ameliorating the health conditions of the largely rural Arab population. With barely a quarter of the Jewish population living in rural areas,115 Jewish health resources were naturally concentrated in developed urban areas. In contrast with health, which at least provided certain areas of contact and cooperation between Arabs and Jews, education stood out as the most highly segregated arena of public life in Palestine. Jews and Arabs

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were educated in separate schools and in different languages, and the topic of education very quickly brought the question of Palestinian nationality and the character of Palestine to the fore in the commission’s hearings. In what appeared at first to be a simple presentation of the state of education in Palestine through statistics and descriptions of practice, H. E. Bowman, the director of education, quickly found himself revealing the underlying structures and assumptions of the mandate by answering Coupland’s questions about the language of instruction in government schools, which was Arabic. Coupland was shocked by this and made the point that “in no other territory under British rule, mandatory or otherwise, is there a Government maintained secondary school in which the language of instruction is not English.”116 Coupland went on to suggest that by allowing linguistic separation, the government was allowing ethnic and racial divisions to persist, and Bowman admitted that the educational system in Palestine played no role in promoting “good understanding between the different sections of the population.”117 When answering a question about whether he saw mixed schooling in Palestine as a possibility, Dr. Joseph Lurie, the Va’ad Leumi’s director of education, inadvertently hit on the rift that education exposed: That would not be desirable. They [the Va’ad Leumi representatives] are opposed to such a course because they maintain that education should be national and ask this not only for their own education system, but also for the Arab education system. [Coupland] National but not Palestinian?—[Interpreter] It should be both, both national and Palestinian, and he would like to add that they had a scheme which they had proposed to their own people, that there should be mixed social evenings between Arab pupils and Jewish pupils, and lectures to Arabs on Jewish subjects and to Jews on Arab subjects.118

The nation and Palestine were seen by Lurie and his compatriots as two separate entities; Palestinian nationality encompassing Jews and Arabs never entered the picture. Evidence given before the commission by Dr. Khalil Totah, headmaster of the Friends’ School in Ramallah and a former official in the Department of Education, drove home the point that the Arabs did not conceive of Palestinian nationalism as including Jews. Nor did they see the Palestine Government as a Palestinian national government, despite the fact that Arabic was the language of government education. Totah’s initial grievance against the government was that “Arab education is either designed to reconcile

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Arab people to this policy [of establishing the Jewish national home] or to make the education so colourless as to make it harmless and not endanger the carrying out of this policy of Government.”119 He advocated greater Arab oversight in education and suggested the establishment of an Arab department of education analogous to that of the Va’ad Leumi. Such a department, he felt, would be able to promote national feelings through education and cultural activity, though as Coupland pointed out, if government were to promote Arab national feeling, it would be “work[ing] for its destruction.”120 Making a strong link between nationalism and education, Totah moved quickly from complaining about the lack of an Arab department of education to stating that an Arab department of education would be insufficient without an Arab government. In answer to a question from Morris, Totah characterized the Palestine Government as “foreign” and said that Arab children under the mandatory government “are just step-children.”121 Coupland asked Totah the same question he asked Bowman, namely, whether he thought education could be used to promote better relations between Jews and Arabs. Totah responded that the only thing would be to have them go to school together and study Arabic, though he acknowledged that currently “every attempt at getting the children together has been rather unsuccessful, even in games and matches such as football.”122 Divided Palestine was reflected in the language of education and in the inability to bring children together for a schoolyard game.

The Mandate In addition to hearing evidence on conditions in Palestine, the commission also heard witnesses expound on the meaning of the mandate. As befitting a document that was referred to by the Jews as “our Magna Carta”123 and “the Bible,”124 discussions on the mandate text often took on a character halfway between biblical exegesis and the crafting of a legal opinion.125 By far the most extensive and tightly constructed evidence on the question of the mandate was presented by Leonard Stein, honorary counsel to the Jewish Agency, in two exhaustive sessions, the first on New Year’s Eve 1936, and the second a few days into the new year.126 Although this evidence came near the end of the commission’s hearings in Palestine, Stein’s interpretation of the mandate formed the quasi-legal framework around which the bulk of the Jewish evidence was built. Stein set out to interpret for the commissioners not only the mandate, but also important documents such as the Balfour Declaration, the 1922 Churchill White Paper, and the 1931

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letter from Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald to Chaim Weizmann clarifying the 1930 Passfield White Paper. Stein aimed to explain and define three key concepts in the mandate and its attendant documents: the “double undertaking,” “economic absorptive capacity” and the timing of the development and duration of the mandate. Using at times complex intertextual reasoning and close readings of individual words and phrases, Stein offered the commissioners a “plain reading” of the mandate. He argued, just as the Mandates Commission had in its 1930 report, that the “double undertaking” or, in the words of the Mandates Commission, the “obligations of equal weight” were in fact slightly unequal. In 1930 the Mandates Commission had distinguished between the “objects of the mandate” and the “immediate obligations of the Mandatory” in order to urge against restrictions on Jewish immigration, land sales, and settlement.127 Stein similarly contended that establishing the Jewish national home on the one hand and not prejudicing the rights of non-Jews in Palestine on the other were equally binding on Great Britain but not equally positive. As a result, he concluded that “those who framed the Mandate did not want to suggest that there were, as it were, two National Homes in Palestine” and that there was no contradiction inherent in the mandate. This allowed Stein to make the point that with this reading of the mandate it became clear that “the British Government did not mean to deceive the whole world by saying ‘We are going to facilitate the building up of a Jewish home for the Jewish people it clearly being understood that the non-Jewish community have a right to put a stop to it if they choose.’”128 The implication was that any other reading of the mandate risked suggesting Britain’s dishonesty. On the topic of economic absorptive capacity, after a lengthy legal exercise in which he dissected the words “rights” and “position” as used in Article 6 of the mandate, Stein concluded that it is “impossible to get out of the words ‘civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities’ anything that cuts down the main purport of the Balfour Declaration so far as concerns such matters as Jewish immigration.” Stein further asserted that contrary to suggestions that political conditions should play a role in determining absorptive capacity, economic capacity was the only measure allowed both by the mandate and by later directives of the British government, and was indeed a principle required by the mandate. After hearing Stein’s three-hour account of the reasoning behind these two points, Peel commended him on his “able exposition” but confessed to feeling that the mandate was “far more obscure than I thought it was yesterday.” “Let us hope,” Hammond quipped, “it will be clearer in 1937 than it is in 1936.”129

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In his final session before the commission, Stein argued that the word development in the phrase “development of self-governing institutions” implied a gradual process, by stages, and so the mandate did not require the immediate or imminent institution of a national legislative assembly. Using the type of reasoning he had exhibited in his first session, he also drove home the point that the principle of self-government could not be allowed to negate that of establishing the Jewish national home. Stein challenged the commission’s equation of self-governing institutions with parliamentary ones and suggested that the establishment of local councils would fulfill the requirements of the “self-governing institutions” clauses of the mandate. In connection with the anticipated speed of development, Stein argued that it had “always been contemplated that the Mandate would be one of indefinite duration.”130 In short, Stein implied that by remaining in Palestine, facilitating the establishment of the Jewish national home, and establishing local councils, Britain would be fulfilling the terms of the mandate. Arab representatives took a similarly legal approach, though their expositions were nowhere near as complex or elegant, and they reached conclusions that were the opposite of Stein’s. One tactic used by the Arabs was to mimic the Zionists and argue within the framework of the mandate, but by far the most popular was to argue that the mandate itself was invalid, illegal, and immoral. Taking the terms of the mandate and accompanying documents as given, the lawyer and member of the Arab Higher Committee Auni Bey Abdelhadi tackled the question of absorptive capacity, arguing that the mandate required that immigration be controlled by the “political capacity of the country to absorb new arrivals.”131 Another member of the AHC, the medical doctor Jamal Husseini, was particularly adept at marshaling evidence in the style of Stein and argued that the “rights” and “positions” of Article 6 in fact guaranteed the Arabs of Palestine a permanent majority of the population and that the Palestine Government had failed to “safeguard the position of the Arabs.”132 These grievances from within the text of the mandate were overshadowed in the Arab testimony, however, by evidence asserting that the entire mandate was invalid. The Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, cited a range of prominent figures from Field Marshal Allenby to US President Woodrow Wilson (often mixing up dates and actors in the process) in his effort to prove the Arab right to self-determination in Palestine.133 Using a twist on Stein’s rhetoric, he attributed what might look like British inconsistency in establishing the seemingly contradictory terms of the mandate to Jewish pressure: “[W]e cannot see how such a great nation,

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such a great country, with the great statesmen they have, could adopt such a course unless there was outside influence bearing in that direction.”134 Auni Abdelhadi and Jamal Husseini mixed denial of the mandate’s validity with insistence that the terms of the mandate were being violated. Abdelhadi asserted that the mandate was inconsistent with Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations and noted that complaints about the functioning of the mandate were subsidiary to the point that “nothing matters so much to the Arabs as their real and natural rights.”135 In keeping with the eloquence of his evidence, Husseini made the same point as Abdelhadi but echoed the Jewish witnesses’ framing of the mandate as their Magna Carta/Bible and spoke in a legal language that evidently resonated with the commissioners: “As we understand the Palestine Mandate in general, we think that Article 22 and particularly Section 4 of that Article is really our Charter, and the Mandate itself represents its by-laws. Our submission is that the by-laws are inconsistent with the Charter.”136

Partition A consistent thread throughout three months of hearing oral evidence was the commission’s push to highlight the rhetorical and practical dead ends of the mandate. Admittedly, this was not hard to do: of the three “parties” coming before the commission, only a portion of the Jewish representatives were optimistic about the mandate, and even they inundated the commission with memoranda and evidence detailing their shortchanging by the Government of Palestine. British officials sounded hopeless, bewildered, and often angered by the conflict, and the Arabs argued for the legal and moral invalidity of the mandate itself. In some ways it is not surprising, given the evidence, that the commission turned to partition, but there are also strong hints in the commission’s questions that the turn to partition had taken place before the evidence was collected and mulled over, and surviving transcripts of secret sessions of the commission show that by the end of December 1936 and early January 1937, partition was being discussed with Jewish leaders.137 At an in camera session with Chaim Weizmann on January 8, 1937, for example, Coupland asked him to comment on a “scheme which really deserves to be called more than cantonisation; it is really partition on a federal basis.”138 In a lengthy response, in which he mentioned his meetings in London with Archer Cust, and during which he utilized a map that he had brought, Weizmann analyzed the advantages and drawbacks of partition, noting that it was “against the Mandate” and concluding that if partition

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3.4. Chaim Weizmann, president of the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization, giving evidence before the Royal [Peel] Commission, 1936 Credit: Central Zionist Archives, Zvi Oron (Orushkes) Collection, NZO/634447

was “the price which is demanded from us, our contribution to peace, I do not think you would find us difficult.”139 Given the prevalence of cantonization and partition in discussions about Palestine among British officials, commission members, and a few Zionist leaders, what is striking about the public oral evidence is how little of it concerned any type of territorial division. Hammond asked Stein briefly about the possibility of cantonization as a solution, to which Stein responded that cantonization was an “inchoate” idea but would probably violate Articles 15 and 25 of the mandate.140 He then put the same question to Abdelhadi, though rather than use the word cantonization, he asked whether a treaty could be concluded by “dividing Palestine and giving the Jews a small portion of Palestine?” Abdelhadi’s way of saying no was to point out that “France refused to give Alsace-Lorraine to Germany.”141 Why, given its history, was the Peel partition plan clearly tacked onto the report at the last minute and given only the sketchiest of outlines? And why did the commission not take public evidence while in Palestine on the question of partition if it was clear that partition was under consideration?

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Both bureaucratic and strategic influences probably helped keep partition off the table until the last minute. Partition fell quite clearly outside the commission’s mandate, which was to examine and report on the causes of the uprising and to propose methods for removing Arab and Jewish grievances. The commissioners followed these instructions to the letter, asking witnesses to explain the root causes of discontent in Palestine and writing the majority of the report on matters of everyday life under the mandatory administration. The commissioners may also simply have been good social scientists, methodically attacking a problem until they realized that their evidence did not point in the direction that they had hoped. Partition was present as a concept and could then substitute as a solution. At the very least the commissioners—even Coupland—knew that it would have been futile to propose something as radical as partition without first convincingly eliminating other possible scenarios. Strategic considerations were also certainly at work. The commissioners were fully aware, as is evident from their January 8, 1937 in camera meeting with Weizmann, that partition would mean the end of the mandate. Raising such a proposal publicly could only inflame public sentiment and risk angering those tasked with supervising Palestine from Geneva. Furthermore, given the negative public reactions to the partition leaks of 1932, it is not particularly surprising that the commission did not vet partition in its public sessions in Palestine. By characterizing partition as an eleventh-hour attempt at solving the problem, the commissioners shielded it from a certain degree of publicity and criticism and gave a reasonable excuse for their plan’s lack of detail. Since it included specifics about land, population, and economy, the plan seemed serious and workable, but by not providing too much information, it retained a degree of flexibility and openness that could have helped it gain supporters.

Conclusion The nature of the Peel Commission was intriguingly contradictory. On the one hand, its very structure emphasized its consultative nature. Unlike past investigative commissions to Palestine, the Peel Commission heard from witnesses directly rather than via counsel and did not allow outsiders to conduct cross-examinations. Like the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations, the Peel Commission opened the floor—at least theoretically—to any party willing to take it. Stepping beyond even the Mandates Commission, the Peel Commission came to the people (rather than vice versa) and heard testimony that took as its fundamental principle

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that the mandate over Palestine was invalid. Connected to the commission’s openness was an element of power and independence. As a Royal Commission, the Peel Commission was completely independent politically, and its investigations could not be controlled or stopped by the British government. The flip side of this openness and independence was that the Peel Commission was strikingly devoid of obligations. Witnesses were welcome to write letters and memoranda and even to give oral evidence and engage in dialogue with the commissioners, but at the end of the process the commission had no obligation to reflect the voices of witnesses in its report. A stark example of this disconnect came when the commission recommended partition in its final report even though it had taken virtually no evidence on the possibility or desirability of partition. A similar relationship existed between the Peel Commission and the British government. The commission was free to say whatever it wanted and recommend the solution it saw fit in the report, but the government was under no obligation whatsoever to follow through on its recommendations. Given that the commission recommended partition as a solution having heard virtually no evidence on it in public sessions and very little in private sessions, and that the British government eventually discarded the commission’s partition plan, what difference did the Peel Commission make in Palestine? A closer look at the commission as undertaken in this chapter reveals that it was less of a policy watershed than previously assumed. It was, however, a watershed in the practice of the Palestine mandate. Borrowing—intentionally or not—from the work of the Permanent Mandates Commission, the Peel Commission acted as a temporary valve for lowering the pressure in Palestine; the country did not experience renewed widespread unrest until the late summer of 1937, after the publication of the commission’s report recommending partition. A wide range of parties came before the commission in Jerusalem and vented, argued, praised and condemned the mandate, painted visions of the future, and decried injustices of the past. This alone was unprecedented in the history of mandatory Palestine. Although it temporarily alleviated the pressure, a notable by-product of the Peel Commission appears to have been a crystallizing of rhetoric—at least in public—around the two poles in Palestine. The two major camps of Zionist Jews and anti-Zionist Palestinian Arabs dominated in both oral and written evidence, and little was heard from non-Zionist Jews or Arabs neutral or favorable toward the Zionists. In this sense, the Peel Commission provided an arena in which both camps could test their political mettle.

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The Jewish Agency and the Arab Higher Committee both had the opportunity to demonstrate how well they had learned a certain type of politics. The fact that the Jewish Agency acted as a proto-government agency in both its marshaling and its presentation of evidence while the Arabs conducted a boycott of nearly the entire exercise undoubtedly supported the commissioners in their turn to partition. In addition, the content of the evidence on the themes of land and immigration, economy and labor, and education and health indicated a deeply divided country and an ineffective government. What became clear over the course of the commission’s time in Palestine was just how badly the Palestine Government was managing the logistics necessary to rule, and how utterly it was failing to placate either Jews or Arabs. The commissioners were left with the impression of a territory that would continue to be a drain on Britain’s imperial prestige and resources, a thorn in the side of its administrators, and in Rumbold’s vision, an “unending vista” of demands and complaints. As a result both of their preconceived ideas going into Palestine, and of the polarized content and presentation of evidence, members of the Peel Commission were able to take the existing concept of partition and prescribe it as the treatment for Palestine’s ills.

FOUR

Negotiating Partition, 1936–1937

The proposal that Britain “should take the appropriate steps for the termination of the present Mandate on the basis of Partition”1 came near the very end of the Peel Commission’s extensive report. While hundreds of pages were devoted to topics as varied as the history of Palestine, Arab nationalism, and the regulation of Jewish immigration under the mandate, the commission’s recommendation for partition, including a brief plan, consumed a mere fourteen pages. As noted in the previous chapter, it was these fourteen pages that drew public attention and, initially, condemnation. Similarly, scholars have identified the commission’s recommendation to partition Palestine as a watershed moment in the history of the British mandate. The previous chapter suggested that the report itself has overshadowed the importance of the very gathering and giving of evidence and oral testimony, the structure and personnel of the commission, and the content of the evidence itself in historical assessments of the Peel Commission’s significance. Delving into those subjects revealed that the sessions of the commission acted as an arena in which various groups could act out a kind of political performance, simultaneously making their views heard and proving that they were capable, to various degrees, of organizing and articulating their positions. This chapter undertakes a similar examination of neglected elements of the commission. In a sort of scholarly synecdoche, the partition proposal has come to represent the entire report and virtually nothing has been written on the hundreds of pages that precede the partition proposal. Additionally, few scholars have examined discussions among the commissioners, within the Colonial Office, or between Jews, Arabs, and British officials of the issues of the report and of partition in the six months between the commissioners’ various departures from Palestine in mid-January and the

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release of the report on July 7, 1937.2 As demonstrated in chapters 1 and 2, partition was not a new concept either in the empire as a whole or more specifically in Palestine, and this chapter suggests that tracing the development of the Peel Report helps us better understand how and why partition emerged as its centerpiece. In order to accomplish this, the first part of this chapter examines conversations among the commissioners after leaving Palestine, revealing some of the personal and ideological fault lines that characterized these discussions. The second examines what might be thought of as testimony received after the sessions of the commission had concluded. This section outlines British military opinions on partition solicited by the commission and sheds light on the process by which Jewish, and to a lesser extent Arab, leaders made their views on partition known to the Colonial Office and the commission. It argues that the form and delivery of certain opinions significantly altered the shape of the final partition proposal. The third section examines the report itself, analyzing its structure and rhetoric and demonstrating the ways in which these helped to support an otherwise brief and potentially weak partition proposal.

Rifts within the Commission Very little remains in the archival record of the tenor or content of private meetings between the commissioners either in Palestine or in the few days they spent at the spa town of Helouan, Egypt, after leaving Palestine.3 But from personal correspondence, and more explicitly from the minutes of three meetings in Helouan, it becomes clear that despite the appearance of unanimity in the final report, there was strong discord beneath the surface of the commission. In letters to his son sent from Palestine, Rumbold hinted at some of the burden the work was placing on relationships between the commissioners, complaining that “the work is very strenuous and never lets down”4 and that he and Peel were “finding some of our colleagues rather difficult to manage.”5 From January 21 to January 23, 1937, most of the commissioners met to discuss what they had heard in Palestine. Morris Carter was missing from all three meetings, and Harold Morris was absent for the first meeting. The commissioners who had been most active in the oral sessions, Peel, Rumbold, Hammond, and Coupland, were in attendance. At the first meeting, it immediately became clear that although the commissioners had heard the same evidence, and had presumably discussed it while in Palestine, they were in significant disagreement over the fundamental causes of Palestinian unrest as well as the potential solutions. Peel focused

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his initial comments on the Jewish national home, the definition of which he felt was crucial to moving forward. From his time in Palestine Peel had determined that “there was uncertainty as to whether the National Home had been established and as to its proper size” and suggested that the heart of the problem lay in the fact that “the idea of a National Home had been entirely changed since 1922: instead of a cultural centre it had come to be looked on as a possible refuge for millions.”6 Rumbold seemed to agree with Peel, arguing that “when the Mandate was drafted it was never contemplated that the National Home would grow so quickly or to such an extent.”7 Because of the radically changed conditions, including restrictions on immigration into the United States, Hitler’s rise in Germany, and the economic crisis in Poland, Rumbold suggested that the mandate was no longer applicable. In Rumbold’s view, the mandate had envisioned the Jewish national home as a “mecca” and a “cultural centre,” not as a refuge for hundreds of thousands of distressed Jews.8 Hammond concurred, stating that “the situation was quite different from what it was in 1922 and the Mandate did not meet the new conditions.”9 All three men indicated that the speed and volume of Jewish immigration was a significant cause of unrest in Palestine and identified Arab demands for representative government and independence as a second underlying cause. Coupland’s view of the situation differed slightly from those of the other commissioners, and he drew a radically different conclusion from his assessment. Coupland did not believe that the definition of the Jewish national home had been changed or that its size was at fault. Instead, he blamed Britain’s “conflicting undertakings” to the Arab and the Jews as embodied in the mandate. In his view “the contradiction could not be terminated without territorial partition. Without partition Palestine could not be given free self-governing institutions without violating one side or the other of the Mandate.”10 Coupland was adamant that he would not “subscribe to any recommendations for action under the Mandate as it stood to prevent the recurrence of the existing grievances.”11 Whereas Peel, Rumbold, and Hammond seemed to suggest that the Jewish national home had been achieved, or indeed overachieved, Coupland proposed that this was not the case. Instead its achievement was not fully possible within the limits of the mandate. Underlying these differing views of the problem in Palestine was a contested definition of the Jewish national home. Coupland argued that the Jews had always hoped for a state in which they were a majority, while Rumbold and Peel pointed to statements by Herbert Samuel and Winston Churchill that seemed to indicate that the national home did not mean an

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eventual Jewish state. The two sides were talking at cross-purposes; Coupland addressed what he thought “the man in the street would accept as fair to both sides,” while Peel and Rumbold referred to the precedent of British policy statements. Peel was also, it seemed, uneasy with “sweeping away the whole Mandate,” which partition necessitated.12 In the end, it was Hammond who charted a middle course between these poles, suggesting that the “Report should paint a picture of the existing situation, suggest such remedies as could be found under the Mandate, point out that these were only tinkering with the difficulties, and therefore suggest the necessity of a ‘clean cut’ in the future.”13 Hammond and Coupland soon clashed over the detail in which the commission might propose partition. Hammond argued that although the commission might briefly suggest partition to be undertaken at some future date, it could not offer much more than that statement since the “clean cut” had not been “properly ventilated.”14 Coupland strenuously disagreed, complaining that making no positive recommendations on partition would be unnecessarily restrictive. “Why waste the knowledge they had acquired by making no recommendations as to an ultimate solution?” he asked.15 Coupland dismissed Hammond’s concern over the fact that the commission had taken little to no evidence on the topic of a territorial solution, boldly stating that he “did not attach great importance to evidence, so long as he himself was satisfied.”16 Coupland said he was confident in the concept of partition, not simply on account of his own reasoning, but also because Douglas Harris and Lewis Andrews, the special commissioners who had drawn up the early cantonization and partition plans, supported it. What he didn’t say, but what we know, is that partition had been vetted during Weizmann’s in camera sessions, and at least according to an apocryphal story, during a private meeting that Weizmann and Coupland had in Nahalal.17 It also seems quite likely that the commissioners had discussed partition with the Emir Abdullah when they visited him in Amman on January 9, 1937. This visit took place the day after the secret session in which Coupland asked Weizmann about partition, and Rumbold noted that “[t]he visit produced one or two ideas that may be useful.”18 This time, Rumbold proposed a compromise, namely, that even if a “clean cut” were to be proposed in some detail, there would be an interim period of some length for which a revised policy would be required. The commission’s suggestions of solutions under the mandate would function as the guide to policy “to meet the existing situation and produce a better atmosphere to prepare for the ‘clean cut’ itself.”19 In the end the commissioners agreed that the report would “indicate that such measures as can

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be adopted under the Mandate provide no real solution for the problem” and would “point to a ‘clean cut’ as the only ultimate solution, leaving the details of such a policy to be worked out.”20 Significantly, in this meeting Coupland managed to move from being the lone voice in support of partition to convincing his fellow commissioners to firmly embed it in the report. He compromised on the degree to which partition would be laid out in detail in the report, but he won the battle to place the blame for the problems in Palestine firmly on the text of the mandate rather than on the size of the Jewish national home or the speed of its growth. At the second meeting of the commission in Helouan (at which Harold Morris was present but Morris Carter was still absent), attempts to map out the structure of the report quickly became mired in the fundamental disagreements revealed in the first meeting. The conflict revolved around the question of whether the commissioners should recommend the reduction or suspension of Jewish immigration. Peel stated that irrespective of the commission’s recommendations concerning partition, he thought that there should be a drastic reduction in immigration. Rumbold suggested that such a proposal could be justified “if it was first decided that a Jewish National Home already exists.”21 Then taking his reasoning a step further, Rumbold argued that because a Jewish national home already existed, the commission could recommend suspending immigration completely for two years and then resuming it under a quota system. Hammond agreed that the “Jews now had a National Home” but mentioned Morris Carter’s concern that the commission not be seen as rewarding Arab violence by stopping immigration completely, even if only for a short period.22 Coupland and Morris strongly opposed the idea that the Jewish national home had been realized. In Morris’s words, “only a nucleus of a National Home had been established.”23 Rather than battle once again over the state of the Jewish national home, Coupland took a new tack, suggesting that the “fair-minded reader” would think a suspension of Jewish immigration unnecessary, Jews would oppose it, and Arabs would not be fully satisfied by it. Peel returned to his initial proposal that immigration be drastically reduced rather than suspended, and the discussion over the Jewish national home and immigration ended.24 Unable to reach a compromise on the question of the Jewish national home’s realization, the commissioners moved on to tackle suggestions for policy under the mandate, coming to a general consensus that the Palestine Government was inadequate in the areas of land policy and settlement, as well as education, and formulating recommendations for ameliorating these two areas of mandatory policy and practice.

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In their final meeting (or at least the final meeting for which notes have survived), it seems that the commissioners avoided debates over some of the fundamental questions about the mandate with which they had engaged previously. The summary note drafted at the end of this meeting mapped out potential recommendations in the areas of self-governing institutions, immigration, police and security, and local government.25 On the topic of immigration, the commissioners had settled on the recommendation that political, not merely economic, factors be taken into account in establishing the number of immigration certificates. These recommendations were indeed reflected in the final report. On the level of policy proposals under the terms of the mandate, the commissioners were all in agreement. Rumbold’s private papers reveal that the discord that had characterized the earlier meetings about the Jewish national home and partition had not, however, evaporated. In a letter to his son sent nearly a year after the discussions at Helouan, when he knew that a technical commission was being sent to Palestine, Rumbold reflected bitterly on his role in bringing a partition plan “containing such glaring defects and features” into the public realm. He explained that he had been “disgusted at the way this particular scheme had been worked out behind my back. This was due to Coupland—an intriguing little professor,” and then noted that he had “decided to sacrifice my convictions for the sake of unanimity.”26 That sacrifice clearly left its scars, for Rumbold recounted in the same letter that he had recently visited an “Indian soothsayer” in Cairo, who told Rumbold, much to his astonishment, that in relation to the commission, he had “sacrificed my personal convictions for the sake of peace and unanimity.”27

Transmission of Arab, Jewish, and Military Views on Partition Hammond’s purported objection to recommending partition in any detail in the report was that the commission had not officially heard evidence on the matter. As elaborated in the previous chapter, this was not strictly true. It seems safe to assume that the idea of territorial division, in the form of either cantonization or partition, had been vetted in a number of conversations with high-ranking officials in Palestine and Britain during secret sessions of the commission.28 However, in comparison with the volumes of written and oral evidence presented on a wide range of other topics, even the few opinions the commission had solicited on the topic of territorial division (most frequently, cantonization) seemed paltry. The one group from which the commissioners had not heard evidence

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were military personnel. In an attempt to redress this imbalance, upon their return to London the commissioners sought the advice of military leaders on the question of partition. The little evidence remaining of the development of the partition plan between March and June 1937 suggests that military concerns altered the commissioners’ partition map. The other category of opinion the commission heard was unsolicited, but some of it nevertheless had a significant impact on the plan for partition. Through the Colonial Office, the commission received general Arab and Jewish opinions on partition that flooded in after the publication of a presumed partition plan for Palestine in the Daily Herald in April 1937.29 Through Coupland’s contacts with Zionist leaders, especially Chaim Weizmann, as well as through Ormsby-Gore’s connections with pro-Zionist British politicians, the commission also received feedback on potential plans. These informal communications shaped the partition plan more than hundreds of protesting telegrams from around the world. Soon after returning to London from Palestine, Peel wrote to the Cabinet secretary, Colonel Maurice Hankey, requesting advice on strategic matters connected with partition.30 Hankey then set up a meeting between members of the commission and the Chiefs of Staff Sub-Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence. Present at the meeting were, from the commission, Peel, Rumbold, Morris, Coupland, and the secretary, J. M. Martin, now back at the Colonial Office, and from the chiefs of staff, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Ernle Chatfield, Field Marshal Sir Cyril Deverell, Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Edward Ellington, and Air Vice-Marshal R.  E.  C. Peirse. Chatfield raised the concern that partition “might result in setting up two States permanently hostile to each other.”31 If this were the case, Britain would be in the uncomfortable position either of having to side with one of the states or else of having to hold the line between the two. To make matters worse, from a military perspective, there was no natural boundary along which to divide Palestine. Deverell expressed the fear that the partition being proposed would “necessitate the retention of considerable forces in the country for a long time.”32 Taking British concerns more broadly, the chiefs of staff noted a number of issues relating to imperial defense and local military commitments but overall cautiously stated that “there were no insuperably strategical objections to the scheme proposed.”33 Before the meeting, the chiefs of staff were not familiar with the contours of the Peel partition plan, and this may have contributed to their fairly weak statement of strategic concerns. A few days after the meeting, Ellington sent Peel a list of major points that he felt the chiefs of staff would

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agree needed to be taken into consideration in planning policy in Palestine. The list was daunting, covering the necessity to maintain the current strategic position for defense of the Suez Canal, trunk air communications, and land communications from the Mediterranean to the British garrison in Iraq. In order to assure this, the security of British forces in Palestine and Transjordan would need to be maintained, and Britain would require freedom to increase forces in either the Arab or the Jewish state, complete freedom for military aircraft, control of civil aviation, and free and priority use of all ports.34 Although Ellington did not state it explicitly in his letter, Peel understood that the chiefs of staff had reservations about the possibility of maintaining these strategic positions in the event of partition. He responded to Ellington, “I fully appreciate the fact that the suggested method of dealing with the Palestine problem has many difficulties, but the present position is so deplorable that I think we are bound to investigate every way of escape.”35 The commission had a proposed partition map while still in Jerusalem, but it has not survived and its boundaries are unknown.36 It is clear, however, that the commission took military-strategic interests very seriously after the meeting with the military chiefs of staff. A position of indeterminate strategic value to Britain caused the commissioners to significantly alter at least one part of the partition map that had been drawn up in Jerusalem. In a note written after a discussion with Hammond, and representing Hammond’s view in addition to his own, Coupland advocated the alteration of the southern frontier separating the Jewish and Arab states. Instead of having the boundary of the Jewish state run southwest until it hit the Egyptian border, Coupland and Hammond proposed that that it be cut off just north of Gaza, in order to create a mandated corridor running along the Egyptian border from Gaza to the Gulf of Aqaba.37 Coupland explained that this would allow Britain to retain a position that might “be of great value to the Empire at some future time,” though he emphasized that this could not be given as a reason in the report.38 Although these boundaries were not maintained in the final version of the partition plan, British access to Aqaba was; the plan retained a mandated enclave on the northwest coast of the Gulf of Aqaba purportedly to provide Arab and Jewish access for commercial purposes to the Red Sea.39 On April 2, 1937, the Daily Herald broke the story of the commission’s supposed plan for dividing Palestine. The article suggested that the commission was contemplating either outright partition or cantonization, though it is clear from the sources that by this time cantonization had long been dismissed in favor of what the commissioners called “the clean cut.”

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Despite this inaccuracy, the article, which was almost certainly the result of a leak, came remarkably close to delineating the border under consideration by the commission, showing a map in which the Jewish state ran along the coastal plain before expanding eastward to incorporate portions of the Jezreel Valley and the Galilee. The article also accurately reported that under the partition plan being considered, Transjordan would be joined with the Arab state, and Britain would retain control over Jerusalem and the port at Haifa.40 Press reactions in Palestine, the Arab world, and Europe were instantaneous and almost uniformly negative. Arabs and Jews inundated the commission with telegrams, formal statements, and letters sent care of the Colonial Office. Within a week of the Daily Herald’s article, Jewish leaders were meeting with Colonial Office officials to voice their concerns over both the concept and details of partition, and to try to sound out those officials on Colonial Office opinion. Reactions to the rumored partition plans can most usefully be divided into two groups: those that categorically rejected partition, and those that protested certain elements of the plan and lobbied for adjustments. Reactions simply decrying partition were by far the most numerous. At Secretary of the Commission J. M. Martin’s request, the Government of Palestine sent the commission a summary of responses in the Palestine press for the week following the publication of the Daily Herald article. The memorandum noted that “both the Arabic and Hebrew Press evince the strongest opposition to the alleged scheme for the partition of Palestine,”41 though the tones were quite different. The Arabic press was said to characterize partition as “a deadly poison” and a “criminal solution,” while the Jewish press saw the alleged partition plan as a “counsel of despair” and an attempt to “win Zionism with a toy state” and avoid the difficult issues placed before the commission.42 The Arabs were incensed, the Jews angrily disappointed. In a letter to Colonial Secretary William OrmsbyGore, Palestine High Commissioner Arthur Wauchope insisted that the views expressed in the Palestine press did not represent the general views of the public in Palestine. He suggested that such vehement opposition was merely a form of tactical maneuvering aiming to provide each side with what Weizmann had called maximum “elbow room” in the event of a territorial division.43 Outside of Palestine, the press reaction was similarly negative, though the jockeying for “elbow room” was not literally for territory but rather for leverage in international power politics. In Italy, correspondents uniformly thought the plan impossible to carry out, though the majority saw devious

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British imperial interests at play and suggested that partition would allow Britain another vote in the League and firmer regional control.44 The British ambassador to Iraq, Archibald Clark Kerr, reported that even a generally moderate newspaper, Al Bilad, had written that “Britain could commit no greater act of perfidy than to divide up Palestine to satisfy Jewish aspirations.”45 Palestine’s potential to hand an advantage to Britain’s enemies and to damage the British empire’s relations with its Muslim subjects constantly concerned members of the Foreign Office and diplomatic corps but did not appear to unduly concern Colonial Office officials or the members of the Peel Commission.46 Disapproval of the alleged partition proposal was not confined to the press. Written responses reached the Colonial Office from a variety of individuals and groups, and representatives of the both the Revisionist Zionist and non-Zionist Orthodox Jewish community in Palestine made their opposition clear in person. The mayor of Gaza sent a letter of protest forwarding the resolution of the municipal council, which urged the commission not to “extinguish a fire by lighting another fire.”47 The municipal council of Majdal decried partition as “an arrow directed towards the country” and requested that their resolution be passed along to the commissioners.48 In a letter forwarded to Ormsby-Gore, a prominent Jew from Liverpool took issue not just with partition as a concept but with the particular boundaries being suggested. He claimed that under the proposed plan, “the Heart and Soul of Palestine, Jerusalem and the Judean Hills, [would] be torn from the body and the dead members given to the Zionist Organisation to form a Jewish State.”49 From organizations at both ends of the Jewish political spectrum came similar wholesale, though less dramatic, dismissals of partition. The acting chairman of the New Zionist Organisation met with H. M. Downie to express the Revisionist rejection of partition and followed up with a detailed memorandum.50 Two representatives of the Orthodox Agudath Israel organization met with Cosmo Parkinson and made the point that Agudath Israel could not accept partition and the establishment of a Jewish state because this would “be anticipating the re-establishment of the Jews in Palestine when the Jewish Messiah comes.” They impressed upon Parkinson that in the event of the establishment of a Jewish state, Agudath Israel members would require minority protection and might even be compelled to leave the Jewish state and settle in the mandated areas.51 Parkinson declined to discuss the likelihood that partition would be recommended and suggested to the representatives that since they had not had the opportu-

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nity to give evidence to the commission on this topic, they should send in a letter immediately. A second group of opinions, all from Jewish leaders or British officials sympathetic to the Zionist cause, offered suggestions within the given framework of partition. Unlike the categorical dismissals of partition, these critiques and suggestions had an effect on the final details of the Peel partition plan. In essence, what took place during the first six months of 1937 was a successful attempt on the part of Zionist leaders to shape a partition plan that most closely matched their ideal vision of a Jewish state. Although members of the Peel Commission, with the exception of Coupland, avoided direct contact with Zionist leaders, both British officials sympathetic to Zionism52 and Zionists themselves were able to influence partition policy through the Colonial Office, and particularly through the colonial secretary, Ormsby-Gore.53 In a meeting with Colonial Office official John Maffey, Pinchas Rutenberg, the founder of the Palestine Electric Corporation, made two suggestions for the partition plan that he felt would greatly enhance its appeal to the Jews of Palestine. The first was to incorporate some of the Jerusalem suburbs into the Jewish state to create a “real ‘Jewish Jerusalem.’”54 The second was to ensure that Jews would be able to purchase Arab-owned land that fell within the bounds of the Jewish state, subject to the sellers’ consent. In his letter following up on their conversation, Rutenberg made clear to Maffey his feeling that partition ran contrary to both Jewish and British interests. He then outlined nine points that he thought would be fundamental to any successful partition proposal. These included sufficient territory for the Jewish state; the inclusion of the Galilee and Haifa in the Jewish state; the south of Palestine, including access to the Gulf of Aqaba, to be under British control; and Jewish immigration into the future Jewish state to continue under the principle of economic absorptive capacity during the transitional period from mandate to state.55 Chaim Weizmann similarly maintained a bifurcated stance, on the one hand insisting that he was not “in any sense committed to any partition scheme”56 and on the other proposing essential nonnegotiable features to be incorporated into the partition plan. These included a geographical area sufficient for immigration and development; Haifa and Jerusalem to be largely within the Jewish state, with certain British powers reserved; the Negev to be under British control but open to development and settlement by Jews; and full sovereignty for Jews in their own territory. In fact, a week before making these statements, Weizmann had attended a dinner party at

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which, with the help of Conservative MP and former colonial secretary Leo Amery, he had attempted to persuade prominent pro-Zionist politicians, including Churchill and Liberal leader Archibald Sinclair, to support the partition proposal, arguing that only a Jewish state could absorb the thousands of Jews fleeing Europe.57 Amery was a persistent advocate for Zionist interests connected to the partition plan and, beyond the point where any changes to the commission’s plan could reasonably have been hoped for, sought to influence government policy via Ormsby-Gore at the Colonial Office. Echoing the sentiments, if not the language, of the man from Liverpool, Amery pointed out that “there is a very big sentimental snag in the cry, which is sure to be raised, that they [the Jews] are to be given Zionism without Zion and that the large body of Jews resident in Jerusalem are going to be outside the national home.”58 As a way of sidestepping this problem, Amery proposed that Jews in the mandated enclave might be considered citizens of the Jewish state and allowed to send members to the legislature of that state. Arab residents of the mandated enclave would have the same status with regard to the Arab state. Amery suggested as an alternate possibility that the Jewish suburbs of Jerusalem and the Hebrew University be designated an enclave of the Jewish state within the British mandated enclave. Ormsby-Gore responded that the government could not deal with such details in its general statement to be released simultaneously with the report and that such questions would be dealt with by the commission that decided the specific line of partition.59 The final form of the Peel partition plan did not meet all of the Zionist demands; most notably, Jerusalem was to be placed under a new British mandate, which would not include the Jewish national home clause.60 But broadly speaking, Zionist efforts to mold the partition plan were successful. At the meeting between members of the commission and the military chiefs of staff, in March 1937, it appears that the favored plan was the socalled “Southern Scheme” in which the Jewish state would comprise the coastal area and the Negev.61 By June, preference had shifted to the “Northern Scheme,” which gave the coastal area and the Galilee to the Jewish state, though in his note, Coupland indicated that the Huleh Basin, on which the Jews had spent significant sums of money, would go to the Arab state.62 Although the southern part of Palestine was large, the Galilee was of prime importance to the Jewish Agency, which in communication with the commission and with Wauchope stressed its strategic, agricultural, and historic value.63 In the partition plan published in July 1937 (see fig. 3.1),

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the Jewish state was given all of the Galilee, something that surprised and pleased David Ben-Gurion, who wrote in his diary that this constituted “an act of great courage and great generosity.”64 It also received the Huleh Basin, which as late as June 1937 had been intended for the Arab state. These territorial gifts were further complemented by the Peel Report’s vision of a compulsory population transfer of nearly a quarter of a million Arabs out of the Jewish state. Thus it appears that constructive criticisms of the partition plan, ones that sought to modify its boundaries rather than dismiss it altogether, had the greatest impact on the shape of the Peel partition proposal. Jewish and official “evidence” heard by the commission after its return to England could be incorporated in the partition plans in the form of revised boundaries. Similarly, the form, content, and method of transmission of evidence given by each side in Palestine affected the openness of the commission to modifying its plan in one direction or another. Palestinian Arab witnesses challenged the legality and morality of the mandate, refusing to spend much time arguing points that presupposed its legitimacy. There is no record of Palestinian Arab leaders meeting outside of the formal public sessions with the commissioners, nor did they make arrangements for the commissioners to visit Arab schools, businesses, and villages in an attempt to counterbalance tours of Jewish settlements, industries, and scientific centers. As a result, the commission’s view of the Arabs was uncomplicated by informal interaction, which might have prompted a more sympathetic tone in the presentation of Arab demands for immediate self-government and independence in all of Palestine. Similarly, Arab opinion uniformly opposed partition, rather than advocating for the largest, most strategically shaped, or most agriculturally fertile Arab state. Again, there is no record of Arab leaders, from either within or outside Palestine, communicating informally with Colonial Office officials or members of the commission. In contrast, both during the sessions of the Peel Commission in Palestine and after its return to England, Zionist leaders maintained constant formal and informal contact with the commissioners, officials at the Colonial Office, and influential British politicians. Through a skillful mix of information, propaganda, and diplomacy, the Zionists achieved a report that painted their achievements in glowing terms. Most important, this cooperation and collaboration with the Peel Commission resulted in a partition plan favorable to the Zionist movement, despite the fact that it was, in large part, ideologically opposed in principle to the division of Palestine.

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The Report The Peel Commission Report was distinguished from the dozens of earlier reports on Palestine in that it managed to be at once comprehensive and elegant. The information gleaned from thousands of pages of reports and memoranda, as well as from the evidence presented orally in Palestine, is mastered and presented in such a way that by the end the reader cannot imagine the possibility of any real solution to the problem of Palestine under the mandate. There is no mention of partition before the very end of the report when the plan is laid out, and yet every section of the report seems to move inexorably toward this conclusion. The ignorant reader is in such a state of suspense that the partition proposal comes as a relief, while the reader who already knows what is coming can read a report that reinforces and confirms the suitability of partition to achieve peace in Palestine. Scholars have credited Reginald Coupland, the lone academic on the commission, with composing the bulk of the report,65 and though no drafts survive, this accords with Martin’s recollection that Coupland “acted as rapporteur and so wrote much of the first version of the draft.”66 Coupland’s imprint is clear from the first two sentences, which read The “disturbances” which broke out in Palestine on the 19th April, 1936, were the outcome of a conflict between Arab and Jewish Nationalism; and when in the following November we visited the country, we expected (to adapt Lord Durham’s famous sentence) to find “two nations warring in the bosom of a single state.” But we did not expect to find so wide a gulf between them or one so difficult to bridge.67

Durham headed a Royal Commission that landed in Quebec in 1838 to investigate the 1837 rebellions led by French Canadian nationalist LouisJoseph Papineau. In addition to undertaking his investigation, Durham was also appointed high commissioner and governor general and charged with governing all of British North America. After five months during which he created ten subcommittees to examine the facts of everyday social, political, and economic life, Durham wrote a lengthy report recommending the establishment of representative government.68 Coupland had a longstanding interest in Wilsonian notions of self-determination and had written extensively on the unification of nationalities within Britain and the political compromises that eased national conflicts in the empire.69

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Coupland’s reference therefore had a deeper resonance for anyone familiar with this episode in imperial history, for it suggested that representation, and in the case of Palestine, national self-determination, was to constitute the solution for Palestine as it had for Canada. In order to lead the reader to this conclusion, the report had to make the case that the conflict was indeed driven by a clash of two distinct and irreconcilable national communities rather than by ethnic hatreds, economic competition or domination, anger over immigration, or poor government. This was achieved over the course of three sections into which the report was divided. The first part set out “The Problem,” offering a historical narrative that began around 2,000 BC and became more dense and detailed as it moved closer to 1936–37. The second detailed the “Operation of the Mandate,” covering topics such as administrative structures and organizations, land, immigration, education, public health and works, and local government. This was by far the longest section of the report and incorporated the greatest amount of evidence from the oral sessions in Palestine. The third part proposed the “Possibility of a Lasting Settlement,” briefly offering partition as a solution, examining and dismissing the alternative of cantonization, and finally sketching out a preliminary partition plan. In the chapter covering the pre- World War I history of Palestine, the report emphasized the long historical connections of both Jews and Arabs to Palestine and the importance of Jewish diaspora history for understanding the current conflict. The Jewish connection to Palestine was traced back to Abraham, and it was noted that Jews had maintained a small community continuously in residence in Palestine in addition to strong spiritual and intellectual connections.70 These later flowered into a Zionist movement that sought to offer Jews an escape from life as a permanent, and often despised, minority.71 For the Arabs, Jerusalem was one of the paramount holy cities, and for a time Muslims had turned in its direction for prayers.72 Carefully woven into this chapter were mentions of Jewish Palestine’s incredible importance to the West. Jewish Palestine had given Europe the “gift of Hebraism,” which was ranked alongside the gifts of ancient Greece and Rome,73 and perhaps most important the gift of Christianity, for Jesus was a Jew “who lived on Jewish soil and founded His gospel on the basis of Jewish life and thought.”74 But the overriding point of this chapter was to establish the historical, spiritual, and now ideologically national connection of the Jews with Palestine and to drive home the point that it was “on Palestine and only on Palestine that the hopes of Zionism were fixed when the World War broke out.”75

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The following chapter established the rise of Arab nationalism in the declining Ottoman empire, and the promises made to the Sherif of Mecca by Sir Henry McMahon in the tense and uncertain times of 1915. It also chronicled the development and proclamation of the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and described the negative Arab reaction at discovering that Palestine was thought by Britain to be outside the areas discussed in the Hussein-McMahon correspondence and thus would have a mandate incorporating the Balfour Declaration. Finally, it explained the rationale behind the League of Nations mandates system, emphasizing that the system’s goal was the “ultimate establishment of independence” for all mandated territories.76 This chapter established the parameters of the conflict in Palestine, while arguing that “the policy of the Balfour Declaration was subjected to the operation of the Mandate System in 1919 in the belief that the obligations thereby undertaken towards the Arabs and the Jews respectively would not conflict.”77 Britain believed that Arab opposition to the Balfour Declaration “would sooner or later be overcome. If this belief should prove false it would be very difficult to operate or to terminate the Mandate.”78 In these few sentences, the report laid down several fundamental assumptions: first, Britain truly did not believe that the McMahon correspondence and the Balfour Declaration were contradictory; second, the mandate was established in good faith, perhaps with British miscalculation of Arab opposition, but not with the intent to deny Arab self-government permanently; and third, the proper functioning of the mandate required that the Arabs acquiesce and that Arabs and Jews “sink their differences in a common Palestinian citizenship.”79 With these framing assumptions laid down, the report moved into more detailed narration of the history of the Palestine mandate between 1920 and 1936 and the disturbances of 1936. The narration of events was informative for the reader new to the history of Palestine, but the report’s greatest strength was in its interpretation of the recent history. It sought to prove that the most important fact in the Palestine conflict was that the conditions for the proper functioning of the mandate had never been met. The Arabs had never acquiesced to the mandate and had in fact become only more vehement in their opposition to it. Far from forging a Palestinian citizenship in common with the Arabs, the Jews had developed the Jewish national home into an unusually robust, advanced, and distinct socioeconomic and political community. “It would be difficult to find in history a precedent for the establishment of so distinct an imperium in imperio,” the report marveled.80

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At every point of Arab uprising, the commission argued, the underlying cause had been opposition to the mandate. Sometimes “external factors” were said to spark violent outbursts, but they did not, the report argued, really cause the unrest. The rise in Jewish immigration in 1928 and early 1929 was often blamed for the disturbances of 1929, just as the rapid influx of Jews fleeing Germany after Hitler’s ascendance in 1933 was often said to have caused the 1936 rebellion. At other points, the advances in nationalism and self-government of neighboring Arab countries, such as the treaty signed with Abdullah in Transjordan in 1921, or the admission of Iraq to the League of Nations in 1932, were blamed for stirring up Arab resentment. But these were not the underlying causes of the conflict; rather Arab opposition to the mandate made peace impossible: The rate of Jewish immigration might rise or fall, Jewish land-purchase might be extended or restricted, ‘Black Letters’ might follow on ‘White Papers’, but all these factors, though they were certainly important, were only subsidiary factors. They might add fuel to the flames or damp them down. But the Mandate itself, of which these other factors were only applications or interpretations, had lighted the fire; and the Mandate itself, however applied or interpreted, was bound to keep it burning—except on the old original assumption that the two races could and would learn to live and work together.81

If the Arabs were guilty of intractable opposition to the mandate owing to their nationalism, the Jews were guilty of strong attachment to the mandate for the same reason. The “intensive character and the ‘modernism’” of Jewish nationalism that could be developed only under the protection of the mandate were expressed in “an elaborate social and political organization” that directed nearly all of its energies toward developing Jewish national life.82 There was little question of the Jews subsuming their project under the larger umbrella of Palestinian nationalism, even if the Arabs had been convinced to pursue a territorial rather than an ethnic national independence. The report noted with disappointment that Jewish nationalism seemed “sometimes to reject consciously or unconsciously, the very idea of a real Palestinian community.”83 Not only was the Jewish community socially and politically distinct, it was culturally set apart from (and the report seems to suggest, superior to) the Arab population. Describing Palestine in 1925, the report noted that “the Arabs were still living in the atmosphere of the past, still separated, almost, it might seem, by centuries, from the educated, resourceful,

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Western-minded section of the Jews now entering the country in increasing numbers.”84 In rare moments of reflection on their own experiences in Palestine, the commissioners wrote almost exclusively of the striking contrast between the Jewish and Arab communities living so close together physically, yet so far apart socioculturally, and of the strong cultural connection between less than half a million Jews in Palestine and the West. The report mentioned that the commission attended a concert of the works of Brahms and Beethoven with Toscanini conducting the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, and then went on to paint a striking visual, and indeed aural, picture: “Anyone who attended the Toscanini Concerts at Jerusalem might have imagined, if he closed his eyes, that he was in Paris, London, or New York. Yet, almost within earshot was the Old City, the Haram-esh-Sharif, and the headquarters of the Arab Higher Committee.”85 The same motif of physical closeness and metaphysical distance was repeated in another description of a place the commissioners had visited: The Daniel Sieff Research Institute at Rehovot is equipped with the most delicate modern instruments; the experiments conducted there are watched by chemists all over the world: yet from its windows can be seen the hills inhabited by a backward peasantry who regard it only as the demonstration of a power they hate and fear and who would like, no doubt, when their blood is up, to destroy it.86

The first part of the report established the total absence of a Palestinian nationalism encompassing Arabs and Jews and urged “that Palestinian ‘citizenship’ also should be recognised as what it is, as nothing but a legal formula devoid of moral meaning.”87 Because, in the reasoning of the commissioners, Palestinian nationalism and true citizenship were prerequisites to the proper functioning of the mandate, it was clear by the end of the first part of the report that the mandate was unworkable. This had the curious effect of making the second, and largest, part of the report virtually moot. Like the dedicated social scientists they were, however, the commissioners reported on their findings concerning the day-to-day functioning of the mandate, supporting or dismissing the Arab and Jewish grievances they had heard, and suggesting improvements that could be made within the framework of mandatory government. So, for example, in tackling the pressing question of immigration, the commissioners carefully set out the system of setting immigration limits, the difficulty of defining “economic absorptive capacity” and projecting

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population growth, and the problem of illegal immigration. After reviewing their findings, the commissioners then proposed a significant change in immigration policy such that Jewish immigration would be subject to a “political high level” to be fixed at 12,000 immigrants per year for the next five years. Immediately after recommending this change, however, the commissioners emphasized that this new policy would not resolve the underlying cause of the unrest in Palestine. For, they argued, “the difficulty has been, and, if the Mandate continues, will continue with it, that the existence of the National Home, whatever its size, bars the way to the attainment by the Arabs of Palestine of the same national status as that attained, or soon to be attained, by all the other Arabs of Asia.”88 Virtually every chapter in the second section ended with the same caveat: the recommendations to alter policy within the terms of the mandate were superficial; the real issue lay in the mandate itself, not in its execution. In their conclusions, the commissioners dutifully enumerated their findings on the functioning of the mandatory administration, Arab grievances, and Jewish grievances and suggested corrective measures to be taken in each case or else justified their dismissal of a given grievance.89 They then repeated that their recommendations to, for example, increase spending on Arab education, loosen central control over Jewish municipalities, or appoint an outside expert to draw up an entirely new land code were “the best palliatives we can devise for the disease from which Palestine is suffering, but they are only palliatives. They might reduce the inflammation and bring down the temperature, but they cannot cure the trouble. The disease is so deep-rooted that, in our firm conviction, the only hope of a cure lies in a surgical operation.”90 Rather than immediately moving to the partition plan after this resounding conclusion, the report hammered two more rhetorical nails in the coffin of the mandate. It imagined, in some detail, the only serious alternative to territorial division, namely, “a rigorous system of repression,”91 and then dispensed with the territorial alternative to partition, cantonization, by claiming that it would not satisfy Arab nationalist claims or give the Jews full freedom to build up the national home.92 A continued mandate, the commissioners imagined, would “mean constant unrest and disturbance in peace and potential danger in the event of war. It will mean a steady decline in our prestige. It will mean the gradual alienation of two people who are traditionally our friends.”93 The Palestine Government would need to maintain extensive police forces to safeguard security, the cost of which might prevent it from providing

126 / Chapter Four the services directed to “the well-being and development” of the population which, in the words of the Covenant, constitute their “sacred trust.” If “disturbances,” moreover, should recur on a similar scale to that of last year’s rebellion, the cost of military operations must soon exhaust the revenues of Palestine and ultimately involve the British Treasury to an incalculable extent. The moral objections to maintaining a system of government by constant repression are self-evident. Nor is there any need to emphasize the undesirable reactions of such a course of policy on opinion outside Palestine. And the worst of it is that such a policy leads nowhere. However vigorously and consistently maintained, it will not solve the problem.

Having presented the reader with the choice of expensive and violent repression causing a worldwide loss of British prestige, on the one hand, versus partition on the other, the report finally laid out the proposed partition plan. Although they freely admitted that “the bulk of the evidence we have heard was not directly concerned with Partition,” the commissioners (or rather as we know from meeting minutes above, Coupland) felt that “most of it was relevant, directly or indirectly, for forming a judgment on that issue.”94 Thus, the commissioners felt obliged to “show that an actual plan can be devised which meets the main requirements of the case,” and so they devoted thirteen pages to sketching out the logistics of such a plan. As we saw earlier, the partition plan’s main features were the establishment of two new states related to Britain by a treaty system following the precedent set in Iraq and Syria; the establishment of a new British mandate for the holy places (including Jewish sacred spaces in the Arab state and vice versa) and a temporary British mandate over the “mixed” cities of Haifa, Acre, Safad, and Tiberias; an unspecified payment from the Jewish state to the Arab state; and an exchange of land and population between the two new states. An interim or transitional period was mentioned, during which the policy of the mandatory should follow the recommendations laid out in part 2 of the report. The partition line, the commissioners noted, roughly followed the existing settlement pattern of Jews and Arabs respectively. The Jewish state, in the shape of an upside-down “L,” comprised the coastal plain and much of the Galilee, while the Arab state comprised the hill country of Judea and Samaria and the rest of Palestine including the Negev Desert. Noting that in all likelihood neither the Arabs nor the Jews would be entirely happy with the proposal, the commission fell back on the English proverb “Half a loaf is better than no bread” and expressed its hope that Arabs and Jews

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would agree that national self-determination and peace on less land was better than no peace at all.

Conclusion The Peel Commission Report, reputed to be “one of the great state papers of the inter-war period” and a “work of lucid and compelling power,”95 conceals within its confident espousal of partition a struggle over the definitions of Palestine, the Jewish national home, Arab nationalism, and British obligations under the Palestine mandate and the mandates system more broadly. It simultaneously reflects and obscures the rifts within the commission and between British military and official, Jewish and Arab voices. The very form of the report was determined to some degree by the compromise brokered by Rumbold between Hammond, who wanted the report to focus almost exclusively on recommendations for dealing with Arab and Jewish grievances under the terms of the mandate, and Coupland, who felt that partition deserved to be placed front and center. As Rumbold suggested it should do, the report avoided rendering its policy suggestions completely moot by recommending that they be implemented during the transition to partition. However, the disagreement between Coupland and the rest of the commission over the underlying cause of unrest in Palestine is completely invisible in the report. Despite holding the minority opinion that the mandate itself was the cause of the problems in Palestine, and that the only solution was to end the mandate and partition the country, Coupland successfully made this opinion the foundational framework of the report. Every chapter of the report was designed to prove that the mandate was deeply flawed and unworkable, and every solution bar partition was shown to be no solution at all. Because the report was unanimous, it contained no formal indication of dissent from its central recommendation to partition Palestine. As we have seen, however, all members of the commission did not, in fact, support partition in principle or in the form proposed in the report. Military-strategic concerns, as voiced by the military chiefs of staff, were reflected in the report but went unnoted and unexposed. British strategic positions were maintained through specific provisions in the partition plan, yet strategic concerns were never stated as even one of several justifications for retaining control over Haifa or reserving an area on the west coast of the Gulf of Aqaba. Zionist wishes expressed after the commission’s return to England significantly affected the proposed shape of the Jewish

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and Arab states, yet only Zionist evidence given to the commission before and during its trip to Palestine is cited in the report. Arab views appeared to have no impact on the determination of the proposed line of partition, though somewhat ironically it was vehement Arab opposition to the mandate, as expressed to the commission in Palestine, that formed the primary justification for the report’s partition proposal.

FIVE

The Demise of Partition, 1937–1939

Between the publication of the Peel Commission Report in July 1937 and the issuing of the famous White Paper of May 1939, stated British policy in Palestine underwent if not a complete reversal, then certainly a dramatic revision with regard to its alignment with Zionist aims. During the quarter century preceding the publication of the Peel Report, British policy ranged from neutrality to outright support and aid of Zionist positions. Certainly there were individual anti-Zionist British officials in Palestine and London, and there were even moments, such as the issuing of the Passfield White Paper of 1930, which would have heavily restricted Jewish immigration, in which it looked as if British policy was about to take a turn. But the major pieces of enacted legislation and the bulk of government practices were designed to further the immigration and settlement of Jews, even if in smaller numbers or at a slower pace than leading Zionists desired. Exceptions such as the Passfield White Paper proved this rule. Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald’s letter to Chaim Weizmann, a letter that Palestinian Arabs came to call the “black letter,” quickly annulled the White Paper’s anti-Zionist implications. The Peel Report fell firmly within this spectrum. For all the public Zionist criticism of the Peel Report, and particularly of its partition proposal, the report presented the Zionist project in a most favorable light. Moreover, it proposed the establishment of a Jewish state, something that had been the dream of Zionist thinkers and leaders going back to Herzl. The government statement released along with the Peel Report confirmed the Cabinet’s agreement with the main findings of the report and expressed its firm support of the partition proposal, and by extension of the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. In this sense, then, British government support of the Peel Commission’s main findings and recommendations

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followed in a well-established tradition of British policies that benefited Zionism. As will be outlined below, however, the timing and form of the partition proposal paradoxically prompted attacks on it by pro-Zionist MPs and organizations, which eventually had the effect of bringing partition planning to a halt. One of the first signs of a significant change in the direction of British policy in Palestine was the decision in a December 1937 Cabinet meeting to begin moving away from partition, by allowing a newly appointed commission (soon to be headed by Sir John Woodhead of the Indian Civil Service) to explore a wider range of options and to recommend against partition if no reasonable and equitable plan could be reached.1 In less than four months, partition was unofficially off the table and suffered death by a thousand cuts. In November 1938, the Woodhead Commission Report was published along with a White Paper rejecting partition. The death of partition heralded a reversal in British policymaking; the May 1939 White Paper made it clear that, on the eve of war, Britain would pursue policies favored by Palestinian and other Arabs rather than those designed to support Zionists. But we should not confuse this change in policy with a reversal of principles. Partition’s primary appeal for most British officials, planners, and politicians had lain in its potential to maintain imperial priorities. Partition collapsed in this period because enough British officials came to see it as endangering the preeminence of the British empire, and as a potentially disruptive move in an increasingly unstable time. This critical period in the formation of Palestine policy has, not surprisingly, been well studied. Historians have charted reactions to the Peel Commission Report on the part of Arabs, Zionists, the British press, and Parliament.2 They have also described the efforts of the Foreign Office to defeat partition and the consequent battle between the Foreign and Colonial Offices to influence decisions made at the Cabinet level.3 These works have painstakingly reconstructed the actions of various involved parties, seeking to explain how partition was gradually dismantled and, more broadly, how British policy for Palestine underwent a revolution between July 1937 and May 1939. However, few historians have probed the significance of partition’s demise or linked this period to the broader arc of partition’s development from the late 1920s. In addition, the standard historical narratives have tended to underemphasize the Permanent Mandates Commission’s 1937 session on Palestine and the Woodhead Commission Report of 1938, both of which this chapter reexamines. Ultimately, this chapter seeks to delineate and weigh the various factors that contributed to the eventual turn

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away from partition and to suggest their significance within the larger story of partition’s development as a British policy for mandate Palestine.

Cabinet Support As demonstrated in chapter 4, the unanimous Peel Commission Report concealed significant disagreements between the commissioners over the details of the partition plan proposed in the report and, most important, over the advisability of turning to partition at all. Similarly, the statement of Government support for partition, which accompanied the release of the Peel Report on July 7, 1937, masked strong objections to partition from within the Cabinet. Differing political, and indeed geographic, frames of reference accounted for much of the distance between factions within the Cabinet. Several members, particularly the colonial secretary, William Ormsby-Gore, saw as their main task finding a way around the impasse in Palestine. Their focus was primarily on Palestine, and they were skeptical of and relatively unconcerned by the argument that British actions in Palestine might endanger Britain’s strategic position in the Middle East and by extension the world. From the points of view of the foreign and India secretaries, Palestine was both part of an important region and a critical area of interest to Muslim subjects throughout the empire. Partition would endanger both regional and broader imperial stability by enraging Arabs and Muslims within and, perhaps most important, beyond Palestine. The possibility of widespread Arab and Muslim unrest, they felt, outweighed the dubious potential of partition to solve a narrowly Palestinian political problem. In its statement of policy accompanying the Peel Report, the government declared its intention to take steps necessary to effect a plan of partition, arguing that partition offered the “best and most hopeful solution of the deadlock.”4 Some members of the Cabinet, however, most notably Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and Secretary of State for India Lord Zetland, were privately less sanguine about partition’s prospects. Zetland argued that the partition plan gave the Arabs a “raw deal,” a point of view he undoubtedly thought was held by Muslims in India.5 Eden raised both logistical and broader political objections. He attacked the boundaries as laid out in the Peel Report, arguing that they would create military-strategic problems for the new states; the Jewish state would be so small as to be virtually unviable, with indefensible borders, while the Arab state would have poor natural resources and no access to the sea. The Peel Commission’s partition plan called for a new Arab state comprising part of mandate Pal-

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estine and all of Transjordan with Abdullah as its leader. Ibn Saud and the Iraqi leadership were likely to be perturbed by Abdullah’s elevation, Eden thought, and this might lead to an upset of the delicate diplomatic balance in the region.6 These early Cabinet arguments prefigured a power struggle that later took place between the Colonial and Foreign Offices over partition, and indeed Eden’s main points in these Cabinet meetings had been supplied by George Rendel, who would later spearhead the Foreign Office attack on partition. In addition to struggling with quite different frames of reference and political priorities, the members of the Cabinet also had to contend with the unfortunate fact that the Peel Report included a mapped plan of partition, but one that was frustratingly vague, and it required that a technical commission complete a detailed feasibility report. Reginald Coupland had argued that proposing partition in principle without providing proof of a workable plan would doom partition from the start, and perhaps he was correct. But by publishing proposed lines of partition, even with the caveat that they constituted merely one of many options, the Peel Report made it hard to disaggregate the particular partition proposal from the broad principle of partition. This created difficulties for nearly every official body that considered partition over the ensuing months. From Cabinet discussions in June to the Zionist Congress at the end of August, the details of a partition boundary preoccupied politicians and officials, distracting from the main purpose, which should have been to approve the principle of partition and to leave the boundary to a separate commission. Debates over the specific lines of partition, and nonacceptance of the Peel Commission’s proposed map, significantly weakened perceived support for the principle of partition. The Cabinet’s ambivalence was expressed in a compromise agreement to approve the principle of partition without rubber-stamping the partition plan proposed in the report. Even its approval of the principle of partition was less than enthusiastic. Two weeks after the release of the report, Ormsby-Gore described the Cabinet as having “slowly been brought up to the idea of partition,” and for the rest of his tenure as colonial secretary, Ormsby-Gore struggled to maintain the Cabinet’s tepid support for partition.7 These preexisting doubts about the advisability of pursuing a partition policy meant that the Cabinet was particularly prone to reversing its support of partition once attacks on both the principle and the specific plan outlined in the Peel Report flooded in over the summer of 1937. In many ways the Cabinet’s early struggle with partition reflected the fact that for all its basis in lengthy investigation and careful observation,

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the Peel Report’s partition proposal had been drafted with little access to the empirical data needed to construct a reasonably defensible partition plan, and still less concern for the political implications of the hastily sketched plan that was eventually presented. As shown in the previous chapter, British military and strategic concerns had been taken into account when the plan was drawn up, but the commissioners had remained remarkably insulated from the kinds of foreign policy concerns raised by Rendel and Eden and appear to have spent little time thinking through the practical, not to mention political, implications of attempting to remove a quarter of a million Arabs from the new Jewish state. In comparison to the detailed analysis undertaken in every other part of the report, the presentation of the partition plan was cursory. This can be attributed to several factors: first, because the commission turned to partition fairly late in its time in Palestine, it did not have the time or resources to conduct an investigation of any depth into the practicalities of such a plan; second, the commission fell under Colonial Office, not Foreign Office, auspices, so foreign policy concerns were less likely to have been transmitted to the commissioners; third, the commission felt that the drawing up of a fully examined partition plan fell too far outside its terms of reference; and finally, Coupland, the main author of the report, was more inclined toward the theoretical and the rhetorically elegant and less willing to tackle the much messier reality of separating intertwined populations.8 The physical form of partition, as embodied in a map, paled in comparison to its ideal form laid out in words.

Public Reactions Public opinion was the first major force to destabilize the Cabinet’s already shaky support of the Peel Commission’s partition proposal. In the period from early July to late September 1937, public opinion was brought to bear on an idea and a plan that had been developed relatively quietly, and indeed with not an insignificant degree of secrecy, over the past decade. Partition did not fare well under the glare of public scrutiny or in the combative political arena; its flaws were easy to spot and exploit for ideological or political gain, and without a tightly controlled flow of information it was much more difficult to cajole reluctant parties into giving partition their provisional consent. Public reactions were expressed in five major fora: the British media, Parliament, the League of Nations, and Zionist and Arab conferences. In none of these was partition unambiguously supported. Reactions ranged

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from outright opposition in public statements, most notably and vocally by Palestinian and non-Palestinian Arab leaders, to support tempered by reservations about the proposed lines of partition.9 Criticism of partition in general, as well as of the particular partition plan proposed by the Peel Commission, chipped away at the Cabinet’s resolve and gradually revealed the underlying fault line between pro- and antipartitionists within the Government. After a short initial period of more or less neutral reflection, in which the breadth and erudition of the Peel Report were praised and partition was generally characterized as a necessary, if distasteful, step, British press reactions turned negative. Even generally positive articles found the partition plan both lacking in detail and disturbing. Just ten days after the report’s publication, the Sunday Express published an article by former prime minister David Lloyd George in which he took these reservations much further, calling the partition plan “a deplorable ending to one of the most imaginative and promising experiments which the great war made possible.”10 Partition, in Lloyd George’s opinion, would be an admission of British failure. His statement also presaged the attacks on a purportedly pro-Zionist measure by pro-Zionists, many of whom came to feel, like Lloyd George, that partition would offer the Zionists too little too early. A Jewish state of some two thousand square miles would hardly be able to offer sanctuary to Europe’s victimized Jews. In a sense, the Peel Commission’s timing was off; the ideal Zionist timeline would have seen the creation of a Jewish state after the Jews had become a majority. Until then, the Zionist project enjoyed the greatest safeguards under British mandatory rule.

Parliamentary Debate Early press reactions merely gave a hint of what was yet to come in Parliament. The debate that took place in the House of Commons on July 21, 1937, was long and heated.11 During the course of the debate, a collection of Liberal, Labour, Communist, and a very small number of Conservative MPs shredded the partition plan proposed in the Peel Report and brought the entire concept of partition into question. The Liberal leader Archibald Sinclair said that he could not read the Peel Report “without a sense of humiliation, for it makes it clear that since 1929 the record of British administration in Palestine has been one of irresolution and that we are now faced with the bankruptcy of one of the most imaginative enterprises which British statesmanship has ever undertaken.”12 Even Amery, a proclaimed supporter of partition, downplayed the Peel Commission’s parti-

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tion plan as “only the merest sketch” and admitted that partition would “give satisfaction in kind, though I admit not in area, to the ambitions of both nations.”13 Partition was attacked from a range of political and ideological positions, but its most vocal opponents were largely Liberal/Labour pro-Zionist MPs. Two factors contributed to the drubbing to which they subjected partition. First was the fact that with the exception of Amery, the most powerful Anglo-Zionists were entirely opposed to partition on the grounds that it would be an admission of Britain’s failure and an abandonment of the Zionists. At a dinner party held in early June, pro-Zionist politicians (Archibald Sinclair, leader of the Opposition, Clement Attlee, Winston Churchill, Josiah Wedgwood, James de Rothschild, and Victor Cazalet) met with Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann to discuss partition, which they all knew was in the cards, and to plan their strategy for responding in the event that partition was proposed. The notes on this informal gathering reveal some of the ideological motivations behind the attacks on partition in Parliament and explain why, despite its creation of a Jewish state, the Peel partition plan was so roundly rejected by most influential Anglo-Zionists.14 Two major arguments developed over the course of the evening; the first framed partition as, in Attlee’s words, “an end to a great experiment . . . a great concession to violence . . . it represented a complete confession of failure in the working of the Mandate, and would be a triumph for Fascism.”15 Churchill foresaw that the Government, a “lot of lily-livered rabbits,” would “chip off a piece here, and chip off a piece there,” leaving the Jews with an unviable state.16 Churchill then argued that the best hope for the ultimate realization of the Zionist project was to “persevere, persevere, persevere” under the mandate.17 Despite being largely in favor of partition, albeit with a significantly larger Jewish state than that eventually proposed in the Peel Report, Zionist leaders were content to have their proxies in Parliament attack the plan in the hopes that this would ease negotiations over the partition boundary.18 At the dinner mentioned above, Weizmann initially spoke in favor of partition but reported his pleasure at Churchill’s staunch defense of the mandate to his close confidante, the great Anglo-Zionist Blanche Dugdale. The support given to Zionism by such major political figures was in part a sign of the success of Zionist lobbying and the strength of political connections built up over decades. It also reflected prevailing public moods sympathetic to the Jews in light of the catastrophe slowly unfolding in Europe. Dugdale, however, was less than sanguine about the meaning of this dinner meeting for the Zionist position, seeing the attacks on partition as

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politically motivated and fearing that partition would “be made the cat’s paw of English politics.”19 To a certain degree Dugdale foresaw correctly the way in which partition was to become a pawn in British political and bureaucratic skirmishes. The second factor behind the attacks on partition in Parliament had little directly to do with Palestine but nevertheless shaped the tone of the debate. Coming less than two months after the formation of a new Government under Chamberlain, the debate provided an arena in which to settle political scores. In addition to expressing serious reservations about partition both in principle and in the Peel Commission’s plan, members of the Opposition strenuously objected to the speed with which Government was trying to force the Commons to approve it. Josiah Wedgwood angrily declared, “Parliament is given one day to decide a question which the Royal Commission took six months to consider . . . This is not a proper way to treat Parliament.”20 Well after midnight, a delaying amendment proposed by Churchill, against his own party, was finally approved.21 This directed the Government to place the broad concept of partition before the League of Nations for approval and then later to return to Parliament with a fully developed partition plan for examination in depth. The debate in Parliament arrested any momentum that the Government had hoped to achieve and meant that Ormsby-Gore took partition to the Permanent Mandates Commission when he himself had failed to unite Parliament and the British public behind partition and was struggling to keep the Cabinet from losing its resolve in the face of widespread opposition. A majority of speakers in Parliament had questioned the justice and practicability of partition, raising objections to both the Peel partition plan and partition in general that made the Government’s statement of policy look hopelessly naïve and uninformed. Antipartition MPs had criticized the Government for its haste in approving the Peel Report and its attempt to have Parliament do likewise. Churchill’s motion to have the partition plan (and by extension, partition in principle) examined by the Permanent Mandates Commission further weakened the Government’s position by reiterating its legal subordination to the League in the matter of a radical policy revision in mandated Palestine. As Churchill and indeed the Cabinet itself knew, any British plan for the partition of Palestine would have eventually required the approval of the League Council. In fact, the Government had already written to the League Secretariat the day before the Peel Report’s release to ask that the Permanent Mandates Commission and the League Council meet quickly to review Britain’s stated policy.22 Churchill’s motion in Parliament was

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thus technically redundant but rhetorically expert. It not only emphasized parliamentary power by refusing to assent to the Government’s wishes to move quickly toward an approved partition plan but also served as a potent reminder that on the question of Palestine, Government answered not only to Parliament but also to the international community. The parliamentary debate over the Peel Report thus reinforced the shaping role both of domestic public and political opinion and of international opinion in the form of the League in the development of a partition policy.

The Mandates Commission The League of Nations’ role in the demise of Britain’s partition plan for Palestine is little noted in the historical literature. Coming on the heels of domestic opposition, however, the Permanent Mandates Commission’s objections to Britain’s partition plan helped to seal its fate. Although the Mandates Commission eventually declared itself “favourable in principle to an examination of a solution involving the partition of Palestine,”23 its meetings on the question of Palestine in late July and early August contained tense exchanges with British representatives, during which commission members raised important questions about the logistics, legalities, and potential timelines of partition. The commissioners struggled with the textual conundrum the partition proposal posed, noting somewhat plaintively in their report to the League Council that they had been asked to do something completely new, that is, to “express a preliminary opinion on the intentions of a mandatory Power which proposes to the Council the termination of the mandate it has been carrying out.”24 Without the textual anchor of the mandate, the commissioners found themselves at sea, unable to ascertain what law or principle they should use in assessing the partition proposal. In a striking feat of interpretive gymnastics, they finally decided to examine the question of partition using as their yardstick the very mandate text that partition was meant to overwrite. The commission’s report to the League Council thus asserted that “[a]lthough the question at issue was its revision, the Palestine mandate remained the centre of the whole of the deliberations.”25 And indeed, in keeping with their commitment to the mandate text, the commissioners valiantly submitted their observations on the annual reports for 1935 and 1936, noting with disappointment that they had deferred examining parts of the 1935 report in the unrealized hope that the Royal Commission would detail the causes and progression of the disturbances that had started in the spring of 1936.26

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Colonial Secretary William Ormsby-Gore, himself a former member of the commission, came before it weakened by the parliamentary debates that had taken place ten days earlier. From the outset, Ormsby-Gore appeared to be on the defensive. Though insisting in his initial statements that partition was the best solution to the deadlock in Palestine, OrmsbyGore assured the commission that “His Majesty’s Government are not tied, and have not committed themselves in detail, to the particular scheme of partition briefly outlined in the Royal Commission’s report.”27 Furthermore, he painted partition as having sprung fully formed from the minds of the Peel commissioners, claiming that “this proposal for partition did not originate either with the Government of Palestine or with me or with the United Kingdom Government at home.”28 In what was perhaps an attempt to preempt difficult questions, Ormsby-Gore quickly proceeded to elaborate the many problems inherent in partition, among them the difficulty of convincing Arab cultivators to leave their land, the issue of Jerusalem, of inconveniently placed pockets of Jewish and Arab populations within the proposed boundaries of the opposite state, and of the expensive and complicated customs and security arrangements that would be necessary. But after all of this, he assured the commission that it was not its job to “approve a scheme of partition, or to settle these questions of defence, minorities, etc. All I ask you is to recommend that the door should not be closed to a solution by partition. I ask you to open the door and not to close it.”29 Before the Mandates Commission would consent to leaving the door open to partition, it subjected Ormsby-Gore and the former chief secretary to the Palestine Government, J. Hathorn Hall, to rigorous questioning, much of which further damaged, both morally and materially, the already battered partition plans. First, in examining the report on the administration of Palestine for 1936, the commissioners strongly criticized the Government of Palestine for having allowed the Arab uprising to spiral out of control, for having done little to punish Arab government officials who signed a letter of protest sent directly to the high commissioner, and for having allowed, and indeed appearing to have appreciated, the intervention of foreign Arab states in the conflict.30 Without exception, the commissioners interpreted these actions as weakness and lack of will to rule on the part of the British. This interpretation reflected the tendency of the Mandates Commission after 1929 to be increasingly sympathetic to the Zionist cause, as we saw in chapter 1.31 Several of the commission’s most active and engaged members, including William Rappard, Pierre Orts, and D. F. W. Van Rees were staunchly pro-Zionist, and the most noted pro-Arab

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member of the commission, the Italian Marquis Theodoli, was gone from the commission by 1937 owing to Italy’s withdrawal from the League after Abyssinia. This left Leopoldo Palacios the lone voice sympathetic to the Arab cause. In questioning Britain’s intention to partition Palestine, the commission was aiming to protect the Zionist project that it thought could flourish only under the existing terms of the mandate. The commission’s chairman, Pierre Orts, questioned whether and how Britain would put a partition plan into action, especially if, as so many predicted, it faced Arab, and possibly Jewish, opposition: “[I]t was futile to speak about a decision, if the one with whom the decision lay did not recognise his right to apply the decision.”32 In this connection, the commission tried to ascertain whether Britain would impose partition once it had been decided upon. William Rappard argued that if British negotiations with the Arabs and Jews began with a declaration that no scheme would ever be enforced which was not willingly accepted by the two peoples, that would, in fact, be closing the door to any successful conciliation. If that attitude were taken, the two parties might be expected to hold out in the hopes of obtaining further concessions, whereas if it were made clear at the outset that everything possible would be done to reach the largest measure of agreement, but that, if no agreement were achieved, the solution would be imposed, the chances of agreement would, in his opinion, be increased rather than lessened.33

Despite the commissioners’ insistent questions, however, neither OrmsbyGore nor Hall would comment on the possibility of Britain’s imposing partition if no agreement could be reached between Britain, the Arabs, and the Jews. Rappard continued this line of questioning throughout the commission’s time in Geneva, effectively pointing out to his fellow commissioners that Britain would be unlikely to follow through on partition without extremely unlikely Arab assent. In addition to questioning the will and ability of both the British and Palestine Governments to rule and to implement a partition in the future, the commissioners had serious reservations about partition itself. Several of their main concerns focused on some of the practical assumptions underlying partition, including the possibilities of population transfer, intensive agricultural development, and development of effective and peaceful government within the defensible borders of the new states. Under pressure to explain how a compulsory transfer of Arabs out of the new Jewish state could comply with the directive to preserve their civil rights, Ormsby-Gore

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told the commission that despite the Peel Report’s recommendation, the British Government did not support the compulsory population transfer.34 Instead, he assured the commission that most of the Arabs would leave voluntarily. Similarly, when questioned about the size and defensibility of the new Jewish state, Ormsby-Gore expressed his conviction that once a Jewish state had been established, the Arabs would come to accept it. In polite but firm terms, the commissioners made it clear that they found British optimism regarding this, and other similar issues, to be naïve and, given past experience, unfounded. Finally, the commission cast doubt on the legality within the framework of the League not only of subsidiary measures such as population transfer but also of the establishment of new states through partition. Would the two new states really be assessed as having reached a stage of development sufficient for self-government? What conditions would govern the establishment of these new states, and what principles would guide the drawing of the new borders? Most pressingly, perhaps, the commissioners wanted to know how Ormsby-Gore envisioned the interim stage between the mandate in its present form and partition. His answers were vague and by all indications unsatisfactory to most of the commissioners. As Chairman Orts summarized the matter: It appeared from what the accredited representative had said that the existing mandatory regime was doomed; but it was also clear that the solution proposed by the mandatory Power in place of the mandate could by no means be regarded with certainty as capable of being put into practical effect. In that respect, matters were still purely hypothetical. Thus, the plan outlined by the mandatory Power could only leave an impression of perplexity.35

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Mandates Commission’s position on partition was inconclusive. The voluminous minutes of the summer 1937 session are a portrait of intellectual chaos, with commissioners following their usual lines of questioning based on the mandate text while simultaneously recognizing that the British government’s acceptance of the Peel Report had, in Palacios’s words, “condemned the mandate to death.”36 In its report to the League Council, the Permanent Mandates Commission did as Ormsby-Gore had begged and left open the door to partition. It did so, however, with its hand firmly on the doorknob, insisting that it was “nevertheless opposed to the idea of the immediate creation of two new independent States.”37 In place of immediate partition, the commission recommended a long interim period in which either two mandates

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would be established, or Palestine would be divided into cantons under a central (British administered) federal government. In an expression of the many doubts expressed by the commission members over the course of their meetings with Ormsby-Gore and Hall, the report foresaw that “with whatever wisdom and justice the frontiers may be fixed, this operation [partition] will come in conflict with the same contending aspirations as those to which the mandatory Power attributes the failure of its mandatory regime.”38 Parliament had slowed the British Government’s rush to partition, and far from removing obstacles from its path, the Mandates Commission questioned the very direction in which British policy seemed to be headed. On September 16, 1937, the League Council adopted a resolution permitting Britain to carry out a study of the possibilities of partition. This was far from the ringing endorsement Ormsby-Gore and the British Cabinet had sought, which might have helped them to overcome parliamentary and broader public opposition. Instead, the council reiterated that the mandate was still in force, and while it permitted Britain to investigate partition, it deferred “consideration of the substance of the question until the Council is in a position to deal with it as a whole, and in the meantime entirely reserve[d] its opinion and decision.”39 The council’s resolution indicated that partition was an open question, but taken in combination with the minutes of the Mandates Commission session, it was clear that even a detailed plan of partition would be unlikely to win favor in Geneva.

Zionist and Arab Views As the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League was in the midst of its session on Palestine, forceful, and largely unexpected, opposition from within the Zionist movement further undermined partition. In early August 1937, the twentieth Zionist Congress convened in Zurich, and the debates over partition threatened to tear the movement apart.40 Weizmann delivered an impassioned speech in which he simultaneously declared the Peel plan “unacceptable” and partition in principle the potential foundation upon which to build a Jewish state.41 After tense meetings and debates, Weizmann and the other pro-partition Zionists managed to convert enough delegates to the principle of partition. By a 299-160 vote, the Zionist Congress resolved that while the Peel partition plan was out of the question, the executive was permitted to enter into negotiations with the British government for the establishment of a Jewish state on the basis of partition.

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As in the parliamentary debate the month before, the Zionist Congress made the acceptance of the principle of partition contingent upon its eventual approval of the plan’s contours. The resolution of the Zionist Congress was, on balance, a mixed victory. On the one hand, Weizmann had narrowly averted a complete rejection of partition, but on the other, what he was left with was hardly a strong endorsement. Most important, from the perspective of the British Cabinet, this lukewarm approval of partition from the Zionists was unexpected. Public denunciations of partition, especially coming from those assumed to be its natural supporters, undermined one of the already shaky assumptions on which Government support for partition rested; partition, it was thought, would not only lift the financial and military burden associated with Palestine but also ease the persistent public criticism of Britain’s policies there. The Zionist Congress was yet another public forum in which partition was unexpectedly and pointedly attacked as a violation of Britain’s promises and a sign of British weakness. Like the Cabinet, the Zionist movement found itself divided by partition. The Arabs, in contrast, appeared to be unconflicted in their views. Unanimous opposition to partition was expressed at the Pan-Arab Congress that took place in Bludan, Syria, in September 1937, but this unanimity masked tensions not only within the Palestinian Arab community but within the wider Arab community as well. In the resurgent violence of the Arab uprising, agents of the Arab Higher Committee, led by the Mufti, Haj Amin alHusseini, conducted a terror campaign against Palestinian Arab supporters of partition, many of them members or clients of the Nashashibi family, a longtime political rival of the Husseinis.42 Emir Abdullah of Transjordan was strongly in favor of partition, which was not surprising given the fact that the plans in question proposed elevating him to the leadership of a new Arab state comprising Arab Palestine and Transjordan.43 Abdullah’s enthusiasm for partition, however, was not given a voice at Bludan. Those Palestinian Arabs willing to consider partition were thus intimidated into remaining silent, or denied a Pan-Arab platform from which to express their dissenting views.

The Foreign Office Campaigns against Partition The negative tone of the public debate, particularly in Parliament, opened the door to renewed attacks on partition by the Foreign Office. Unlike nearly every other group, the Foreign Office expressed little ambivalence on the question of partition, seeing it as an unmitigated disaster in the making. Using reports from local officials, and letters of protest from Arab

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leaders, members of the Eastern Division of the Foreign Office argued that partition was uniformly opposed not only by the Palestinian Arabs but also by the wider Arab world. At the core of this contention was the Foreign Office’s belief that Arab countries formed part of an “organic whole” and that any policy must take this into account.44 Non-Palestinian Arabs were therefore naturally extremely invested in the position of Palestinian Arabs. As a result, Palestine policy must be made with an acute awareness of the wider Arab world, as actions in Palestine had the potential to change the relationship between Britain and a vital region of the world. Partition would enrage “the Arabs,” causing instability in diplomatic relations with Middle Eastern states, potentially driving them into the arms of Germany and Italy and endangering the position of the British empire. The Colonial Office approached Palestine from a much more restricted frame of reference, having as its primary concern the effective and just governance of the country with little regard to the opinions of neighboring Arab states or to larger geopolitical considerations. From July to November 1937, the Foreign and Colonial Offices engaged in what one scholar has termed the “battle of memoranda,” as each office attempted to bring the Cabinet around to its point of view regarding partition.45 The Foreign Office insisted that partition would be interpreted as a British move against the Palestinian Arabs and would turn Arab states against Britain. The Colonial Office responded that partition was the only feasible solution to the Palestine problem that would not bring dishonor to Britain.46 Colonial Office officials further sought to undermine the Foreign Office’s position by questioning the true interest of neighboring Arab states in the affairs of Palestine and asserting that in the event of partition those states would not abandon their ties with Britain. This back and forth of memoranda meant that the Cabinet remained effectively paralyzed for a period of several months without indicating Britain’s next move regarding partition. By November, the Foreign Office had decided to shift tactics. Rather than advocate a complete reversal in policy, its officials decided to attack partition more subtly by manipulating the terms of reference for the new technical commission that Ormsby-Gore was requesting be sent to Palestine to flesh out the details of a partition plan. At first, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden pushed for the Cabinet to add clauses to the terms of reference that would give the new commission total freedom in determining a solution.47 Ormsby-Gore retorted that this would effectively throw the entirety of British policy in Palestine into question, possibly placing the Jews in the position of a permanent minority and risking international discredit

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for its breach of faith.48 The Foreign Office then modified its demands once again, this time advocating successfully for the deletion of three key clauses. The first clause confined the commission to considering only that evidence related to partition. Its removal gave the commission a much wider range of inquiry. The second clause stated that permanent minority status for the Jews was incompatible with the Balfour Declaration. With its removal, the Foreign Office left open the possibility of a solution in which the Jewish population would remain at a fixed, minority ratio. Finally, the third clause emphasized the fact that Britain would not be deterred from implementing partition by opposition from either or all sides. By removing this clause, the element of consent was reinserted into the picture, and lack of consent on the part of the Arabs was already well known. In this way, the Foreign Office successfully opened the door for the technical commission to find that partition was not feasible.49 At the Cabinet’s last meeting in which Palestine was addressed in 1937, Prime Minister Chamberlain appeared to be in agreement with the Foreign Office, finding that partition would be dangerous and impractical.50 The Cabinet was still split, with Eden representing the Foreign Office side against partition, and Ormsby-Gore repeating what had been William Rappard’s point in Geneva, which was that the Jews and Arabs would accept partition only if they were sure there was no other alternative. The dominions secretary, Malcolm MacDonald, who in less than six months would replace Ormsby-Gore as colonial secretary, wanted to leave open the possibility of partition, which he thought to be the best of the many poor options at hand. What all members agreed upon was that the Government could not publicly repudiate partition. Especially after the assassination of Lewis Andrews at the end of September, it became politically impossible for Britain to reverse its stated policy of partition since this would appear to be surrendering in the face of violence. Instead, Chamberlain suggested that the movement toward partition be slowed through a statement of policy that would emphasize the length of time needed for the technical commission to undertake it investigation and for Parliament and the League to give their input on the resulting report. Chamberlain further proposed that if the Cabinet felt it necessary, it might privately communicate to the technical commission that it could return to the Cabinet with the answer that partition was not practicable. In essence Chamberlain adopted the delaying tactics that had been used for both political and practical reasons by Parliament and the Permanent Mandates Commission, but added the possibility of effectively fixing the results of the as yet unappointed technical commission’s investigation. This Cabinet

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meeting, then, can be seen as the first point at which the balance tipped definitely against partition. This tug-of-war between the Foreign and Colonial Offices for control over Palestine policy reveals the degree to which the partition policy that appeared fairly firm and coherent from the outside was bitterly contested by a fragmented group of British policymakers. Partition, in fact, was contingent on bureaucratic politics and strategizing, as well as on high political perceptions of the risk inherent in pursuing such a policy. The Foreign Office won the battle over partition for two reasons that had little to do with partition itself: it was the superior of the two departments, having a longer history, a larger and more experienced staff, and a wider geographical range, and Foreign Secretary Eden outranked and outmaneuvered his counterpart at the Colonial Office, Ormsby-Gore. But the Foreign Office also capitalized on its strong contacts with Arab leaders and presented to the Cabinet a forceful and coherent picture of the Arab world in an uproar over partition. In contrast, the Colonial Office could only assert that partition would be accepted despite Arab and Jewish protests to the contrary. The Foreign Office’s Arab clients supported its contentions that partition was dangerous, while the Colonial Office’s Zionist and Arab clients undermined its assertion that partition was the best possible policy and would not bring unrest to the region. In a sense, then, the Foreign Office both capitalized on and further nurtured what could be thought of as the regionalization of the Palestine issue. Finally, the Foreign Office benefited from increased global instability after the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in October 1935, which made the British Government unwilling to risk losing allies in the critically important Middle East region. Additionally, British strategy in the Mediterranean and Middle East depended on a peaceful Palestine, whose reserve force would be needed to defend the Suez Canal in the event of war.

The Woodhead Commission Between January and November 1938, members of the Cabinet privately moved away more decisively from partition, though the Government continued to act as if it were under serious consideration. Perhaps using a lesson learned from its experience with the Peel Commission, which had been too independent and unpredictable for Government comfort, the Cabinet sought to control the results of the Woodhead Commission’s investigation. In the event, these attempts to influence the commission were unnecessary, for the realities of demography, agriculture, finance, and politics in

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Palestine meant that any detailed study of partition was bound to come to the conclusion that the “clean cut” would be anything but clean. Once the Woodhead Commission had delivered its verdict on partition, the Government used its report to justify an official reversal of policy embodied in the November 1938 White Paper. By this point partition had long been abandoned, but concerns over public opinion and Britain’s worldwide prestige meant that partition could not be seen to be the victim of political expediency. Rather, partition could be dispensed with only once an independent commission reported that it was not practically possible. The terms of reference for the new technical commission set out in the January 1938 White Paper were formidable. The commission was directed to recommend boundaries for the new states and the British mandated areas such that the Arab and Jewish states would be self-supporting and secure and include as few members of the other nationality as possible and that the British mandatory power would be able to carry out its responsibilities including the protection of holy places. It was also asked to take into consideration and report on a broad range of economic and financial questions, such as the distribution of public assets and debt between the new states, the administration of public services crossing state boundaries such as the railroads and telephone services, and the functioning of customs. Finally, the commission was asked to report on the thorny issues of voluntary land and population exchange and the protection of minorities within each of the new states.51 The White Paper emphasized both the contingency of any proposal constructed by the new commission and the length of time that the entire process could be expected to take. Any partition plan devised by the new commission would have to be found “equitable and practicable” by the Government in order to be referred to the Council of the League for its approval. The initial stage of investigation by the commission would “undoubtedly occupy many months,” and there would be a further delay on the road to partition after the League’s approval since new systems of government would have to be established and new treaties negotiated. The Arab and Jewish areas might, in fact, need to be administered as cantons for a period before being officially partitioned. In short, the White Paper concluded, “for some time to come, any action taken will be of an exploratory nature.”52 With the January 1938 White Paper, Britain adopted a slow, gradual, contingent approach to partition that had been advocated by Parliament, the League, and the Zionist Organization.53 Not addressed explicitly in the January White Paper was the possibility that the Woodhead Commission would return with a negative verdict

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on partition. Instead, it was hinted that the Government might find the commission’s plan unsuitable for reasons of “equity” or “practicability.” But the Government hoped to avoid having to make this kind of decision, and so in March 1938, Ormsby-Gore was put in the humiliating position of following through on the suggestion that Chamberlain had made at the December 1937 Cabinet meeting. He was compelled by Eden, with the support of the other Cabinet members, to send a letter to Sir John Woodhead instructing him that if the commission decided partition was not feasible, it must of course say so in its report.54 Personnel changes in February and May 1938 assured a more cohesive and receptive audience for the Woodhead Commission’s eventual report advising against partition. Eden and George Rendel, the head of the Middle East Division at the Foreign Office and the source of most of Eden’s antipartition memoranda, resigned their positions in February, to be replaced by Viscount Halifax and Herbert Lacy Baggallay, respectively, and in May former dominion secretary Malcolm MacDonald replaced an exhausted and embittered Ormsby-Gore as colonial secretary. With the lead combatants in the Foreign Office vs. Colonial Office fight over partition gone, the Cabinet could move more peacefully in the direction of formally abandoning partition without sacrificing official egos in the process.55 The Woodhead Commission arrived in Palestine on April 27 and departed for London on August 3. While in Palestine the commissioners undertook a strenuous schedule of travel, hearing witnesses, and examining evidence. During May and the early part of June, the commission traveled throughout Palestine and Transjordan, covering approximately three thousand miles. Once back in Jerusalem during June and July, the commission held fifty-five private and two public sessions in which oral evidence was presented. No Arabs gave evidence before the Woodhead Commission. The evidence with by far the greatest impact on the commission’s conclusions came from the Palestine Government, which supplied the commissioners with endless statistics and memoranda on topics such as population, land availability and use, and finances.56 Over the summer and early autumn, while the Woodhead Commission was investigating the possibilities of partition and drawing up its report, international developments helped to push Malcolm MacDonald toward accepting the antipartition arguments of which he had previously been doubtful. By May 1938, Britain was deeply involved in the run-up to the Munich crisis and was already plotting military strategy for the Middle East. When MacDonald briefly visited Palestine in early August, he sought the opinions of Palestine Government officials and of military command-

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ers. While High Commissioner Harold MacMichael presented the idea of establishing a small Jewish state under a modified British mandate, most other senior officials were of the opinion that partition and the establishment of new states was impossible.57 By the end of September, such a discussion seemed hard to imagine: on September 26, 1938, Britain declared a state of emergency and war appeared inevitable. In such tense and unstable times, Britain could hardly risk a complicated partition of Palestine that would certainly consume manpower and money and might precipitate diplomatic tensions and regional unrest. At a Cabinet meeting in October, MacDonald confessed that despite stated Government policy, he could no longer support a turn to partition.58 In October, the Woodhead Commission gave its report to the Cabinet.59 The Cabinet itself could not have written a more damning report on partition. Anchored by reams of technical data, the report outlined three partition plans: a so-called “majority” plan (Plan C) supported by two of the four commissioners, plan B advocated by one member, and plan A rejected unanimously by the commission (fig 5.1).60 The commission used the Peel plan as a baseline, modifying the lines proposed by that commission, and eventually severely shrinking the proposed Jewish state and radically enlarging the mandated areas in its effort to devise a workable solution. Plan A was a slightly modified version of the Peel partition plan, but even the modifications were not enough to allay the concerns of the commissioners over the lack of possibilities for land and population transfer and for intensive agricultural development in Arab areas. Plan A would leave nearly as many Arabs as Jews in the new Jewish state, and more than three quarters of the land in the Jewish state would be Arab-owned and cultivated. This plan clearly did not fulfill the Woodhead Commission’s terms of reference and so was discarded. Plan B excluded Transjordan from the entire proposal and hewed most closely to Harris’s earlier “Southern Plan” in which the Jewish state would not receive the Galilee. Under Plan B, the Galilee was to be a mandated area, but three commissioners thought this would ensure Arab opposition to partition and so rejected the plan. Plan C, supported by two of the commissioners, partitioned only the center of the country, reserving an enclave around Jerusalem and keeping both the north and the south under mandatory control. Within the mandated areas, however, a complex set of policies were to be instituted to control acquisition and development according to racial-religious categories. In the Negev, for example, Jews would be allowed to develop land in an “occupied” area (defined as having a certain amount of rainfall per year), while in the “unoccupied” area (in reality occupied by Bedouin), Britain

5.1. Palestine Partition [Woodhead] Commission Report partition maps A, B, and C, October 1938

Source: Map 8, “The A Plan of Partition,” Map 9, “The B Plan of Partition,” and Map 10, “The C Plan of Partition,” accompanying Cmd. 5854, Palestine Partition Commission Report [Woodhead Report] (London: HMSO, 1938). Credit: Blackmer Maps

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would undertake development projects and possibly allow the Jews to “improve” the land. In the Galilee, Jewish land purchases would be prohibited, and in the rest of the Northern Mandated Territory government permission would be required for each purchase. Immigration into either of the mandated territories would be strictly under government control, meaning that the Balfour Declaration would not apply. Even this convoluted set of regulations could not, in the end, produce an Arab state that the commissioners could be sure would be “self-supporting,” and so the Woodhead Commission devised a complex customs union between the Jewish state, the Arab state in combination with Transjordan, and the mandated areas, with each party taking one-third of the overall revenue. As this financial arrangement would obviate the establishment of truly independent states, the commissioners confessed that Plan C did not fall strictly within their terms of reference.61 The Woodhead Commission’s Plan C, with its dozens of appended rules and exceptions, effectively sought to place sensitive or complex areas under British control for a time. The aim was to render their assignment to one group or the other more gradual and less apparent than in an immediate clean cut. The many political and logistical problems inherent in this plan caused one of the commissioners to throw his support behind Plan B and the other to argue against partition entirely. Even the least objectionable plan, Plan C, Thomas Reid asserted, “would not and could not be implemented” owing to its inequity, impracticability, and the lack of consent on the part of Jews and Arabs.62 On November 9, 1938, the Government published a White Paper along with the Woodhead Commission Report, publicly declaring what it had privately decided months earlier, namely, that “the political, administrative and financial difficulties involved in the proposal to create independent Arab and Jewish States inside Palestine are so great that this solution of the problem is impracticable.”63 The Peel Report’s recommendations were openly dismissed. The public abandonment of partition was made possible by the final convergence between British political needs and the conclusions born of a detailed analysis of the practical aspects of partition in the Woodhead Report. Given the impending war, however, it seems likely that partition would have been jettisoned one way or another, or at least put on hold. After all, the commissioners had arrived in Palestine just after the Anschluss of March 1938 and published their report shortly after the Munich settlement over Czechoslovakia. The significance of the Woodhead Report is rather that it brought the partition of Palestine out of the realm of theory and placed it in tables and

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graphs, revealing that the reality of partition on the ground was much less elegant than partition on the page. Partition was defeated between 1937 and 1938 by its perceived insufficiency in two different yet complementary spheres: the first was the broader arena of international relations and global military strategy, and the second was the physical and fiscal reality of Palestine itself. As Palestine came to be seen as playing an important role in Britain’s geopolitical strategy on the eve of war, partition had to fit the requirements of maintaining peace and stability in the Middle East and preserving a key British imperial staging ground. And as a closer inquiry was made into the realities of carving out new states from Palestine, partition had to fulfill certain basic requirements concerning the distribution of land, people, resources, and money in order to mitigate the drain on imperial resources that the conflict in Palestine represented. It failed on both counts.

The 1939 White Paper Having finally dismissed the possibility of partition, the British Government had to propose an alternative policy. To this end, the November White Paper announced Britain’s intention to bring Arab and Jewish representatives together in London to discuss future policy, including the question of immigration. These meetings, it was hoped, would help promote an understanding between Arabs and Jews, which, in the banal rhetoric of the White Paper, was the “surest foundation for peace and progress in Palestine.”64 More pragmatically, the White Paper emphasized that if an agreement were not forthcoming at this conference, Britain would be forced to implement a policy of its own choosing. In early February 1939, the St. James’s Conference was formally opened, though in a sign of just how unlikely Arabs and Jews were to reach a mutually agreeable understanding, each delegation met separately with the British representatives. Significantly, the Arab delegation included not just members from Palestine but also representatives from Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Transjordan, and Yemen. The regionalization of the Palestine issue was undisputed; Britain was more concerned with the views of the Arab states than with those of the Palestinian Arabs.65 Over the next six weeks, British officials shuttled between the Arab and Jewish delegations, though in reality they were conducting “an exercise in British colonial diplomacy from which the Government knew exactly what it wanted, well before the first session began.”66 It thus served Britain well when first the Jews walked out of the conference, after discovering that the Government was secretly

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proposing different terms to the Arabs, and then the Palestinian Arabs flatly rejected the proposal that representation on an Executive Council be fixed at 2:1. The remaining task was to assure that the Arab states would stand behind, or at least not interfere with, Britain’s stated policy in Palestine. This was accomplished by negotiations in Cairo in mid-April with the representatives of the Arab states who were on their way home from London. The White Paper published on May 17, 1939, laid out Britain’s policy for Palestine, the terms of which mirrored more closely the agreements made in Cairo in April than the proposals that had been discussed at the conference in London. The White Paper proposed the establishment in ten years’ time of an independent, self-governing “Palestine State,” in which the “two peoples . . . Arabs and Jews,” would “share authority in government in such a way that the essential interests of each are secured.”67 These interests were taken to include the maintenance of the Jewish national home, though it was emphasized that the Jewish national home did not mean a Jewish state. Jewish immigration was to continue for five years, with a total of 75,000 Jewish immigrants permitted to enter Palestine in that period. After five years, Jewish immigration would be contingent upon Arab acquiescence, and Britain would consider itself to have discharged its responsibilities concerning the Jewish national home. During the ten-year period leading up to full independence, land sales would take place at the discretion of the British high commissioner. In the event that the country was not found suitable for full independence at the end of ten years, Britain might postpone the establishment of the Palestine state after consulting with the people of Palestine, the League of Nations, and the neighboring Arab states. It would take the advice of these parties in formulating a new policy for Palestine at that point. In effect, the 1939 White Paper returned Britain to the policy originally set out in the Passfield White Paper of 1930 and overturned by the MacDonald letter of 1931. It proposed the establishment of normative representative government in Palestine, with the result that the continued growth of the Jewish national home would be eventually subject to Arab approval. In proposing such a policy, the White Paper provided new answers to some of the fundamental questions that had bedeviled British administration of the mandate: Was Palestine to contain or produce a Jewish state? What was the Jewish national home and had it been achieved or completed? What constituted the Arabs’ rights? In answering these questions and setting out a revised policy for Palestine, the 1939 White Paper significantly shifted British policy away from its earlier pro-Zionist bent, as

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well as from the Peelite tendency to see Palestine as containing two nations whose borders simply had to be created. In Geneva in June 1939, Ramsay MacDonald’s son Malcolm, now colonial secretary after Ormsby-Gore (now Lord Harlech) had entered the House of Lords and resigned his position, argued that the mandate had been fulfilled. “The Jewish National Home is established,” MacDonald concluded, “and given reasonably peaceful conditions, it is secure and will grow as the years go by.”68 But the mandates commissioners did not agree, decrying the fact that “the policy set out in the White Paper was not in accordance with the interpretation which, in agreement with the mandatory Power and the Council, the Commission had always placed upon the Palestine mandate.”69 In asserting the territorial unity of Palestine, the 1939 White Paper heralded not only the demise of partition before the end of World War II, but also the final British break with the Mandates Commission over how to interpret the Palestine mandate.

Conclusion The story of partition’s fall from governmental grace, which unfolded between the release of the Peel Report and the issuing of the May 1939 White Paper, points to the multitude of forces acting on the development, and ultimately the demise, of partition. Some of these forces, in particular foreign policy concerns in an increasingly unstable European environment, in tandem with the growing influence of Arab states, if not of the Palestinian Arabs themselves, have been given pride of place in the historiography of this period. And while certainly one can see Britain moving away from an idealistic concern with trustworthiness toward a grittier realpolitik, it is important not to underemphasize the role played by public opinion, as expressed in a variety of fora, in shifting the British Government away from partition. In particular, much of the historical literature has overlooked the role of the League of Nations in turning Britain away from partition, despite the fact that the League comprised the main international arena in which Britain’s administration of Palestine was examined and judged. Even after placing strategic objectives above all other concerns, the British Cabinet sought to manipulate and assuage public opinion by hiding its decision about partition from public view for several months. The secrecy that had accompanied partition’s development also surrounded its demise. One of the prime forces acting on the development of partition plans before and during the Peel Commission, however, was notably weakened.

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In the period leading up to the release of the 1939 White Paper, the Zionists largely failed to pierce the veil of secrecy surrounding the Government’s plans for partition and wielded a vastly reduced influence on the question of partition. Whereas Zionist lobbying was remarkably effective in setting the geographic framework of the Peel Commission’s partition plan, in the period after the Peel Report direct Zionist influence on government policy waned significantly. Ironically, however, it was the Zionist leadership’s success in influencing British public and high political opinion that initially destabilized partition. In an attempt to set the stage for a maximalist partition line, Zionists framed partition as being insufficiently beneficial for the Jews of Palestine, and even as being anti-Zionist. Anglo-Zionists and others with sympathy for the besieged Jews of Europe thus attacked partition. The demise of partition against the wishes of the Zionist leadership, and the creation of a new, truly anti-Zionist policy embodied in the 1939 White Paper, is thus a potent demonstration of unintended consequences and complicates the standard narrative about the coherence and power of Zionist influence. Finally, the Woodhead Commission seems to have suffered in the historiographical shadow of its predecessor, the Peel Commission, and in light of the Cabinet’s desire to abandon partition long before it ever laid eyes on the Woodhead Report. There is no question that the Woodhead Report never came close to the eloquence or elegance of the Peel Report and served merely to confirm rather than to shift the Government’s course, but in overlooking it we risk losing sight of the role played by men on the spot and the situation on the ground in determining the course of partition. Douglas Harris, one of cantonization’s earliest proponents, whose work had formed the underpinning for the Peel Report’s partition proposal, headed the Palestine Government’s work collecting, collating, and interpreting data to be presented to the Woodhead Commission. In addition, Harris drafted parts of the new policy proposed at the St. James’s Conference, which he attended. Data on population and land distribution, water and irrigation, finances and enterprise formed the backbone around which the Woodhead Report was constructed. The figures told the story of a Palestine that could not be divided neatly into new states that fulfilled ideals of homogeneity and economic self-sufficiency.

CONCLUSION

Partition Redux, 1939–1948

Despite its apparent demise in 1939, partition survived the war and reemerged most famously in the United Nations plan of 1947. In part, this postwar revival was possible because partition had continued to be a tool that appealed to British officials in Jerusalem and London during World War II. The 1939 White Paper might have declared partition definitively off the table, but in land legislation passed soon afterward we see an almost immediate return to dividing land and sovereignty as a method of problem solving in Palestine. Partition also endured thanks to the reliance of Cabinet-level planners on officials such as Douglas Harris, whose 1936 cantonization plans and later partition plans and memoranda had formed the basis of the Peel partition plans. Harris remained active in developing territorial solutions to the Palestine problem throughout the war and particularly from 1943 on was crucially involved in providing information and framing for the anticipated postwar settlement of the Palestine question.1 The array of proposals on the future of Palestine produced between 1943 and early 1947 had in common that to one degree or another, they were all based on the model of the Peel partition map, despite the desires and efforts of many British politicians to abandon the Peel precedent altogether in favor of a unitary state.2 The terms and principles laid down in the Peel Report had become so firmly entrenched in most officials’ views of the mandate that they were impossible to shake, and the Peel partition plan became both the starting point and the standard against which other plans were judged. Finally, as the United Nations took up the question of Palestine policy from early 1947, it was deeply reliant on British documents and experts such as Harris; its approach was therefore profoundly shaped by the legacy of British partition proposals. The same imperial priorities that had driven the emergence and devel-

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opment of partition plans in the 1930s continued to shape related plans in the 1940s, whether they were formulated by British actors or individuals working on behalf of the international community. In what we now retrospectively understand was the era of late imperialism, British partition planners developed maps and plans that prioritized imperial control of strategic resources. Far from envisioning the imperial collapse that in fact followed World War II, these men imagined a continued British geographic and political presence in Palestine. In the transition from British to UN oversight of Palestine policy, much of the specific imperial calculus attached to partition was naturally stripped away, but underlying assumptions about Arab and Jewish ethnonationalisms and sovereignty and about the legitimacy of imposing territorial separation remained. The partition proposal put forward by the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) in 1947 did not follow earlier British plans in reserving land and a political role for Britain. Yet in the UN’s eventual turn to partition, and in some key features of its partition plan, we can see the hallmarks of partition’s origins as a British imperial policy. The very notion of partition was shot through with imperial prerogatives—to draw borders, assign sovereignty, retain areas, shift populations, and set timeframes for political independence—and these remained even after partition shifted from the explicitly imperial to the international arena.

Wartime Legacies of the Peel Partition Plan The 1939 White Paper repudiated partition as a viable policy for resolving the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine and firmly committed the British Government to a policy designed to establish a unitary state within a decade. Paradoxically, then, the Land Transfers Regulations of 1940, implemented explicitly to further this policy of fostering conditions for a single Palestine state, reveal evidence of the kind of partitionist thinking exemplified by the Peel Report. In a stated attempt to satisfy Article 6 of the mandate pertaining to the preservation of the “rights and position” of non-Jewish populations, part of the new policy put forward in the 1939 White Paper focused on land. Effective immediately, the White Paper stated, the high commissioner would “be given general powers to prohibit and regulate transfers of land” from Arabs to Jews in order to help Arab cultivators “maintain their existing standard of life” and prevent the creation of “a considerable landless Arab population.”3 This was not the first time that the Palestine Government had attempted to control land sales and to mitigate their impact on

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tenant agriculturalists.4 But what represented a substantial change was that the new regulations developed to fulfill this policy followed a geographical rather than economic model, and thus followed the legislative approach that Harris had first proposed in his October 1936 memorandum arguing for alternatives to cantonization. Rather than approach the question of land transfer by attempting to retain enough land to sustain tenants (what Hope-Simpson had called the lot viable, the definition of which had so troubled the Peel commissioners), the new regulations demarcated entire geographical areas in which land transfer was restricted. Under the regulations, Palestine was divided into three zones (fig 6.1). In Zone A land could be transferred only to Palestinian Arabs, with certain enumerated exceptions, such as the mortgage by entities approved by the high commissioner or transfer for the purpose of consolidating existing holdings. In Zone B Palestinian Arabs could transfer land only to other Palestinian Arabs, except with the approval of the high commissioner or through the intervention of the land settlements officers in particular circumstances such as a mortgage preexisting the regulations. In other words, with some exceptions, in Zone A Jews could not purchase land at all, while in Zone B they could, but not from Palestinian Arabs. Finally, transfer was permitted without reservation in the third, “free” zone.5 The area of this free zone was geographically closest to that set aside for the Jewish state under Plan C of the Woodhead Report, which itself reflected a subsection of the Jewish state envisioned in the Peel Report. This was no coincidence, as the zones themselves were the product of collaboration between two officials who had been involved in partition planning for some time. Douglas Harris drew up the original proposal for the zones used in the Land Transfers Regulations, while Stephen E. V. Luke of the Colonial Office, who had served as the secretary for the Woodhead Commission, expressly used that commission’s plans as the basis for working out the contours of the zones.6 Though not effecting a partition in the strict sense of dividing and creating polities, the Land Transfers Regulations controlled access to land, which was widely recognized as the lifeblood of any future sovereign state. The high commissioner, John Chancellor, had understood this in 1930 when, much to the dismay of the Colonial Office, he had proposed the cessation of land sales to Jews alongside the granting of self-government to a permanent Arab majority.7 In a letter to his son, Chancellor had commented that ending land sales in particular would “be a great blow to political Zionism.”8 The Zionists who protested and then circumvented the 1940 regulations clearly understood this connection between political sovereignty and land acquisition, and they sought to push back the lines

6.1. Palestine Land Transfers Regulations, 1940 Source: Fig 1. in Reecia Orzeck, “Normative Geographies and the 1940 Land Transfer Regulations in Palestine,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39, no. 3 (July 2014): 350; Map 5, Land Classification map of Palestine, notated with boundaries of land transfer regions as prescribed in 1940 in Suppl. to Cmd. 6808, Maps relating to the Report of the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry regarding the problems of European Jewry and Palestine (London: HMSO, 1946). Credit: Blackmer Maps

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that the regulations drew on the map of Palestine. The difference between Chancellor’s 1930 proposal and the 1940 regulations is instructive, however: the latter, though designed to give legislative weight to the 1939 White Paper’s vision of a unitary Palestinian state, carved out a geographic space, however small, for political Zionism, whereas the former had left no such room. Here, then, we see one legacy of the cantonization and partition plans of the 1930s. They had established habits of dividing territory and sovereignty that were strong enough to persist even in a period when official British policy held that no such division was to take place. In 1943, with the war in North Africa turning in the Allies’ favor, and the first five-year Jewish immigration quota established by the 1939 White Paper set to expire at the end of March 1944, Britain faced the question of Palestine’s future and of either reaffirming or revising the policy as laid down in the White Paper. The Colonial Office began planning for the economic, industrial, and infrastructural reconstruction of British territories. In this connection it turned once again to consider territorial solutions, including a partition proposal from the high commissioner, Harold MacMichael. MacMichael had become a recent convert to partition, having opposed it vociferously until mid-1943, and he had also, probably not coincidentally, recently appointed Harris to a position as the reconstruction commissioner for Palestine.9 Simultaneously, a special Cabinet committee on Palestine appointed by Churchill began work in August 1943 to develop a long-term plan for Palestine. It was instructed to look first to the Peel Report’s proposal, effectively reviving partition as the favored solution at the highest levels of the British government. The colonial secretary, Oliver Stanley, worked in consultation with the Palestine Government to develop a partition plan and then rallied support for it, most importantly from the resident ministers in the Middle East, Richard Casey and Lord Moyne. He also requested that Douglas Harris be made available as an expert advisor to the committee.10 In a move that exemplifies the ways in which partition ideas traveled via the career paths of imperial officials, Harris was recalled to London to advise the Cabinet committee. He became a regular attendant at its meetings and supplied it with statistics, memoranda, and general input that helped to shape its plans.11 Harris thus once again provided an important link between high-level planners and on-the-ground knowledge, as he had done for the Peel and Woodhead Commissions. By now he also had an unrivaled institutional memory of planning for territorial separation, stretching back to cantonization proposals nearly a decade earlier. David Horowitz, director of the Jewish Agency’s Economic Department from 1935 to

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1948, later remembered Harris in the 1940s in the following terms: “High commissioners and Government chief secretaries came and went in regular succession, and even British policy—or its expedient equivalent—changed tone more often than not; but Harris remained at his post, his influence unimpaired, regarded by some as the uncrowned ruler of Mandated Palestine.”12 The uncrowned ruler’s fondness for territorial separatism as a solution to the Palestine problem perhaps goes some way toward explaining its recurrence throughout the 1930s and 1940s in conversations among those who set policy. In December 1943, the Committee on Palestine submitted a report to the entire War Cabinet, along with a dissenting note by Richard Law, the undersecretary of state, who was on the committee representing the Foreign Office. Given its directive, nearly all of the committee’s conversations had revolved around partition plans of one version or another, and so both the report and the dissent put forward partition plans.13 Both plans revealed the effects of the war in shifting the range of options considered workable by different British officials, but alongside these subtle shifts lay a remarkably consistent focus on British strategic assets and their preservation via partition. Even the dissent paid lip service to partition, agreeing that it represented “the best and possibly the only final solution of the Palestine problem,” which was an odd concession in a response that otherwise demolished the partition plan being proposed precisely on the grounds that it would “jeopardise [Britain’s] whole position in the Middle East” without explaining how any other partition plan could avoid this disaster.14 In the working out of specifics, we can see the cumulative effect of years of partition planning, as the Cabinet committee brought a number of strategies and prior techniques to bear on its vision of Palestine’s future. The majority recommended a partition plan that, in its words, was based upon the Peel plan, though in reality it was much closer to the Woodhead B plan (fig 6.2). The plan proposed the creation of a Jewish state, Arab areas to be joined initially with Lebanon and Transjordan, and a Jerusalem state, possibly with a joint administration of services such as mail and railways, and certainly with the establishment of an international body to arbitrate any interstate conflicts and oversee treaty obligations. At a territorial level, the Cabinet committee followed the Woodhead B plan in removing the Galilee from the Jewish state of the Peel Report. In compensation it granted the Jewish state control over Jaffa and land surrounding it, thereby eliminating the British-controlled corridor to the sea present in both the Peel and Woodhead plans. It also granted the Jewish state an area east of the Jordan river south of Lake Tiberias and more land around Beisan.

6.2. Partition proposal of the War Cabinet Committee on Palestine, December 1943 Source: Map, “Proposed Scheme for the Partition of Palestine,” in War Cabinet, Committee on Palestine, Report of the Committee, December 20, 1943. P.(M)(43) 29, TNA: CAB 95/14. Credit: Blackmer Maps

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The Jerusalem state would encompass Jerusalem and Bethlehem as well as areas critical to British security: Ramallah with its broadcasting station, the airfields at Lydda (“likely to be an important centre in post-war Empire air communications”), and the source of Jerusalem’s water at Ras el-Ein.15 Addressing the loss of Haifa under this plan, the report argued that Britain and the other great powers would demand treaty rights to maintain a variety of military installations as a condition of any partition plan and suggested that Britain might lease the port of Haifa from the Jewish state. To avoid the creation of an “island” Jewish state in the south, which they feared would lead to the demand for a corridor, the planners assigned to the high commissioner of Jerusalem control over the Negev. This would leave the area available for lease at a later date to a Jewish chartered company if it were found suitable for development. On a regional scale, the committee members signing the majority report thought it ideal—though not essential—that partition lead ultimately to the creation of a Greater Syria, consisting of Syria, Transjordan, the Arab areas partitioned from Palestine, and the part of Lebanon to the south and east of Sidon. This, in the somewhat tone-deaf words of men planning to carve up and rearrange not only British but also French territories, would “be a return to a political order which lasted for many centuries and was disturbed only by the arbitrary dismemberment of the Levant after the last war.”16 Having handpicked most of the committee, Churchill was, unsurprisingly, pleased with its report, which he pronounced a “very fine piece of work.”17 His one quibble was that he thought the Greater Syria scheme would need to be an essential rather than an optional feature of partition. Triumphant, he cabled Anthony Eden in mid-January 1944: “Some form of partition is the only solution.”18 Later in the month, the War Cabinet approved the partition proposal in principle, though it also agreed, as the planners had suggested, that a partition plan could not be implemented before the defeat of Germany. Churchill had also expressed the desire to avoid interfering in any way with the US presidential election, and so further discussion was deferred. In a pattern reminiscent of what unfolded between the publication of the Peel Report and the appointment of the Woodhead Commission in 1937, this pause in the planning process allowed the Foreign Office to marshal facts and figures, solicit further memoranda from ambassadors and the chiefs of staff, and argue strenuously against partition on foreign policy grounds when discussions were resumed in the late summer and early autumn of 1944. Despite this opposition, however, the committee stuck with

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partition, submitting a revised report to the Cabinet in September. Partitionist thinking also remained popular at the local level in Palestine where, after a dispute over the mayoralty of Jerusalem, the acting district commissioner, Robert Newton, put forward a proposal to partition the city. Perhaps we should not be surprised that Harris, now something of a partition consultant, was present at the discussion in December 1944 of this proposal.19 The Cabinet approved partition in October 1944. The plan it backed, outlined in the committee’s second report made the previous month, scrapped the Greater Syria idea and, in a return to the Peel plan, proposed the creation of a state of South Syria comprising the Arab areas partitioned from Palestine combined with Transjordan. The Greater Syria plan had several flaws, the committee members had discovered, not least of which was the fact that under the 1928 treaty signed with Abdullah, Britain could not take unilateral action to subsume Transjordan within a Greater Syria. Furthermore, given French influence in Syria, such a merger “would almost inevitably be contrary to British interests.”20 The assassination in November 1944 of Lord Moyne by operatives of the Zionist militant group Lehi (the so-called Stern Gang) in Cairo stopped partition planning in its tracks. Furious at the attack, and sensitive to the upcoming general election, Churchill instructed the Cabinet to suspend discussion of future policy for Palestine. Moyne’s assassination thus interrupted what looked to be momentum toward partition in two ways: first, it drove a wedge in the short term between British officials supportive of partition and their Zionist counterparts; and second, and most important, it once again delayed partition planning. The impact of the delay was substantial. As Colonial Secretary Oliver Stanley put it somewhat ruefully when the question of partition policy was raised again in March 1945, “[t]he long delay in reaching a final decision on the Report of the Committee has been a grave disadvantage.”21 The most troubling development from Stanley’s perspective was that the opposition to partition had both intensified and broadened. Now Casey’s replacement as minister of state in Cairo, Sir Edward Grigg, and MacMichael’s replacement as high commissioner in Palestine, Lord Gort, both opposed partition. Palestine’s Arabs, reliable opponents of partition, enjoyed the support of a new institution, the Arab League, which had been formally inaugurated the week before Stanley penned his memorandum. On the Zionist side, Chaim Weizmann was “now blowing cold on Partition and has moved towards full support of the Biltmore Programme,” with its maximalist demands for unrestricted Jewish immigration and the establishment of Palestine as a Jewish Commonwealth.22

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The Labour government of Clement Attlee, which came to power in July 1945, thus found itself in possession of a partition plan designed in and for what seemed like a different era. Between 1945 and 1947 Britain struggled, fruitlessly, to develop policy for Palestine in a domestic and international context that set severe constraints on its ability to both design and implement a plan and that led it to revert officially to the 1939 White Paper. As other scholars have documented extensively, postwar British policymaking—if, indeed, we can call what followed policymaking—was shaped by several key factors. First, Britain itself was in a rough economic state at the end of the war. After the end of Lend-Lease in August 1945, it faced an international trade deficit and overseas debt of mammoth proportions, both of which accentuated the cost of remaining in Palestine. With the emergence of the United States and the Soviet Union as international superpowers with strong interests in the Middle East generally, and in the settlement of the Palestine question in particular, the United States took a prominent role in Palestine, one initially welcomed by Britain. In August 1945, Truman made public the demand he had privately made of Churchill at the Potsdam conference in July, which was that Britain lift the restrictions on Jewish immigration set down in the 1939 White Paper, and the ensuing diplomatic dispute between Truman and Attlee indicated that Palestine was going to become a crucial test of Anglo-American relations. It also revealed what Britain would come to learn over several years of talks, which was that while the United States was not going to leave Palestine policy to Britain, it also would not take military or substantial financial responsibility for imposing a settlement. Regionally, meanwhile, a weakened Britain faced growing problems, including Zionists engaging in terrorism in Palestine, nationalists aiming to remove British troops from Egypt, and five member states of the Arab League taking up membership in the newly constituted United Nations. Finally, Labour was committed to Indian independence and to reducing the fiscal burden of empire. Partition, which in every iteration had envisioned Britain as both the partitioner and a residual power after partition was complete, seemed an unlikely policy given these larger circumstances.

Internationalizing Partition Nevertheless, territorial possibilities for resolving the Palestine question remained in circulation within British policy circles, and owing to negotiations with the United States, soon entered the realm of international planning. Harris was appointed secretary to the 1945 Cabinet Committee on

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Palestine, and in September of that year the colonial secretary, George Hall, submitted a provincial autonomy proposal to that committee that mirrored closely Harris and Andrews’s 1936 cantonization plan, as well as the Indian constitutional arrangements on which Harris had worked so closely in the early 1930s. The provincial autonomy plan, which Harris likely authored himself, argued that the principle of partition might be “achieved in some other way,” namely, by taking the partition lines—with some slight modifications—of the War Cabinet Committee on Palestine’s proposal and transforming them into provincial boundaries. A central mandatory government would run the area immediately around Jerusalem, including Bethlehem, as an enclave and would also “administer directly subjects of all-Palestine importance, such as foreign relations, defence, customs, railways, harbors and posts and telegraphs.”23 Such a scheme, the proposal claimed, had all the benefits of partition—namely, continued British control of key assets and a solution to the Arab-Jewish conflict—with none of the costs. So, for instance, it would not matter where Haifa, the airfields at Lydda, or the broadcasting station at Ramallah fell, since control over defense, aviation, and broadcasting would be reserved to the mandatory government. Likewise, Jaffa and the Galilee could be recharacterized as Arab provinces since their status as “islands” would not be particularly problematic in a provincial rather than a nation-state model. The British mandated area, in other words, could shrink down to its smallest area, while Britain retained maximum strategic advantage in Palestine. This “new” plan for Palestine—in fact not new at all—eventually made its way, once again via Douglas Harris, to an international audience. In mid-November 1945, Truman and Bevin announced the composition of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, designed primarily to tackle the question of Jewish immigration, which had crystallized around a Zionist demand, supported by the United States, that 100,000 Jews be granted immigration certificates for Palestine. The terms of the committee of inquiry also directed it to approach the “problems of Palestine” as they were related to immigration. Acting on behalf of the Colonial Office, Harris submitted his provincial autonomy plan to the committee when it began its work in January 1946.24 In its final report, the committee recommended the immediate granting of 100,000 immigration certificates while avoiding larger constitutional questions, and so Harris’s provincial autonomy/ cantonization plan appeared to go nowhere. Instead, with its members split between pro- and antipartitionists, the committee chose to make a unanimous recommendation that the mandate be continued and eventually transformed into a UN trusteeship.25

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Even before the Anglo-American Committee issued its report, it had been decided that a group of British and American experts, led by the Cabinet secretary, Sir Norman Brook, and the American diplomat Henry Grady, should meet to plan for the implementation of the committee’s eventual recommendations. After the committee’s report effectively sidestepped larger constitutional questions, the stage was set for Hall to reintroduce Harris’s provincial autonomy plan. Hall argued in a Cabinet meeting that the implementation of the committee’s recommendations “would provide no solution to the Palestine problem since no long-term policy is suggested and no proposals offered.”26 To fill that gap, a few days later he circulated Harris’s provisional autonomy plan to the Cabinet, which gave its approval in principle. Talk turned quickly to the best strategy for the British representatives to introduce the plan to their American counterparts and to convince them of its superiority.27 In the event, the Americans were much more focused on securing Britain’s agreement to issue 100,000 immigration certificates and so did not require much convincing before agreeing to the provincial autonomy plan, which Harris himself was on hand to explain.28 Over the latter part of July 1946, as the situation in Palestine worsened with the bombing of the King David Hotel on July 22, the British and American delegations finalized and printed a proposed agreement on future policy for Palestine.29 It was never circulated, though leaks meant that both its existence and its details were widely reported in the press before it was formally announced in the House of Commons on July 31, 1946, by Deputy Prime Minister Herbert Morrison, who had the unenviable task of presenting it in the absence of the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, who had collapsed a week earlier. What soon became known, rather oddly therefore, as the MorrisonGrady plan was a vision of provincial autonomy that hewed closely to the borders and terms envisioned by the British Cabinet, and that had its roots, as we have seen, in the cantonization plans drawn up by Harris and Andrews a decade earlier (fig. 6.3). It effectively overturned the AngloAmerican Committee recommendation for a continued mandate and then a transition to UN trusteeship. Despite its reference to the committee’s principles “that Palestine as a whole can be neither a Jewish nor an Arab state, that neither of the two communities in Palestine should dominate the other, and that the form of government should be such as to safeguard the interests in the Holy Land of the three great monotheistic religions,”30 and its framing of provincial autonomy as a way of fulfilling the committee’s ultimate aim of self-government, the provincial autonomy agreement represented a reversal of one of the committee’s central recommendations.

6.3. Provincial autonomy plan proposed by the Morrison-Grady Committee, July 1946 Source: Map, “Provincial Autonomy Plan,” in Cmd. 7044, Proposals for the Future of Palestine, July, 1946-February, 1947 (London: HMSO, 1947). Credit: Blackmer Maps

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No one understood this better than Oliver Stanley, who, furious at the delay and deeply disappointed that the new policy was not partition, called the Anglo-American Committee report “dead” and pitied the poor committee that had slaved over it for nothing. “They came, they saw—and it appears now that they have vanished,” he exclaimed.31 In this, however, he was mistaken, for while the Morrison-Grady plan did reverse part of the Anglo-American Committee Report, it also, in a concession to the Americans, incorporated the committee’s plan to move 100,000 Jews into Palestine and to support broad refugee resettlement efforts around the world under the auspices of the United Nations and the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees. Soon, however, the United States would abandon the Morrison-Grady plan, Truman coming under political pressure from Zionists at home and facing objections to the plan from his Treasury and the US military authorities in Europe. Anglo-American negotiations had brought a territorial solution back to the center of British policymaking for Palestine, and so even though the Americans had stepped back, provincial autonomy was the policy that Britain attempted to negotiate with Arabs and Jews. As is well known, neither party was amenable. Palestinian Arabs demanded a single independent state and were supported in this by the Arab League, which held a special meeting in Bludan, Syria, in June 1946 devoted entirely to the question of Palestine. Meanwhile, the Zionists became ever more committed to partition and noncollaboration with Britain and were tacitly supported by Truman, whose statement of October 4 suggested presidential sympathy with the Zionist position regarding the “creation of a viable Jewish state.”32 By mid-February 1947, with the latest roundtable conference between British officials and Arab and Jewish representatives having failed, the Cabinet took the decision to refer the question of future Palestine policy to the United Nations.33 On February 18, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin addressed the House of Commons: “His Majesty’s Government,” he said, “have of themselves no power, under the terms of the Mandate, to award the country either to the Arabs or to the Jews, or even to partition it between them. It is in these circumstances that we have decided that we are unable to accept the scheme put forward either by the Arabs or by the Jews, or to impose ourselves a solution of our own. We have, therefore, reached the conclusion that the only course now open to us is to submit the problem to the judgment of the United Nations.”34 As Bevin indicated in his speech, part of passing the question of the mandate to the UN involved turning over reams of written and statistical material, and so the UN began

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its study of the problem deeply reliant on British documents, and therefore profoundly influenced by prior British interest in partition. Trygve Lie, the UN secretary-general, directed Arkady Sobolev, the Russian assistant secretary-general for Security Council affairs, to form a team composed of five members to study the question, and material on the Palestine question was collected and kept in a special library at the UN. Five volumes of statistics and old British proposals and plans were published, and these were used not only by the team of five, but also by the eventual UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) and by the Partition Commission entrusted with actually implementing partition after the November 1947 vote.35 Ralph Bunche, the American political scientist and diplomat, played a role in all three of these groups; an initial member of the small team of five appointed by Lie to collect, collate, and produce material on Palestine, Bunche accompanied UNSCOP to Palestine as a special assistant and ran the secretariat of the Partition Commission.36 In addition to material officially handed over by the British, Bunche and others received private memoranda, among them an analysis of past partition plans written by Harris.37 The hallmarks of British partition planning are, not surprisingly, evident in the UNSCOP plan and in the slightly modified version of this plan that was eventually voted on by the UN General Assembly. The legacy of the Peel partition plan was apparent in the partition plans proposed by UNSCOP at the end of August 1947, a mere two weeks after the disastrous partition of India, though as we will see, the UNSCOP plan in fact was closer in its details to the Woodhead B plan. At a structural and procedural level, the UNSCOP Report, like the Peel Report, was the result of an in-depth and in-country investigation. The eleven-member special committee spent two weeks in Palestine, several days in Lebanon, Syria, and Transjordan, and, in a sign of the impact of the European Jewish crisis on the question of Palestine, a week in displaced persons camps in Germany and Austria. As with the Peel Commission, UNSCOP heard evidence in public and private sessions as well as in informal meetings, and there are striking parallels in the ways in which Jewish and Arab leaders approached these two bodies.38 Palestinian Arab leaders had boycotted the Peel Commission until the last minute, and with UNSCOP their boycott was complete.39 Meanwhile, as they had done with the Peel Commission, Zionist leaders presented a detailed and finely wrought case in public and worked diplomatic and personal back channels in order to increase the chance that UNSCOP would, as Peel had, come up with a favorable proposal.40 After considering unitary, bi-national, and cantonal possibilities, UNSCOP proposed two plans, one endorsed by the minority and the

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other by the majority of its members.41 The minority proposal, supported by the committee members from India, Iran, and Yugoslavia, outlined the creation of a new, “independent federal State of Palestine” with a bicameral federal legislature and courts in addition to the legislatures and courts of the individual Arab and Jewish states. One federal chamber would be elected proportionally to the Arab and Jewish populations in the entire country, while the other would contain equal numbers of Arab and Jewish representatives. The federal government would have control over matters such as defense, foreign policy, federal taxation, transport, and most significantly immigration, while the individual state governments would have authority over issues such as education, local taxation, land permits and settlement, policing, public health, and agriculture. In some ways, this minority plan had its roots in the cantonal plans of the mid-1930s that had been revived by Harris and found their way back into currency in the Morrison-Grady plan. By contrast, the majority plan, supported by Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, Holland, Peru, Sweden, and Uruguay (with Australia abstaining), strongly echoed the central recommendation of the Peel Report inasmuch as it advocated partition into two states. It also more fully developed the Peel plan’s economic ideas by proposing a full economic union and, mirroring in some ways the mandated areas of the Peel plan, proposed creating Jerusalem as a corpus separatum under a special international regime. The differences between the Peel plan and the UNSCOP plan were, however, substantial. This is not terribly surprising when we consider that the Peel commissioners included a number of key figures with extensive imperial experience and that the (unstated) aim of the commission was to resolve the conflict in Palestine while simultaneously preserving Britain’s moral and material interests in the region. The UNSCOP members on the other hand were drawn from a range of countries with different approaches to and interests in the Palestine question, a number of which explicitly gave their representatives the freedom to develop plans and vote as their consciences dictated rather than as their nations’ perceived interests lay. One of the most significant divergences between the Peel and the UNSCOP majority plan was, therefore, that the UNSCOP plan did not envision Britain playing a continued role in Palestine as the mandatory or trustee over any part of the territory. Indeed, the first unanimously agreed upon recommendation in the UNSCOP Report was that the “Mandate of Palestine shall be terminated at the earliest practicable date,” and a further unanimous recommendation was that the United Nations would supervise the body in charge of the transitional period.42 All of the predecessors to

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the Peel plan, all of the Woodhead plans, and all of Britain’s wartime plans had assumed some measure of continued formal British presence and control over resources as varied as the holy sites of Jerusalem, the oil pipeline and deep-water port, and airfields. UNSCOP, by contrast, evinced no interest in preserving imperial access to these areas. On a related point, the UNSCOP partition plan did not propose amalgamating the new Arab state and Transjordan, though we know that this is precisely what Zionist and Hashemite operatives were seeking, with the blessing of the British.43 Combining the Arab state and Transjordan was, as we saw earlier, an objective of many British policymakers, who saw such a unification as a way to retain access to critical geostrategic positions via Britain’s ally, the Emir Abdullah of Transjordan (from 1946, King Abdullah of Jordan). Unifying the Arab state and Transjordan would also, from the British perspective, have the advantage of nullifying the political power of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who had been instrumental in the Arab uprising of 1936–39 and during World War II cast his lot with the Nazis. Without explicitly imperial objectives to adhere to, UNSCOP dropped a Greater Transjordan from its partition plans. Finally, we must note that whereas the Peel commissioners saw population and land transfer as such great necessities that they were willing to make them compulsory, even as they emphasized the need for minority protection, the UNSCOP partition plan on the contrary privileged choice in matters of citizenship and gave greater detail about the rights to be preserved for all residents of Palestine. The UNSCOP Report unanimously recommended that the laws of the new state or states give specific guarantees concerning Human rights and fundamental freedoms, including freedom of worship and conscience, speech, press and assemblage, the rights of organized labor, freedom of movement, freedom from arbitrary searches and seizures, and rights of personal property; and full protection for the rights and interests of minorities, including the protection of the linguistic, religious and ethnic rights of the peoples and respect for their cultures, and full equality of all citizens with regard to political, civil and religious matters.44

With regard to citizenship, the UNSCOP partition plan envisioned that all residents of Palestine would be granted the citizenship of the state in which they found themselves resident upon independence or, if they were resident in the corpus separatum of Jerusalem, would declare which state’s citizenship they desired to obtain. Those who wished could “opt within

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one year for the citizenship of the other State or declare that they retain the citizenship of any State of which they are citizens.”45 Far from being forcibly relocated, that is, the new citizens would have a good deal of latitude to decide their own future states. Finally, UNSCOP saw fit to specify that “No expropriation of land owned by an Arab in the Jewish State (by a Jew in the Arab State) shall be allowed except for public purposes,” unless the land had remained unused and uncultivated for a year and the Supreme Court of the state in question approved the expropriation.46 While this provision might be open to interpretation and manipulation, the point remains that the UNSCOP partition plan explicitly ruled out forced land transfers along with forced population transfers. Remembering that its members had just witnessed the mass violence and bloodshed that accompanied large-scale population movement in the aftermath of the partition of India goes some way, perhaps, toward explaining UNSCOP’s aversion to the population transfer envisioned by the Peel Commission, though it raises a more perplexing question about its support for partition as an overall concept. At the end of September 1947, over a year after the bombing of the King David Hotel had signaled a British loss of control that spiraled and led to mounting British casualties, and shortly after the publication of the UNSCOP Report, Britain announced its firm intention to unilaterally withdraw from Palestine. Palestine, long a focus of international interest and concern, was now, officially, the world’s problem. The United Nations adopted a slightly modified form of the majority UNSCOP partition plan on November 29, 1947,47 and in mid-December Britain declared its intention to end the mandate on May 15, 1948 (fig 6.4). As in India, Britain moved quickly and decisively to withdraw from what its leaders saw as an untenable situation that was quite likely to bog its forces down in a civil war. The UN partition plan, though it was never put into effect, was thus linked temporally and later historiographically with decolonization and national independence, but as this book has suggested, it was the product of a longer imperial history. While it is clear that the UN plan was not a facsimile of the earlier British partition and cantonization plans and had little, explicitly, to do with British interests, to restrict our comparative examination to lines and resources alone avoids the deeply imperial implications of partition as a concept and risks losing sight of the fact that, from their inception, plans of territorial separation were designed to ensure the maintenance of British access to material resources, carve out some sort of space for Britain’s Zionist allies, placate regional Arab states, and solidify Britain’s position as a protector of the holy sites of three of the world’s major religions.

6.4. United Nations partition plan, November 1947 Source: Annex A, “Palestine, Plan of Partition with Economic Union,” United Nations General Assembly, Future Government of Palestine, November 29, 1947, UN Doc. A/RES/181(II). Credit: Blackmer Maps

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Building on a long British history of partition planning therefore had both material and ideological ramifications for the UN planners. On a practical level, UNSCOP had models to tweak, revise, or abandon, statistics on which to base its work, maps, and plans, and even input from those who had been instrumental in the work of proposing partition ten years earlier. In contrast to the Peel Report, which tacked on the partition proposal almost as an afterthought and could only vaguely sketch out its contours, the UNSCOP Report was able to build on the work of the Peel and Woodhead Commissions, as well as on the reams of wartime and postwar plans for territorial separation of one variety or another. Those UNSCOP members in favor of partition were likewise able to slowly but surely build consensus around a plan whose basic concepts were familiar to all on the committee. Crucially, the experience of 1937 had made it clear what the Zionist and Arab responses would be to the UN’s partition plan, and so staunch Arab opposition came as absolutely no surprise. Palestinian Arabs’ refusal to entertain partition on the grounds of national self-determination ensured that the planning proceeded without them. Having handled the debate over partition in 1937, Zionist leaders were in a much stronger position in 1947 to lobby UNSCOP members, push successfully for a favorable border, and expertly frame the Zionist acceptance of partition as a compromise rather than a victory. Partition was also, by simple accretion and repetition, now a legitimate undertaking and one whose imagined eventuality had already shaped Jewish land purchase and settlement on the ground in Palestine.48 Along with the institutional structures granted by the British mandate, the decade between the Peel Report and the referral to the UN had given the Zionist movement the critical gift of time to plan for partition. Despite all of the vacillations in British policy over the decades, the Jewish Agency had found under British rule the conditions it needed to build a para-state. Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that when the UN Secretariat began preparing a partition commission to implement the November 1947 plan, it recommended that the commission ignore the requirement to set up an Arab state, which would be too difficult, and instead focus “on the establishment of a Jewish state with a strong army, which would impose its authority on its resident Arab minority, be able to repulse any Arab attack from across the border, and in practice would be the force to implement the partition plan.”49 Partition planning under the British had prioritized the objectives of an imperial power, and we see in the UN plans the way in which those imperial perspectives shaped supposed plans for national

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independence. UN plans envisioned Britain’s imperial power giving way to a dominant Jewish state.50 After a war that had started in late 1947, the state of Israel unilaterally declared its existence and independence on May 15, 1948. Following armistice agreements reached in 1949, the new state controlled nearly 80 percent of the former British-mandated territory, an area substantially larger than that given to the Jewish state under the partition plan approved by the United Nations (fig 6.5).51 The Peel Commission’s recommendation of population transfer looked, in retrospect, like a prophecy; some 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were forced from their homes.52 The new state of Israel therefore had a much smaller minority population and a much larger territory than the Jewish state of the Peel or UN partition plans would have possessed. The principle of population transfer that underlay the Peel partition plan and had been repudiated by UN planners was put into action, albeit in a more violent manner than the Peel commissioners had been willing to contemplate. War provided the tactical means and rhetorical cover to solve the problems of mixed and fragmented populations, territorial contiguity, and defensibility that had so plagued the authors of cantonization and partitions plans since the late 1920s.

Imperial Imaginings at the End of Empire On the surface, then, partition failed to be implemented by the British in Palestine after the World War II, just as it had failed before the start of the war. But beneath this apparent failure was the persistence of the principles that had made territorial partition such an appealing solution in the first place and the ultimate realization of British plans by Israel. The partition idea proposed an answer to the fundamental questions and uncertainties of the Palestine mandate, an answer rooted in developing interwar notions of nationality, statehood, and self-determination and eventually shaped by growing evidence of Palestinian Arab nationalism and Jewish victimization in Europe. Palestine, it asserted, contained two nations, both with valid claims to the land and with incompatible nationalisms. The solution to this problem was to physically separate the nations, not simply by dividing both sovereignty and territory, but also, and most important, by shifting populations. That the Peel partition plan of 1937 was still the basis for plans drawn up a decade later is testament to its remarkable longevity. The mass movement of populations, not only in Palestine in 1948 but also in the partition of India in 1947—to say nothing of the postwar forced

6.5. Map showing armistice agreements between Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt, 1949 Source: Map H212/10/1955, United Nations Digital Library, https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/686123?ln=en accessed November 10, 2018. Credit: Blackmer Maps

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movements of millions in Europe—meanwhile, bore out the Peel Commission’s sense that demographic reality would have to be realigned to match the lines drawn on a map. The human cost of that realignment, however, was far greater than the partition planners had ever let themselves imagine. Britain’s talk of and plans about partition, and its simultaneous inability and unwillingness to implement partition plans in Palestine in the period up to 1948, are significant in their own right. As this book has demonstrated, the dialogues around partition in the 1920s and 1930s repay close attention in broad international and imperial contexts by illuminating not only a critical piece of the story of mandate Palestine, which was to have a lasting impact on its future structure, but also by drawing our attention to the underlying assumptions, principles, and ways of thinking that shaped and constrained British policymaking, ways of thinking that were inherited by the United Nations and the new Israeli state. The failure of these plans suggests a gap between what was technically feasible and politically possible, a gap that shifted constantly owing to changing political circumstances. Studying the failed partition plans of the 1930s and their descendants of the 1940s tells us something not only about the particular political limits of the time, but also more broadly about the role of plans and planning, and of imagining, in policymaking. Plans of the kind developed for Palestine speak to a blend of political pragmatism and political imagination. Planning allowed political actors to map out (in this case, literally) and test their reasonably achievable political objectives, but it also, critically, provided a space for them to imagine seemingly unlikely solutions and outcomes. The point at which pragmatism gives way to imagination is, by its nature, hard to pin down, but it is worth at least identifying the work of what seems to be anachronistic imperial imagining at the end of empire. In the case of the Palestine partition plans of the 1930s and 1940s, certain of their essential components were so extreme or so clearly unworkable that it seems highly unlikely that the people proposing them thought them feasible. The cantonization plans that hinged on the economic and political, not to mention policing, cooperation of Jews and Arabs in a federated system are mild examples of the flights of fancy in which British officials, and later UN officials, indulged. A more extreme example of imperial imagining run wild was the proposed partition line running through Jaffa in the Peel plan. As Reginald Coupland explained it, Jaffa would be surrounded by strips of mandated land, and the plan would require “a belt of park land with railings and a road running north and south through each belt with gates at each end.

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There would also be roads running east and west between the enclave and the sea.”53 The Woodhead Commission modified this proposal, offering instead the plan to construct a straight road dividing Jaffa and Tel Aviv with a “high iron railing” running down the middle, complete with “gates to allow of the passage of traffic between the two towns.”54 The Peel proposal to forcibly relocate some 250,000 Palestinian Arabs arguably falls into the category of highly imaginative planning; though the commissioners could point to the Greco-Turkish precedent, the specifics of the two cases were different enough to raise the question whether the otherwise detailoriented Peel commissioners really believed population transfer on this scale would work in Palestine. A satirical partition map penned in 1938 by Charles Tegart, the chief of police in Bengal, who had been seconded to Palestine in an attempt to quash the 1936–39 Arab Revolt, beautifully encapsulates the tensions of empire and imperial imagining that partition planning entailed throughout the period examined in this book (fig 6.6). Tegart’s map was clearly meant to be funny on its own, but because it responds directly to the Woodhead maps (the “D plan” referencing the Woodhead “A plan,” “B  plan,” and “C” plan), and by extension to the original Peel partition map, it indirectly reveals the hidden absurdity in these maps as well. On Tegart’s map British mandate Palestine is divided into nineteen states, enclaves, unions, and other assorted spaces. Although much of the map was sketched freehand, it is clear that the outline of Palestine’s borders was traced from a printed source. Tegart was also careful to follow the cartographic conventions used to distinguish between those borders established by nature (the solid line of the Mediterranean coast) and those invented by man (the dotted lines of Palestine’s international border, its internal divisions, and the “anti-illegal immigration” boundary at sea). Tegart’s use of traced contours and standardized mapping practices instantly provide the map with an authoritative foundation, and yet the map’s content is imagined and humorous, thus blurring the line between received geospatial knowledge and invented geopolitical humor. Other elements of the map further destabilize the boundary between mapping and mocking. Some of the labeled spaces mirror those found on the Peel and Woodhead partition maps, such as Arab and Jewish states and mandated territories. As with those maps, Tegart’s map includes oddly situated states and a corridor. These elements establish Tegart’s map in a real conversation about partition, in the company of seemingly serious partition proposals. Grounded in this semblance of reality, Tegart’s map then

6.6. Charles Tegart, “The D Plan of Partition,” n.d. [1938?] Source: Tegart Papers, box 2, file 3, Middle East Centre, St. Antony’s College, Oxford. Credit: Blackmer Maps

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utilizes cartographic absurdity to demonstrate the futility of earlier partition maps. Tegart’s square, oval, triangular, and banded spaces are neat and regular, whereas the Peel and Woodhead maps have virtually no straight lines. And yet the sheer proliferation of rational yet unrealistic shapes on the Tegart map causes the viewer to return to the Woodhead maps, in particular, and to laugh at the torturous maze of enclaves, corridors, and tiny territories within tiny territories. The Tegart “D” plan similarly plays with the absurd to shine light on geopolitical realities. In addition to what, by 1938, were standard Jewish, Arab, and mandated areas, Tegart’s map includes such light, humorous gems as a preserve for ex-members of commissions (of which, by that time, there had been over a dozen in Palestine), and a large space, including some of the more fertile and hotly contested land, labeled “This space free for advertising.” The darker side of Tegart’s humor is evident in the area reserved for Assyrians, who had been massacred in Iraq in 1933 following Britain’s withdrawal from the mandate, and in the rectangular area labeled “German and Italian Spheres of Influence.” These seem to remind the viewer that partition plans are not just about Palestine but also about other international and imperial political interests and that mapping has sometimes deadly effects. Most of the partition plans put forward by the British were not as absurd or impossible in the abstract as Tegart’s “D” map and indeed would have been quite feasible in another century. But they conveniently ignored the political context in which the planners found themselves in the 1930s and 1940s. Imposing territorial and political order through unilateral planning and mapping was possible in the world of nineteenth-century imperialism (a world whose mindset was made evident in the carving up of the Ottoman empire and the distribution of its territories to the victorious European powers), but in the interwar period Wilsonian ideals had shifted normative political assumptions and practices, and crucially Palestine was not a simple colony. Palestinian Arabs and Jews saw themselves, and to varying degrees were supported in this view by the key texts of the League of Nations, as nascent nations whose consent was required and whose agency over their future statehood was assured. British partition planners tried to accommodate this view, stressing the active collaboration and consent of the two parties to the conflict in any proposed plan. And yet, as the situation in Europe grew ever more precarious, the maps they drew up fell back on old imperial models of imposed order. Tegart’s map highlighted this disjuncture: satisfying Arab, Jewish, and by extension League

Partition Redux, 1939–1948 / 181

demands, while maintaining British strategic assets, it seemed to say, was impossible without sacrificing geographical and cartographical coherence and descending into the absurd. Herein lay the crucial failure of imagination of the partition planners, whose maps of Palestine’s future invariably included Britain. For them, a Palestine without Britain was unimaginable.

APPENDIX I

Mandate for Palestine

The Council of the League of Nations: Whereas the Principal Allied Powers have agreed, for the purpose of giving effect to the provisions of Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, to entrust to a Mandatory selected by the said Powers the administration of the territory of Palestine, which formerly belonged to the Turkish Empire, within such boundaries as may be fixed by them; and Whereas the Principal Allied Powers have also agreed that the Mandatory should be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917, by the Government of His Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers, in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country; and Whereas recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country; and Whereas the Principal Allied Powers have selected His Britannic Majesty as the Mandatory for Palestine; and Whereas the mandate in respect of Palestine has been formulated in the following terms and submitted to the Council of the League for approval; and Whereas His Britannic Majesty has accepted the mandate in respect of Palestine and undertaken to exercise it on behalf of the League of Nations in conformity with the following provisions; and Whereas by the afore-mentioned Article 22 (paragraph 8), it is provided

184 / Appendix I

that the degree of authority, control or administration to be exercised by the Mandatory, not having been previously agreed upon by the Members of the League, shall be explicitly defined by the Council of the League of Nations; confirming the said Mandate, defines its terms as follows:

Article 1 The Mandatory shall have full powers of legislation and of administration, save as they may be limited by the terms of this mandate.

Article 2 The Mandatory shall be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home, as laid down in the preamble, and the development of self-governing institutions, and also for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion.

Article 3 The Mandatory shall, so far as circumstances permit, encourage local autonomy.

Article 4 An appropriate Jewish agency shall be recognised as a public body for the purpose of advising and co-operating with the Administration of Palestine in such economic, social and other matters as may affect the establishment of the Jewish national home and the interests of the Jewish population in Palestine, and, subject always to the control of the Administration, to assist and take part in the development of the country. The Zionist organization, so long as its organization and constitution are in the opinion of the Mandatory appropriate, shall be recognised as such agency. It shall take steps in consultation with His Britannic Majesty’s Government to secure the co-operation of all Jews who are willing to assist in the establishment of the Jewish national home.

Mandate for Palestine / 185

Article 5 The Mandatory shall be responsible for seeing that no Palestine territory shall be ceded or leased to, or in any way placed under the control of the Government of any foreign Power.

Article 6 The Administration of Palestine, while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced, shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in cooperation with the Jewish agency referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes.

Article 7 The Administration of Palestine shall be responsible for enacting a nationality law. There shall be included in this law provisions framed so as to facilitate the acquisition of Palestinian citizenship by Jews who take up their permanent residence in Palestine.

Article 8 The privileges and immunities of foreigners, including the benefits of consular jurisdiction and protection as formerly enjoyed by Capitulation or usage in the Ottoman Empire, shall not be applicable in Palestine. Unless the Powers whose nationals enjoyed the afore-mentioned privileges and immunities on August 1st, 1914, shall have previously renounced the right to their re-establishment, or shall have agreed to their nonapplication for a specified period, these privileges and immunities shall, at the expiration of the mandate, be immediately reestablished in their entirety or with such modifications as may have been agreed upon between the Powers concerned.

Article 9 The Mandatory shall be responsible for seeing that the judicial system established in Palestine shall assure to foreigners, as well as to natives, a complete guarantee of their rights.

186 / Appendix I

Respect for the personal status of the various peoples and communities and for their religious interests shall be fully guaranteed. In particular, the control and administration of Wakfs shall be exercised in accordance with religious law and the dispositions of the founders.

Article 10 Pending the making of special extradition agreements relating to Palestine, the extradition treaties in force between the Mandatory and other foreign Powers shall apply to Palestine.

Article 11 The Administration of Palestine shall take all necessary measures to safeguard the interests of the community in connection with the development of the country, and, subject to any international obligations accepted by the Mandatory, shall have full power to provide for public ownership or control of any of the natural resources of the country or of the public works, services and utilities established or to be established therein. It shall introduce a land system appropriate to the needs of the country, having regard, among other things, to the desirability of promoting the close settlement and intensive cultivation of the land. The Administration may arrange with the Jewish agency mentioned in Article 4 to construct or operate, upon fair and equitable terms, any public works, services and utilities, and to develop any of the natural resources of the country, in so far as these matters are not directly undertaken by the Administration. Any such arrangements shall provide that no profits distributed by such agency, directly or indirectly, shall exceed a reasonable rate of interest on the capital, and any further profits shall be utilised by it for the benefit of the country in a manner approved by the Administration.

Article 12 The Mandatory shall be entrusted with the control of the foreign relations of Palestine and the right to issue exequaturs to consuls appointed by foreign Powers. He shall also be entitled to afford diplomatic and consular protection to citizens of Palestine when outside its territorial limits.

Mandate for Palestine / 187

Article 13 All responsibility in connection with the Holy Places and religious buildings or sites in Palestine, including that of preserving existing rights and of securing free access to the Holy Places, religious buildings and sites and the free exercise of worship, while ensuring the requirements of public order and decorum, is assumed by the Mandatory, who shall be responsible solely to the League of Nations in all matters connected herewith, provided that nothing in this article shall prevent the Mandatory from entering into such arrangements as he may deem reasonable with the Administration for the purpose of carrying the provisions of this article into effect; and provided also that nothing in this mandate shall be construed as conferring upon the Mandatory authority to interfere with the fabric or the management of purely Moslem sacred shrines, the immunities of which are guaranteed.

Article 14 A special commission shall be appointed by the Mandatory to study, define and determine the rights and claims in connection with the Holy Places and the rights and claims relating to the different religious communities in Palestine. The method of nomination, the composition and the functions of this Commission shall be submitted to the Council of the League for its approval, and the Commission shall not be appointed or enter upon its functions without the approval of the Council.

Article 15 The Mandatory shall see that complete freedom of conscience and the free exercise of all forms of worship, subject only to the maintenance of public order and morals, are ensured to all. No discrimination of any kind shall be made between the inhabitants of Palestine on the ground of race, religion or language. No person shall be excluded from Palestine on the sole ground of his religious belief. The right of each community to maintain its own schools for the education of its own members in its own language, while conforming to such educational requirements of a general nature as the Administration may impose, shall not be denied or impaired.

188 / Appendix I

Article 16 The Mandatory shall be responsible for exercising such supervision over religious or eleemosynary bodies of all faiths in Palestine as may be required for the maintenance of public order and good government. Subject to such supervision, no measures shall be taken in Palestine to obstruct or interfere with the enterprise of such bodies or to discriminate against any representative or member of them on the ground of his religion or nationality.

Article 17 The Administration of Palestine may organise on a voluntary basis the forces necessary for the preservation of peace and order, and also for the defence of the country, subject, however, to the supervision of the Mandatory, but shall not use them for purposes other than those above specified save with the consent of the Mandatory. Except for such purposes, no military, naval or air forces shall be raised or maintained by the Administration of Palestine. Nothing in this article shall preclude the Administration of Palestine from contributing to the cost of the maintenance of the forces of the Mandatory in Palestine. The Mandatory shall be entitled at all times to use the roads, railways and ports of Palestine for the movement of armed forces and the carriage of fuel and supplies.

Article 18 The Mandatory shall see that there is no discrimination in Palestine against the nationals of any State Member of the League of Nations (including companies incorporated under its laws) as compared with those of the Mandatory or of any foreign State in matters concerning taxation, commerce or navigation, the exercise of industries or professions, or in the treatment of merchant vessels or civil aircraft. Similarly, there shall be no discrimination in Palestine against goods originating in or destined for any of the said States, and there shall be freedom of transit under equitable conditions across the mandated area. Subject as aforesaid and to the other provisions of this mandate, the Administration of Palestine may, on the advice of the Mandatory, impose such taxes and customs duties as it may consider necessary, and take such steps as it may think best to promote the development of the natural re-

Mandate for Palestine / 189

sources of the country and to safeguard the interests of the population. It may also, on the advice of the Mandatory, conclude a special customs agreement with any State the territory of which in 1914 was wholly included in Asiatic Turkey or Arabia.

Article 19 The Mandatory shall adhere on behalf of the Administration of Palestine to any general international conventions already existing, or which may be concluded hereafter with the approval of the League of Nations, respecting the slave traffic, the traffic in arms and ammunition, or the traffic in drugs, or relating to commercial equality, freedom of transit and navigation, aerial navigation and postal, telegraphic and wireless communication or literary, artistic or industrial property.

Article 20 The Mandatory shall co-operate on behalf of the Administration of Palestine, so far as religious, social and other conditions may permit, in the execution of any common policy adopted by the League of Nations for preventing and combating disease, including diseases of plants and animals.

Article 21 The Mandatory shall secure the enactment within twelve months from this date, and shall ensure the execution of a Law of Antiquities based on the following rules. This law shall ensure equality of treatment in the matter of excavations and archaeological research to the nationals of all States Members of the League of Nations. 1 “Antiquity” means any construction or any product of human activity earlier than the year 1700 A.D. 2 The law for the protection of antiquities shall proceed by encouragement rather than by threat. Any person who, having discovered an antiquity without being furnished with the authorization referred to in paragraph 5, reports the same to an official of the competent Department, shall be rewarded according to the value of the discovery. 3 No antiquity may be disposed of except to the competent Department, unless this Department renounces the acquisition of any such antiquity.

190 / Appendix I No antiquity may leave the country without an export licence from the said Department. 4 Any person who maliciously or negligently destroys or damages an antiquity shall be liable to a penalty to be fixed. 5 No clearing of ground or digging with the object of finding antiquities shall be permitted, under penalty of fine, except to persons authorised by the competent Department. 6 Equitable terms shall be fixed for expropriation, temporary or permanent, of lands which might be of historical or archaeological interest. 7 Authorization to excavate shall only be granted to persons who show sufficient guarantees of archaeological experience. The Administration of Palestine shall not, in granting these authorizations, act in such a way as to exclude scholars of any nation without good grounds. 8 The proceeds of excavations may be divided between the excavator and the competent Department in a proportion fixed by that Department. If division seems impossible for scientific reasons, the excavator shall receive a fair indemnity in lieu of a part of the find.

Article 22 English, Arabic and Hebrew shall be the official languages of Palestine. Any statement or inscription in Arabic on stamps or money in Palestine shall be repeated in Hebrew and any statement or inscription in Hebrew shall be repeated in Arabic.

Article 23 The Administration of Palestine shall recognise the holy days of the respective communities in Palestine as legal days of rest for the members of such communities.

Article 24 The Mandatory shall make to the Council of the League of Nations an annual report to the satisfaction of the Council as to the measures taken during the year to carry out the provisions of the mandate. Copies of all laws and regulations promulgated or issued during the year shall be communicated with the report.

Mandate for Palestine / 191

Article 25 In the territories lying between the Jordan and the eastern boundary of Palestine as ultimately determined, the Mandatory shall be entitled, with the consent of the Council of the League of Nations, to postpone or withhold application of such provisions of this mandate as he may consider inapplicable to the existing local conditions, and to make such provision for the administration of the territories as he may consider suitable to those conditions, provided that no action shall be taken which is inconsistent with the provisions of Articles 15, 16 and 18.

Article 26 The Mandatory agrees that, if any dispute whatever should arise between the Mandatory and another member of the League of Nations relating to the interpretation or the application of the provisions of the mandate, such dispute, if it cannot be settled by negotiation, shall be submitted to the Permanent Court of International Justice provided for by Article 14 of the Covenant of the League of Nations.

Article 27 The consent of the Council of the League of Nations is required for any modification of the terms of this mandate.

Article 28 In the event of the termination of the mandate hereby conferred upon the Mandatory, the Council of the League of Nations shall make such arrangements as may be deemed necessary for safeguarding in perpetuity, under guarantee of the League, the rights secured by Articles 13 and 14, and shall use its influence for securing, under the guarantee of the League, that the Government of Palestine will fully honour the financial obligations legitimately incurred by the Administration of Palestine during the period of the mandate, including the rights of public servants to pensions or gratuities. The present instrument shall be deposited in original in the archives of the League of Nations and certified copies shall be forwarded by the Secretary-General of the League of Nations to all members of the League. Done at London the twenty-fourth day of July, one thousand nine hundred and twenty-two.

APPENDIX II

Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations

To those colonies and territories which as a consequence of the late war have ceased to be under the sovereignty of the States which formerly governed them and which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world, there should be applied the principle that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilisation and that securities for the performance of this trust should be embodied in this Covenant. The best method of giving practical effect to this principle is that the tutelage of such peoples should be entrusted to advanced nations who by reason of their resources, their experience or their geographical position can best undertake this responsibility, and who are willing to accept it, and that this tutelage should be exercised by them as Mandatories on behalf of the League. The character of the mandate must differ according to the stage of the development of the people, the geographical situation of the territory, its economic conditions and other similar circumstances. Certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone. The wishes of these communities must be a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory. Other peoples, especially those of Central Africa, are at such a stage that the Mandatory must be responsible for the administration of the territory under conditions which will guarantee freedom of conscience and religion, subject only to the maintenance of public order and morals, the prohibition of abuses such as the slave trade, the arms traffic and the liquor traffic,

194 / Appendix II

and the prevention of the establishment of fortifications or military and naval bases and of military training of the natives for other than police purposes and the defence of territory, and will also secure equal opportunities for the trade and commerce of other Members of the League. There are territories, such as South-West Africa and certain of the South Pacific Islands, which, owing to the sparseness of their population, or their small size, or their remoteness from the centres of civilisation, or their geographical contiguity to the territory of the Mandatory, and other circumstances, can be best administered under the laws of the Mandatory as integral portions of its territory, subject to the safeguards above mentioned in the interests of the indigenous population. In every case of mandate, the Mandatory shall render to the Council an annual report in reference to the territory committed to its charge. The degree of authority, control, or administration to be exercised by the Mandatory shall, if not previously agreed upon by the Members of the League, be explicitly defined in each case by the Council. A permanent Commission shall be constituted to receive and examine the annual reports of the Mandatories and to advise the Council on all matters relating to the observance of the mandates.

A B B R E V I AT I O N S

CZA

Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem

LNA

League of Nations Archives, Geneva

OIOC TNA

Oriental and India Office Collection, British Library, London The National Archives of the United Kingdom, London

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. 2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

David Lloyd George, Memoirs of the Peace Conference (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939), 2: 721–22. HL Deb., 5th series, vol. 111, col. 421, December 8, 1938. On the negotiations, see Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2003); David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Henry Holt, 2009). As Gideon Biger explains, though the name “Filistin” appeared in Ottoman documents, it did not apply to a fixed, delimited geographical area, nor was the area that later became British mandate Palestine referred to as a unit by any other name. Gideon Biger, The Boundaries of Modern Palestine, 1840– 1947 (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), 13. On the pre-1914 roots of this deep-seated, racialized vision that underpinned the interwar international order, see Mark Mazower, “An International Civilization? Empire, Internationalism and the Crisis of the Mid-Twentieth Century,” International Affairs 82, no. 3 (May 2006): 553–66. On the imperial imperatives that underlay these agreements, see, among others Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Asher Kaufman argues that in fact prewar mapping by the Palestine Exploration Fund played a role in the conceptualizations of space and the eventual boundaries that were drawn. “Colonial Cartography and the Making of Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria,” in Routledge Handbook of the History of the Middle East Mandates, ed. Cyrus Schayegh and Andrew Arsan (New York: Routledge, 2015). For the discussions at San Remo over the Palestine mandate, see “British Secretary’s Notes of a Meeting of the Supreme Council, held at the Villa Devachan, San Remo, on Saturday, April 24, 1920, at 4 p.m.” in Rohan Butler, J. P. T. Bury, and M. E. Lambert, eds., Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919–1939, vol. 8, First Series (London: HMSO, 1958), 156–71. Eventually, the core of the Balfour Declaration was

198 / Notes to Pages 1–7

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

concentrated in Article 2 of the mandate, as well as in its preamble. See Cmd. 1785, League of Nations: Mandate for Palestine, Together with a Note by the Secretary-General Relating to Its Application to the Territory Known as Trans-Jordan under the Provisions of Article 25 [Mandate for Palestine] (London: HMSO, 1922). On the origins of the Balfour Declaration, see Jonathan Schneer, The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). For more on the negotiations that resulted in the incorporation of the main elements of the Balfour Declaration in the mandate, see John J. McTague Jr., “Zionist-British Negotiations over the Draft Mandate for Palestine, 1920,” Jewish Social Studies 42 (1980) : 281–92, and James Renton, “Flawed Foundations: The Balfour Declaration and the Palestine Mandate,” in Rory Miller, Britain, Palestine, and Empire: The Mandate Years (London, 2010), 15–37. Telegram from Curzon to Sir Herbert Samuel, August 6, 1920, in Rohan Butler, J. P. T. Bury, and M. E. Lambert, eds., Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919–1939, vol. 13, First Series (London: HMSO, 1963), 331. On Samuel’s role, see Bernard Wasserstein, Herbert Samuel: A Political Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 250–53. On the establishment of Transjordan and its relation to mandate Palestine, see Mary C. Wilson, King Abdullah, Britain and the Making of Jordan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). The resulting full mandate text and note are reproduced in Cmd. 1785. For the memorandum submitted to the League Council, see League of Nations Official Journal 3 (November 1922): 1390–91. On the discussion in the Council, see Minutes of the Twenty-First Session of the Council, League of Nations Official Journal 3 (November 1922): 1188–89. Itzhak Galnoor, The Partition of Palestine: Decision Crossroads in the Zionist Movement (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 41. Political descendants of the Revisionists still refer to the events of 1921 and 1922 as a partition, and Bernard Wasserstein, for instance, decries the fact that this version of events makes its way into scholarly and popular histories. “The British Mandate in Palestine: Myths and Realities,” in Middle Eastern Lectures, ed. Martin Kramer, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, 1995), 32. Covenant of the League of Nations, Article 22 (4). J. B. Barron, ed., Palestine: Report and General Abstracts of the Census of 1922 (Jerusalem: Government of Palestine, Greek Convent Press, 1922), 3. Kenneth W. Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 210, 226. Cmd. 1700, Palestine: Correspondence with the Palestine Arab Delegation and the Zionist Organisation (London: HMSO, 1922), 19. Jacob Metzer, The Divided Economy of Mandatory Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 70–72. Ironically, it was at precisely this moment that the old Ottoman system was being dismantled and its diverse ethnoreligious communities “unmixed” through war, genocide, and internationally supervised forced population transfer. On the events and contexts of the Armenian Genocide and the Greek-Turkish population exchanges, see Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsions That Forged Modern Greece and Turkey (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Eric D. Weitz, “From the Vienna to the Paris System: International Politics and the Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations, and Civilizing Missions,” American Historical Review 113, no. 5 (December 1, 2008): 1313–43; Ronald Grigor Suny,

Notes to Pages 7–9 / 199

18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

Fatma Müge Göçek, and Norman M. Naimark, eds., A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Taner Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton University Press, 2012); Umut Özsu, Formalizing Displacement: International Law and Population Transfers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Mandate for Palestine, Article 9. The King-Crane Commission, which had gone to the Middle East to canvass public opinion in 1919, had found that the vast majority of Palestine’s residents were “practically unanimous for the independence of United Syria,” and also “practically unanimous against Zionism, usually expressing themselves with great emphasis.” The resulting report was finally published at the end of 1922. For the report, see “First Publication of the King-Crane Report on the Near East,” Editor & Publisher, December 2, 1922. On the commission, see Andrew Patrick, America’s Forgotten Middle East Initiative: The King-Crane Commission of 1919 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015). “Report of the Court of Inquiry Convened by Order of H.E. the High Commissioner and Commander-in-Chief,” April 12, 1920, National Archives, FO 371/5121/85, 75. Interestingly, in parsing casualties this report divided by religion (Jews, Muslims, Christians) but referred to the violence as taking place at the hands of an “Arab mob.” Ibid., 7–8. On these efforts see Sahar Huneidi, A Broken Trust: Sir Herbert Samuel, Zionism and the Palestinians (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), chap. 7. On the latter, see Natasha Wheatley, “Mandatory Interpretation: Legal Hermeneutics and the New International Order in Arab and Jewish Petitions to the League of Nations,” Past & Present 227, no. 1 (May 2015): 205–48. Compare, for example, Eric Mills, ed., Census of Palestine, 1931, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Greek Convent & Goldberg Press, 1932), and Palestine Government, A Survey of Palestine: Prepared in December 1945 and January 1946 for the Information of the AngloAmerican Committee of Inquiry, 3 vols. (Palestine Government, 1946). This naturally led to no small confusion in the compilation of population statistics, as the Peel Commission found out when trying to obtain clear numbers from the Palestine Government. See the conversation between Lord Peel and the statistics commissioner, Eric Mills, in which Peel expresses his perplexity at this arrangement. Colonial no. 134, Palestine Royal Commission, Minutes of Evidence Heard at Public Sessions (with Index) [Peel Minutes] (London: HMSO, 1937), 1. Elie Kedourie, “Religion and Politics: The Diaries of Khalil Sakakini,” Middle Eastern Affairs (1958): 79; Laura Robson, Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011). Within Palestine, the non-Zionist Orthodox Jewish communities repeatedly protested this issue to no avail. See, for instance, the Permanent Mandates Commission discussing a petition from representatives of Agudath Israel for separate recognition and educational funding: Minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission, ninth session (1926), 154–55. A decade later, Agudath Israel would bring the same complaints before the Peel Commission: Peel Minutes, 193–96. Stephan Wendehorst illustrates the immense range of responses from British Jews across the political spectrum to Zionism in British Jewry, Zionism, and the Jewish State, 1936–1956 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). On Jewish anti-Zionism more broadly, see Robert S. Wistrich, “Zionism and Its Jewish ‘Assimilationist’ Critics (1897–1948),”

200 / Notes to Pages 9–13

27.

28.

29.

30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

Jewish Social Studies 4 (Winter 1998): 59–111; Rory Miller, Divided against Zion: AntiZionist Opposition in Britain to a Jewish State in Palestine, 1945–1948 (London: Frank Cass, 2000); Thomas Kolsky, Jews Against Zionism: The American Council for Judaism, 1942–1948 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992). A nuanced critique of the inaccuracies inherent in speaking of a “Jewish” or an “Arab” economy is provided by Roger Owen, “Economic Development in Mandatory Palestine, 1918–1948,” in The Palestinian Economy: Studies in Development under Prolonged Occupation, ed. George T. Abed (London: Routledge, 1988). For a complex picture of economic relations on the ground, see Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906–1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Among works reversing the rupture between the Ottoman and mandate periods is Michelle Campos, Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early TwentiethCentury Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). Rashid Khalidi expands on the sharp differences in the legitimacy granted to Jewish and Arab leaders and institutions under the mandate in The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Boston: Beacon, 2006), chap. 2. Khalidi demonstrates that these new institutions and titles contravened longstanding Ottoman practice. Ibid., 55–57. On the ways in which British-created sectarianism affected Palestine’s Christian minority, see Robson, Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine. Matthew Kraig Kelly has recently argued that the revolt must be understood as a reaction to Britain’s violent suppression of Palestinian nationalism. The Crime of Nationalism: Britain, Palestine, and Nation-Building on the Fringe of Empire (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017). On British violence, see Matthew Hughes, “The Banality of Brutality: British Armed Forces and the Repression of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–39,” English Historical Review 124, no. 507 (April 1, 2009): 313–54. See, for instance, Barbara J. Smith, The Roots of Separatism in Palestine: British Economic Policy, 1920–1929 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1993). Metzer, Divided Economy of Mandatory Palestine, table 1.3, 16. Sherene Seikaly has compellingly argued that the characterization of the Jewish economy as modern, industrial, and capitalist and the Arab economy as traditional, rural, and agrarian is deeply flawed and inaccurate. Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). Peel Minutes, 207, 355. Ibid., 13. The literatures on the partitions of Ireland and India are vast. Important and influential studies include Urvashi Butalia, ed., Partition: The Long Shadow (London: Penguin, 2015); Lucy P. Chester, Borders and Conflict in South Asia: The Radcliffe Boundary Commission and the Partition of Punjab (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); Joya Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Vazira FazilaYacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Ged Martin, “The Origins of Partition,” in The Irish Border: History, Politics, Culture, ed. Eberhard Bort and Malcolm Anderson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999); Nicholas Mansergh, The Unresolved Question: The Anglo-Irish Settlement and Its Undoing, 1912–

Notes to Pages 13–14 / 201

39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45.

72 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); Michael Laffan, The Partition of Ireland, 1911–25 (Dundalk, Ireland: Dundalgan Press, 1983). On comparative partitions and partition in world-historical perspective, see Arie M. Dubnov and Laura Robson, eds., Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019); Laura Robson, States of Separation: Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017); John Docker, “The Two-State Solution and Partition: World History Perspectives on Palestine and India,” Holy Land Studies 9, no. 2 (November 2010): 147–68; Smita Tewari Jassal and Eyal Ben-Ari, eds., The Partition Motif in Contemporary Conflicts (Delhi: SAGE, 2007); Brendan O’Leary, Ian  S. Lustick, and Thomas Callaghy, eds., Rightsizing the State: The Politics of Moving Borders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Joe Cleary, Literature, Partition and the Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel, and Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Shulamit Eliash, “De Valera v’Tokhnit ha-Khalukah shel Eretz-Yisrael [De Valera and the Partition Plan for Palestine],” Cathedra 97 (2001): 117–48; T. G. Fraser, Partition in Ireland, India and Palestine: Theory and Practice (London: Macmillan, 1984); Nicholas Mansergh, The Prelude to Partition: Concepts and Aims in Ireland and India, 1976 Commonwealth Lecture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). Shmuel Dothan, A Land in the Balance: The Struggle for Palestine, 1918–1948 (Tel Aviv: MOD Books, 1993), 104–46, 180–93. Galnoor, Partition of Palestine; Yossi Katz, Partner to Partition: The Jewish Agency’s Partition Plan in the Mandate Era (London: Frank Cass, 1998). Roza El-Eini, Mandated Landscape: British Imperial Rule in Palestine, 1929–1948 (London: Routledge, 2006), 314–79. Biger, Boundaries of Modern Palestine, 190–97. Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Henry Holt, 2001); Michael J. Cohen and Martin Kolinsky, Demise of the British Empire in the Middle East: Britain’s Responses to Nationalist Movements, 1943–55 (London: Frank Cass, 1998); Bernard Wasserstein, The British in Palestine: The Mandatory Government and Arab-Jewish Conflict, 1917–1929, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991); Neil Caplan, Futile Diplomacy, vol. 2: Arab-Zionist Negotiations and the End of the Mandate (London: Frank Cass, 1986); Neil Caplan, Futile Diplomacy, vol. 1: Early Arab-Zionist Negotiation Attempts, 1913–1931 (London: Frank Cass, 1983); Nicholas Bethell, The Palestine Triangle: The Struggle for the Holy Land, 1935–48 (London: Andre Deutsch, 1979); Michael J. Cohen, Palestine, Retreat from the Mandate: The Making of British Policy, 1936–45 (London: Elek, 1978); Norman Anthony Rose, The Gentile Zionists: A Study in Anglo-Zionist Diplomacy, 1929– 1939 (London: Frank Cass, 1973). Seikaly, Men of Capital; Noah Haiduc-Dale, Arab Christians in British Mandate Palestine: Communalism and Nationalism, 1917–1948 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013); Jacob Norris, Land of Progress: Palestine in the Age of Colonial Development, 1905–1948 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Abigail Jacobson, From Empire to Empire: Jerusalem between Ottoman and British Rule (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011); Robson, Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine; Campos, Ottoman Brothers; El-Eini, Mandated Landscape. A notable recent exception, which placed the entire mandate period in its British imperial context, is Norris, Land of Progress. Robson, Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine, chap. 2, and Khalidi, Iron Cage, chap. 2, both briefly note British imperial connections.

202 / Notes to Pages 14–15 46. Peter Sluglett complains that British imperial historians tend either to ignore the Middle East or to “subsume it under some generalized notion of ‘the periphery.’” See “Formal and Informal Empire in the Middle East,” in Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 5 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 422. 47. Antoinette Burton offers the clearest articulation of this argument in The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). For a study of the role of confusion, ignorance, and friction between multiple agents in creating imperial knowledge about the Middle East, see Daniel Foliard, Dislocating the Orient: British Maps and the Making of the Middle East, 1854– 1921 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 48. Wm. Roger Louis, Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez and Decolonization: Collected Essays (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006); Wm. Roger Louis and Robert W. Stookey, The End of the Palestine Mandate (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986); Wm. Roger Louis, The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945–1951: Arab Nationalism, the United States, and Postwar Imperialism (Oxford University Press, 1985); Michael J. Cohen, Palestine and the Great Powers, 1945–1948 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). 49. For an early example of ignoring the international context of the Palestine mandate, see Albert Montefiore Hyamson, Palestine under the Mandate, 1920–1948 (London: Methuen, 1950), which mentions the League only once. Neither Wasserstein, British in Palestine, nor Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 (New York: Vintage, 2001), for example, mentions the League as a factor in explaining British high officials’ persisting loyalty to the Zionist project, despite the fact that Britain was bound under the terms of the mandate to support the establishment of the Jewish national home. 50. Pedersen, Guardians. 51. Given its temporal and geographical range, this literature is too extensive to cite fully here. See, for broad overviews, Martin Thomas, Bob Moore, and L. J. Butler, The Crises of Empire: Decolonization and Europe’s Imperial Nation States, 1918–1975 (London: Bloomsbury, 2008); Martin Shipway, Decolonization and Its Impact: A Comparative Approach to the End of the Colonial Empires (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008). Focused studies on specific regions or themes include Tracey Banivanua Mar, Decolonisation and the Pacific: Indigenous Globalisation and the Ends of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Elisabeth Leake, The Defiant Border: The Afghan-Pakistan Borderlands in the Era of Decolonization, 1936–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005); Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt, 2005); Mazower, No Enchanted Palace. 52. On legal continuities, see Michael Sfard, The Wall and the Gate: Israel, Palestine, and the Legal Battle for Human Rights (New York: Henry Holt, 2018); Yael Berda, Living Emergency: Israel’s Permit Regime in the Occupied West Bank (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017); Gershon Shafir, A Half Century of Occupation: Israel, Palestine, and the World’s Most Intractable Conflict (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017).

Notes to Pages 15–22 / 203 53. Wm. Roger Louis and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Decolonization,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 22, no. 3 (September 1, 1994): 462–511. CHAPTER ONE

1.

Minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission, Thirty-Second [Extraordinary] Session Devoted to Palestine (1937), 90. 2. On the exceptions to this general rule, see Stephanie Chasin, “Citizens of Empire: Jews in the Service of the British Empire, 1906–1940” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2008). 3. Minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission, Thirty-Second [Extraordinary] Session Devoted to Palestine , 83. 4. Other territories with high commissioners included the British Western Pacific Territories (1877–1972), the High Commission Territories of Basutoland, Bechuanaland, and Swaziland (1910 to the late 1960s), and territories such as Cyprus and the Seychelles during the periods in which they were in transition with regard to sovereignty. The heads of diplomatic missions from one Commonwealth nation to another were (and are) also called high commissioners, though their function was quite different from that of high commissioners of protectorates and possessions. 5. For the immediate context and details, see Sir Hubert Young, The Independent Arab (London: J. Murray, 1933), 323–28. 6. Helmut Mejcher, “British Middle East Policy, 1917–21: The Inter-Departmental Level,” Journal of Contemporary History 8, no. 4 (1973): 81–101; John Fisher, “Lord Robert Cecil and the Formation of a Middle East Department of the Foreign Office,” Middle Eastern Studies 42, no. 3 (May 1, 2006): 365–80. 7. Sahar Huneidi, “Was Balfour Policy Reversible? The Colonial Office and Palestine, 1921–23,” Journal of Palestine Studies 27, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 23–41. 8. Chaim Weizmann to Felix Warburg, November 13, 1929, The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, Series A, ed. Camillo Dresner (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction/ Rutgers University, 1978), 14: 75. 9. Gabriel Sheffer, “British Colonial Policy-Making towards Palestine (1929–1939),” Middle Eastern Studies 14, no. 3 (1978): 308. 10. Sir Harry Luke and Edward Keith-Roach, The Handbook of Palestine (London: Macmillan, 1922). On the hybrid legal system the British developed on the framework of Ottoman law, see Assaf Likhovski, Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), chaps. 1–5. 11. For an early study of this particularly volatile period, see John Gallagher, “Nationalisms and the Crisis of Empire, 1919–22,” Modern Asian Studies 15 (1981): 355– 68. Erez Manela places these challenges to empire in broad international context, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). On “diasporic patriotism” and the range of possibilities between universalism and territorial nationalism, see Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). An example of nonnationalist anticolonialism is examined in Maia Ramnath, “Two Revolutions: The Ghadar Movement and India’s Radical Diaspora, 1913–1918,” Radical History Review 92 (Spring 2005): 7–30. 12. See, for example, Tony Ballantyne, “Race and the Webs of Empire: Aryanism from India to the Pacific,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 2, no. 3 (Winter 2001); Alan Lester, “Trans-imperial Networks: Britain, South Africa, Australia and

204 / Notes to Pages 22–26

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

New Zealand during the First Half of the Nineteenth-Century,” in Home and Colonial: Essays on Landscape, Ireland, Environment and Empire in Celebration of Robin Butlin’s Contribution to Historical Geography, ed. Alan R. H. Baker (London: Historical Geography Research Group, 2004), 125–38. There is considerable disagreement on the impact and importance of these exchanges. Some argue that links between nationalist groups were merely inspirational, while others point to practical learning, such as the mechanics of bombmaking, the organization of secret cells, or the principles of guerrilla warfare that took place across national boundaries. Cf. Sarmila Bose and Eilís Ward, “India’s Cause Is Ireland’s Cause: Elite Links and Nationalist Politics,” in Ireland and India: Connections, Comparisons, Contrasts, ed. Denis Holmes and Michael Holmes (Dublin: Folens, 1997), and Michael Silvestri, “‘The Sinn Féin of India’: Irish Nationalism and the Policing of Revolutionary Terrorism in Bengal,” Journal of British Studies 39 (2000): 454–86. Alvin Jackson argues that both sides repeated the patterns learned in Ireland. “Ireland, the Union, and the Empire, 1800–1960,” in Ireland and the British Empire, ed. Kevin Kenny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 143. See Durba Ghosh, “Terrorism in Bengal: Imperial Strategies of Political Violence and Its Containment in the Interwar Years,” in Decentering Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World, ed. Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy (Delhi: Orient Longman, 2006). It was not, of course, always successful. As Charles Townshend points out, successful British techniques from one conflict were often forgotten in other similar conflicts. “The Defence of Palestine: Insurrection and Public Security, 1936–1939,” English Historical Review 103, no. 409 (October 1, 1988): 917–49. One notable exception is Roger Owen, “The Influence of Lord Cromer’s Indian Experience on British Policy in Egypt, 1883–1907,” Middle Eastern Affairs 4 (1965): 1965, 109–39. Lynn Hunt proposes a similar methodology for undertaking a study of globalization from the bottom up as “a series of transnational processes in which the histories of diverse places become connected and interdependent.” Writing History in the Global Era (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), 59. Gordon Johnson, “Partition, Agitation and Congress: Bengal, 1904 to 1908,” Modern Asian Studies 7 (1973): 533–88. Curzon to Brodrick, February 2, 1905, Curzon Papers, MSS Eur F 111/168, British Library, Oriental and India Office Collections (OIOC), quoted in Johnson, “Partition, Agitation and Congress,” 550. On the immediate late nineteenth-century antecedents of the Bengal partition, see V. P. Menon, The Transfer of Power in India (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1957), 9. The evolutions of ideas and movements rarely have neatly defined boundaries. Thus, it could be argued that the seeds of the Home Rule movement began germinating in the 1840s. See, for example, David Harkness, “Ireland,” in Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 5 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 118. Rory Miller, “‘An Oriental Ireland’: Thinking about Palestine in Terms of the Irish Question during the Mandatory Era,” in Miller, ed., Britain, Palestine, and Empire: The Mandate Years (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010), 157–76. R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (London: Viking Penguin, 1988), 466. T. G. Fraser, “Ireland and India,” in An Irish Empire?: Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire, ed. Keith Jeffery (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 92.

Notes to Pages 26–32 / 205 25. Shaunnagh Dorsett and John McLaren, eds., Legal Histories of the British Empire: Laws, Engagements and Legacies (London, 2014). 26. Frederick Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (London: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1922), 391. 27. Rashid Khalidi argues that this was an intentional move on the part of British officials to quash Arab nationalism by interfering with the potential for MuslimChristian alliances. The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Boston: Beacon, 2006), 55–64. Similarly invented traditions were used, however, in mandates such as Iraq, where the need to protect the Jewish national home did not exist. See Toby Dodge, Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 28. Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation, 1918–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 15. 29. Roger Owen, Lord Cromer: Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 357. 30. Toby Dodge finds similar Orientalist views of Iraqis at work in British denials of the legitimacy of public opinion there. Inventing Iraq, 67. 31. On the fascinating confluence between Zionist and British wishful thinking about the lack of Palestinian national feeling, see Haim Gerber, Remembering and Imagining Palestine: Identity and Nationalism from the Crusades to the Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 32. The attacks on Assyrians in Iraq after that mandate’s independence were undoubtedly on the minds of British and Permanent Mandates Commission officials when pondering the situation in Palestine. The Peel Commission tried hard to find out how exactly the Palestinian Arabs proposed to deal with the nearly 400,000 Jews already in Palestine in the event of the establishment of a unitary independent state. The results were not encouraging; Arab representatives claimed the Jews could not be assimilated or accommodated, but refused to say how they would deal with this problem. See Peel Minutes, 298, 314. 33. Henry Gurney, “Palestine Postscript,” 21, Middle East Centre, St. Antony’s College, Oxford, GUR 1/2, quoted in Segev, One Palestine, Complete, 9. 34. Cmd. 3686, Palestine: Report on Immigration, Land Settlement and Development (London: HMSO, 1930), 146. Indeed, some Zionists hoped that Hope-Simpson would recommend the transfer of some Arabs to Transjordan or Iraq in order to make room for Jewish colonists. Stein, Land Question in Palestine, 91. 35. For a fuller discussion of Coupland’s work and philosophy, see T. G. Fraser, “Sir Reginald Coupland, the Round Table and the Problem of Divided Societies,” in The Round Table, the Empire/Commonwealth and British Foreign Policy, ed. Andrew Bosco and Alex May (London: Lothian Foundation Press, 1997), 407–22. 36. Reginald Coupland, “The British Empire and the World Crisis,” in The Empire Club of Canada Speeches, 1933–1934 (Toronto: Empire Club of Canada, 1934), 166. 37. Peel Report, 375. 38. Peel Minutes, 48–51. Years later, the secretary to the Peel Commission, Sir John Martin, indicated that he thought it was probably after this evidence on education that Coupland first turned to partition. Imperial War Museum, PAL 80 (interview transcript, 1978), p. 6. 39. Peel Report, 386. 40. Ibid., 122.

206 / Notes to Pages 33–40 41. Martin Gilbert, ed., Winston S. Churchill: Companion Part III: Documents: The Coming of War, 1936–1939 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), 608–9. 42. Ibid., 612. 43. The Palestine Information Centre and the National Political League were among the strongest pro-Arab groups in Britain, while the Zionists relied on a political executive committee there that coordinated the efforts of Jewish Zionist groups and maintained extensive and regular contact with important British politicians. On Zionist contacts with British politicians, see Rose, Gentile Zionists; Harry Defries, Conservative Party Attitudes to Jews, 1900–1950 (London: Frank Cass, 2001). On British pro-Arab organizations, see Rory Miller, Divided against Zion: Anti-Zionist Opposition in Britain to a Jewish State in Palestine, 1945–1948 (London: Frank Cass, 2000). 44. Greg Burgess, The League of Nations and the Refugees from Nazi Germany: James G. McDonald and Hitler’s Victims (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). 45. On Palestine’s place in the much larger crisis of European Jewry in the 1930s, see Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pt. 3. 46. The list of individuals, public and private institutions, and news organizations receiving League publications found in the League of Nations Archive (LNA) R78 1/52914 gives a sense of the League’s public outreach. 47. The press digested for the commissioners was particularly wide-ranging. For example, LNA S238 (72), compiled during the disturbances of 1929, references extracts from the British, French, German, Italian, and Palestinian presses, though in the latter there is only one publication in Arabic. 48. Minute by T. I. K. Lloyd, May 9, 1928. TNA, CO 733/153/13. 49. Minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission, fourteenth session (1928), 254–55. 50. Minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission, thirty-second session (1937), 222. 51. Pedersen, Guardians, 87. 52. Leila Tarazi Fawaz, Merchants and Migrants in Nineteenth-Century Beirut (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 93. 53. William E. Rappard, A la mémoire de Chaim Weizmann, principal fondateur et premier président de l’état d’Israël, ami de la Suisse (Neuchâtel: Éditions de La Baconnière, 1953), 34. 54. On the trip, see Victor Monnier, William E. Rappard: Défenseur des libertés, serviteur de son pays et de la communauté internationale (Geneva: Slatkine, 1995), 335–46. 55. Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949), 376. 56. Minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission, seventeenth session (1930), 145. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. In the wake of the riots, the high commissioner, Sir John Chanchellor, had proposed the complete cessation of Jewish immigration, the suspension of land sales, and a restriction on land transfers. Memorandum from Chancellor to Passfield, January 17, 1930. TNA, CO 733/182/9. On Chancellor’s impact on British policy concerning immigration and land sales, see Stein, Land Question in Palestine, chaps. 3–4. 60. For an earlier period, Jonathan Schneer painstakingly details Weizmann’s diplomacy ending in the Balfour Declaration. Jonathan Schneer, The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). Contemporary actors, historians, and journalists have credited, variously, British imperial aims, Allied war aims, Zionist leaders, British politicians, and ideologies ranging from

Notes to Pages 40–45 / 207

61.

62. 63. 64.

65. 66.

67. 68. 69.

70.

71.

anti-Semitism to Anglo-Zionism for the birth of the Declaration. See, among others, Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961); Mayir Verete, “The Balfour Declaration and Its Makers,” Middle Eastern Studies 6, no. 1 (January 1970): 48–76; Segev, One Palestine, Complete. Weizmann’s published correspondence is a testament to his steadfast efforts to bolster support for the Jewish cause in Palestine and gives a sense of the breadth and depth of his political connections. Weizmann, Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, Series A. Weizmann, Trial and Error, 463. On Rappard’s relationship with Weizmann and his trip to Palestine, see Monnier, William E. Rappard, 335–46. Weldon Matthews details the struggles of young Arab nationalists in Palestine to create a popular political movement, Confronting an Empire, Constructing a Nation: Arab Nationalists and Popular Politics in Mandate Palestine (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006). On the subject of Palestinian Arab factionalism and failures of leadership, see Khalidi, Iron Cage, chap. 3; Ann Mosely Lesch, Arab Politics in Palestine, 1917– 1939: The Frustration of a Nationalist Movement (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979); Yehoshua Porath, The Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement, 1918–1929 (London: Frank Cass, 1974). Laila Parsons, The Commander: Fawzi Al-Qawuqji and the Fight for Arab Independence, 1914–1948 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2016). On the Syro-Palestinian Congress and Shakib Arslan’s broader political activities and philosophy, see William L. Cleveland, Islam against the West: Shakib Arslan and the Campaign for Islamic Nationalism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985). Peel Report, 363. George Antonius, “Memorandum: On errors of translation at the Royal Commission sittings,” n.d., Israel State Archives, P/1051/13. Cemil Aydin highlights the Mufti’s role as “one of the key figures of interwar-era pan-Islamic politics” who “sought to mobilize Muslims within and beyond the [British] empire.” The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), 156. On the Islamic Congress, see H. A. R. Gibb, “The Islamic Congress at Jerusalem in December 1931,” in Survey of International Affairs, 1934, ed. A. J. Toynbee (London: Oxford University Press,, 1935); Uri M. Kupferschmidt, The Supreme Muslim Council: Islam under the British Mandate for Palestine (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987), 187–220. Government of India officials intercepted much of Ali’s correspondence and maintained regular contact with their counterparts in Palestine. Some of this correspondence  remains in the Foreign & Political Proceedings files of 1930–31, particularly file 281-N, National Archives of India, New Delhi, and in MSS DS714/13, OIOC. Minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission, seventeenth session (1930), 142. C H A P T E R T WO

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

On these failed attempts at creating a legislative assembly, or any sort of consultative representative body, see Wasserstein, British in Palestine, chap. 6. Minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission, fifth session (1924), 55. Ibid. Ibid., 56. Ibid., 65. For a recent reassessment of the roots and long-term import of the 1929 distur-

208 / Notes to Pages 46–48

7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

bances, see Hillel Cohen, Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict: 1929, trans. Haim Watzman (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2015). Bernard Wasserstein sees 1929 as the moment when Britain started contemplating abandoning the Balfour Declaration. British in Palestine, 239. W. K. Hancock, Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs, vol. 1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), 375. Roza El-Eini and Shmuel Dothan are exceptions. El-Eini makes the point that Coupland was open to ideas from various sources and briefly traces the partition idea back to 1935, though not before; Mandated Landscape, 324. Dothan calls Coupland’s primary role “a myth”; Land in the Balance, 196. See, for example, Joe Cleary, Literature, Partition and the Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel, and Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 24. Fraser, “Sir Reginald Coupland, the Round Table and the Problem of Divided Societies,” 410. Fraser writes of Coupland’s mind “turning to a more far-reaching course of action” than cantonization—that is, partition—which he then “launches” to Weizmann and the members of the Peel Commission; see also Martin Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold: Portrait of a Diplomat, 1869–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1973), 415–16; Katz, Partner to Partition, 2–3; Itzhak Galnoor, The Partition of Palestine: Decision Crossroads in the Zionist Movement (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 70–74. Howard Sachar identifies Coupland as “[t]he single most influential” member of the Peel Commission and emphasizes that it was Coupland who first raised the possibility of partition in one of the commission’s secret meetings with Chaim Weizmann. A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), 201–3. Robert Weltsch, “Palestine Plans and Counter-Plans: Zionism Face to Face with World Realities,” Commentary 2, no. 4 (October 1946): 305. Alvin Jackson, “Ireland, the Union, and the Empire, 1800–1960,” in Ireland and the British Empire, ed. Kevin Kenny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 144. Citing Cox to Cairncross, June 5, 1972, covering a memorandum by J. S. Bennett on “Palestine and Ireland,” TNA, CJ.4/236. Arthur Ruppin, a member of the Zionist Executive, proposed in 1907 that Jewish settlement be concentrated on the coastal plains so that Jews could eventually become the majority there and gain regional autonomy. The journalist and Zionist activist Itamar Ben-Avi proposed a similar clustering of Jewish settlements in 1918 and advocated the creation of a cantonal system similar to that of Switzerland. For a detailed discussion of the development of territorial separatism in Zionist thought, see Dothan, Land in the Balance, 13–38, 72–103. G. K. Chesterton, The New Jerusalem (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1920), 297. Chesterton was enamored of this proposal only inasmuch as it gave him the idea of creating Jewish cantons outside of Palestine as well since all the Jews couldn’t possibly fit in Palestine. His vision was that virtually all the world’s Jews would be concentrated in a series of cantons around the world and would have their spiritual center in one of the Jewish cantons in Palestine. This, he argued, would solve the “Jewish problem.” “Zionism: A Critical Phase,” Palestine Weekly, February 17, 1928, 146. Murray to Knabenshue, November 22, 1929, National Archives, Washington, DC, RG84.350/26/14/1, Class 840.1.

Notes to Pages 49–54 / 209 17. Knabenshue to Murray, December 21, 1929, 4, National Archives, RG84.350/ 26/14/1, Class 840.1. 18. Neil Caplan, Futile Diplomacy, 2: 23–25, 182–86. 19. On Zionist politics over the so-called Abbas Hilmi affair, see the Central Zionist Archives (CZA), S25/2 and Z4/286/13. 20. Jewish Telegraphic Agency Bulletin, February 10, 1932, TNA, CO 733/219/2. 21. Statement of the Executive of the Zionist Revisionist World Union, February 4, 1932, TNA, CO 733/219/2. 22. Translated excerpt from Rassweit, February 28, 1932, TNA, CO 733/219/2. 23. Minute, O. G. R. Williams, February 11, 1932, TNA, CO 733/219/2. 24. Minute, H. F. Downie, March 9, 1932, TNA, CO 733/219/2. 25. A. C. C. Parkinson to A. Wauchope, December 14, 1933, TNA, CO 733/248/20. 26. Ibid. 27. Minute, O. G. R. Williams, March 10, 1932, TNA, CO 733/219/2. 28. For an early example of the notion of “transfer,” see Theodor Herzl, The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, ed. Raphael Patai, trans. Harry Zohn, vol. 1 (New York: Herzl Press and Thomas Yoseloff, 1960), 88. For one during the British Mandate, TNA, CO 733/231/1. See also Segev, One Palestine, Complete, 403–8. 29. Minute, O. G. R. Williams, December 4, 1933, TNA, CO 733/248/20; letter from Sir Eric Drummond, British Ambassador in Rome, December 13, 1933, ibid. These same conversations made their way by February 1934 to the attention of the Foreign Office. See letter from Sir Eric Drummond, ambassador to Rome, February 19, 1934, TNA, FO 371/17876/E1279/31. 30. A. C. C. Parkinson to A. Wauchope, December 14, 1933, TNA, CO 733/248/20. 31. Ibid. Khalidi’s plan was published, without his name attached to it, in the newspaper Falastin on December 27, 1933. On the plan and Khalidi’s correspondence with Judah Magnes, at this point the chancellor of the Hebrew University and a staunch bi-nationalist, see Susan Lee Hattis, The Bi-national Idea in Palestine during Mandatory Times (Haifa: Shikmona, 1970), 123–24; Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 90–92. 32. Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Daily News Bulletin, January 3, 1934, TNA, CO 733/ 248/20. 33. Minute, A. C. C. Parkinson, December 5, 1933, TNA, CO 733/248/20. 34. Examples include those published by the famed son of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, Itamar Ben-Avi, “Pilpelaot,” in Doar Ha-Yom, July 30, 1929, and the prominent legal scholar Paltiel Dickstein (later Daykan), in Ha-Olam, February 11–18, 1930. See Dothan, Land in the Balance, 107–12. 35. By 1936 when the Peel Commission was gathering evidence, less than 10 percent of senior British officials in the Palestine Government knew Hebrew. See Peel Report, 164. 36. Beatrice Erskine, Palestine of the Arabs (London: G. G. Harrap, 1935), 226–29. 37. Cust was also well connected, though this did not appear to aid his efforts for cantonization. His cousin was Sir Ronald Storrs, first British governor of Jerusalem, and his father was a close confidant of King George V. 38. L. G. Archer Cust, “The Future of Palestine,” January 18, 1935, 16, TNA, CO 733/283/12. 39. The movement of ideas between nonofficial and official spheres was quite common, and it is not clear whether in 1935 the cantonization concept jumped from

210 / Notes to Pages 54–67

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

the Arab source cited in Erskine’s book to the “British ex-official” (presumably Cust) via Erskine, or vice versa. It is also possible that there was no direct line of transmission since cantonization was simply “in the air.” Cust, “Future of Palestine,” 4. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 10. Minute, H. F. Downie, February 9, 1935, TNA, CO 733/283/12. Minute, O. G. R. Williams, February 11, 1935, TNA, CO 733/283/12. Minute, A. C. C. Parkinson, February 14, 1935, TNA, CO 733/283/12. L. G. Archer Cust, “Whither Palestine,” The Near East and India, September 19, 1935, TNA, CO 733/283/12. A. Wauchope to A. C. C. Parkinson, November 23, 1935, TNA, CO 733/283/12. Archer Cust, “Cantonization: A Plan for Palestine,” Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society 23, no. 2 (1936): 211. Ibid., 201. Italics mine. Ibid., 206. Minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission, twenty-ninth session (1936), 62. Ibid., 142. Ibid., 143. C. Weizmann to L. G. A. Cust, June 30 1936, TNA, CO 733/302/9. Report of an interview between High Commissioner Wauchope, Moshe Shertok, and David Ben-Gurion, July 9, 1936, TNA, CO 733/302/9. Cipher telegram from D/H.366 to D/HV, November 24, 1942, TNA: HS/9/385/2. I am grateful to Arie Dubnov for this reference. Confidential note by C. Weizmann, June 19, 1936, covering a conversation on June 16, 1936, CZA, A185/134. This plan was never sent to the Colonial Office and does not survive in the remnants of the Palestine Government files in Israel. However, later memoranda and maps sent to the Colonial Office clearly indicate the shape of this proposal. See the map included with Harris’s memo of October 4, 1936, TNA, CO 733/302/9. I. N. Camp, “Statistical memorandum on Arab population in the two proposed Jewish cantons,” September 22, 1936, TNA, CO 733/316/9. Edward Keith-Roach, “Recommendation on future policy,” September 30, 1936, TNA, CO 733/316/9. D. G. Harris, “Cantonisation in Palestine,” October 4, 1936, 1, TNA, CO 733/302/9. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 17. Note, J. Hall to A. Wauchope, August 24, 1936, CZA, S25/22723. CHAPTER THREE

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

“Royal Commission in Jerusalem,” The Times, November 12, 1936, 13, D. Peel Report, 106. Telegram from the secretary of state to the high commissioner, October 29, 1936, TNA, CO 733/318/12. Horace Rumbold to Tony Rumbold, September 24, 1936, MSS Rumbold Additional, box 5: Modern Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Peel Report, 368.

Notes to Pages 67–77 / 211 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

Ibid., 385. Ibid., 382. Ibid., 381. Ibid., 387. Ibid., 381. Ibid., 389. Ibid., 390. Ibid., 392. Report from L. Y. Andrews, July 31, 1937, CZA, S25/22728. “The Press and Palestine,” The Times, July 9, 1937, 9, B. Most pay particular attention to the incredible scope of the report, calling it “thorough,” “bold,” and “clear-headed.” Segev, One Palestine, Complete, 401; Aaron  S. Klieman, The Rise of Israel—the Partition Controversy, 1937, vol. 25: The Rise of Israel (New York: Garland, 1987), n.p.; Wasserstein, British in Palestine, 242. Yehoshua Porath writes that the commission “tackled the roots of the whole Palestine Question.” Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement, 107. Porath also makes the case for the importance of the commission and its report for the pan-Arabization of the Palestine problem. See Katz, Partner to Partition. Peel Report, vi. Chaim Weizmann sought, with some success, to bring Jewish Agency opinion to bear on the framing of the mandate terms as well as on the selection of the commissioners. See TNA, CO 733/318/12. Among other attempted interventions in the framing and selection of the Royal Commission was the Jewish Agency’s attempt at writing the terms of reference. See C. Weizmann to W. Ormsby-Gore, June 9, 1936, TNA, CO 733/318/12. Private and confidential letter from Ormsby-Gore to Wauchope, June 10, 1936, TNA, CO 733/318/12. Ormsby-Gore was referring here to the League’s failure in Abyssinia. Minute, A. C. C. Parkinson, May 22, 1936, TNA, CO 733/318/12 Minute, A. C. C. Parkinson, May 29, 1936, TNA, CO 733/318/12. Cmd. 3692, Palestine: Statement of Policy by His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom (Passfield White Paper) (London: HMSO, 1930). Minute, Sir G. Bushe, October 6, 1936, TNA, CO 733/318/12; undated note to Peel, ibid. For Rathbone’s protests and responses to them, see TNA, CO 733/319/1 and CO 733/319/2. Lord Lytton to Lord Birkenhead, April 29, 1925, quoted in Carl Bridge, Holding India to the Empire: The British Conservative Party and the 1935 Constitution (Delhi: Sterling, 1986), 12. Note to Ormsby-Gore from Wauchope, November 13, 1936, CZA, S25/22723. Note from Ms. R. Hyams, undated (1936), CZA, S25/3768. Introduction by H. Nicolson to Horace Rumbold, The War Crisis in Berlin, July– August 1914 (London: Constable, 1944), xxiv. James A. Malcolm to Lord Peel, August 17, 1936, TNA, CO 733/319/5. Malcolm was said to be from an Armenian family in Persia, though he had been educated and spent his adult life in England. In other publications, he claimed to have introduced Sir Mark Sykes to Zionism. See James A. Malcolm, Origins of the Balfour Declaration: Dr. Weizmann’s Contribution (London: British Museum, 1944). M. McDonnell to Peel, October 1936, TNA CO 733/320/9.

212 / Notes to Pages 77–85 32. J. M. Martin to D. Ben-Gurion, August 20, 1936, TNA, CO 733/318/12. 33. Memorandum Submitted to the Palestine Royal Commission on Behalf of the Jewish Agency for Palestine (London, 1936). 34. See, for example, “Antimalaria and Drainage Work by Jewish Bodies,” memorandum to the Palestine Royal Commission on behalf of the Jewish Agency for Palestine (Jerusalem, 1936). 35. Basheer M. Nafi, Arabism, Islamism and the Palestine Question, 1908–1941: A Political History (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 1998), 249. 36. Auni Abd al-Hadi, Mudhakkirat Awni ʻAbd al-Hadi [Memoirs of Awni Abd al-Hadi] (Beirut: Center for Arab Unity Studies, 2002), 182. Translation mine. 37. Ibid., 183. Translation mine. 38. Minute by J. M. Martin expressing Lord Peel’s wishes, September 8, 1936, TNA, CO 733/318/12. 39. See, for example, minute by J. M. Martin, September 15, 1936, TNA, CO 733/318/12. 40. Wauchope to Parkinson, August 8, 1936, TNA, CO 733/318/12. 41. Ibid., summarizing note by D. G. Harris, August 5, 1936. 42. It seems hard to imagine that Wauchope was unaware of the Permanent Mandates Commission’s practice of publishing the minutes of its meetings, though he clearly did not have this practice in mind when he advocated following the example of the commission. 43. Arthur Lourie to J. M. Martin, August 19. 1936, TNA, CO 733/318/12. 44. Lourie noted that the agency hoped “that reasonable opportunity will be afforded to the other parties concerned of dealing with any points affecting them which may have been raised in evidence given behind closed doors.” Ibid. 45. Peel to Martin, August 25, 1936, TNA, CO 733/318/12. 46. Ibid. 47. Note that except where minutes of secret evidence are available, it is impossible to know who gave evidence in camera and on what date. Telegrams in TNA, CO 733/318/13 suggest that Wauchope was the first person to give evidence before the commission and that he did so in secret. 48. These statistics are gathered from Peel Minutes. It is worth noting that a private meeting between the entire commission and Winston Churchill on March 12, 1937, is not included in this list. Other de facto sessions may well have been held and likewise never recorded. 49. File notes on financial matters indicate that all of the evidence, including minutes of secret sessions, was printed and bound for the commissioners. See TNA, CO 733/319/10. Archivists at the National Archives, London, and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, as well as other scholars, have been unable to find any remaining copies of the full minutes of secret evidence. 50. With a scarcity of British secretaries in Palestine, British officials and businessmen frequently hired English-speaking Jews who then passed information to the Jewish Agency. Though she was by no means passing secret information, Ms. R. Hyams, Peel’s personal secretary, seemed to be following in this tradition (see above). The American consulate in Jerusalem similarly experienced extensive leaks via its Jewish secretaries. See, for example, Wallace Murray to Paul Knabenshue, June 8, 1932, National Archives, Washington, DC, RG 84.350/26/14/1, Class 840.1. 51. Cmd. 1700 (Churchill White Paper). 52. Peel Minutes, 17. 53. Ibid., 21

Notes to Pages 85–92 / 213 54. Ibid. 55. The character of state land was, in and of itself, highly uncertain. British officials in Palestine struggled to understand Ottoman land categories, usufruct rights, and Palestinian land-holding and agricultural practices. “State land” in fact had no direct equivalent in Ottoman Palestine and was merely a close approximation imposed by British colonial administrators. See Martin P. Bunton, “Demarcating the British  Colonial State: Land Settlement in the Palestinian Jiftlik Villages of Sajad and Qazaza,” in New Perspectives on Property and Land in the Middle East, ed. Roger Owen (Cambridge: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University Press, 2000). 56. Peel Minutes, 26. 57. Ibid., 164–66. 58. Ibid., 17. 59. Ibid., 15. 60. Ibid., 118. 61. “Palestine Royal Commission, Notes of evidence taken on Monday, 15th December, 1936” (H. Wolfson), CZA, S25/4642. 62. Peel Minutes, 18. 63. Ibid., 19. 64. Ibid., 42. 65. Ibid., 105. This was well below the estimate of M. T. Dawe, director of the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries, who suggested that in the future thirty irrigated dunums of land in the Huleh Plain would constitute a subsistence area (42). 66. Ibid., 26. 67. Ibid., 130–31. 68. Ibid., 27. 69. Ibid., 29. 70. Ibid., 107. This high figure was questioned by Peel and reconfirmed by Ruppin. It appears to be the result, therefore, not of a typo but instead of a particularly capacious calculation of Arab agricultural sales to Jews. 71. Ibid., 101. 72. Ibid., 103. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid., 106. 75. Ibid., 112. 76. Ibid., 19. 77. Ibid., 108. 78. Ibid., 151. 79. Ibid., 157. 80. Ibid., 166. 81. Ibid., 169. 82. Ibid., 172. 83. Ibid., 173. 84. Ibid., 170. 85. Ibid., 172. 86. Ibid., 361–62. 87. Ibid., 362. 88. Ibid., 39. In fact, the Jewish and Arab economies were much more linked than Weizmann realized or chose to indicate. Roger Owen, “Economic Development in

214 / Notes to Pages 92–100

89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114.

115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125.

126. 127. 128.

Mandatory Palestine, 1918–1948,” in The Palestinian Economy: Studies in Development under Prolonged Occupation, ed. George T. Abed (London: Routledge, 1988). Peel Minutes, 6. Ibid., 11. Italics mine. See, for example, ibid., 175. See Jacob Metzer, The Divided Economy of Mandatory Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 148. Peel Minutes, 98. Ibid., 235. Ibid., 286. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 185. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 236. Ibid., 175. Tolkowsky suggested that Palestine be brought into the system of imperial preference. An exasperated Peel pointed out, not for the first time, that Palestine was not part of the British empire. Ibid., 221. Ibid., 337. Ibid., 348. Ibid., 329. Ibid., 333. Ibid., 341–42. Ibid., 327. Ibid., 13. Population figures from Mills’s estimates as of mid-1936 (ibid., 1). Ibid., 15. Ibid., 355. Ibid., 207. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 209. Ibid., 210. It is possible that the Arabs referred to by Heron as receiving Jewish medical care were accessing Jewish doctors through smaller clinics or on an individual basis. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 48. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 207. Ibid., 352. Ibid., 353. Ibid., 351. Ibid., 357. Ibid., 158 Ibid., 216. David Ben-Gurion reversed the equation, saying, “the Bible is our Mandate.” Ibid., 288. This line of reasoning, however, was not one that Jewish representatives spent much time elaborating. For this evidence see ibid., 244–62, 271–84. Minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission, seventeenth session (1930), 145. Peel Minutes, 248.

Notes to Pages 100–110 / 215 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137.

138. 139. 140. 141.

Ibid., 262. Ibid., 277. Ibid., 302. Ibid., 319. Ibid., 293. Ibid., 296. Ibid., 306. Ibid., 317. See, for example, “Palestine Royal Commission, Notes of evidence taken on Friday, 8th January, 1937” (C. Weizmann), CZA, S25/4642. Weizmann’s private testimonies are also reproduced in Chaim Weizmann, The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, ed. Barnet Litvinoff, series B (Jerusalem: Transaction, 1984), 2: 126–264. Ibid. Ibid. Peel Minutes, 279–80. Ibid., 313. CHAPTER FOUR

1. 2.

Peel Minutes, 380. Exceptions include El-Eini, Mandated Landscape, 320–28, who briefly covers some of the discussions within the commission and the Colonial Office, and Dothan, Land in the Balance, 200–211, who details Zionist efforts to shape the commission’s partition plan before the release of the report. 3. The gaps in the personal papers of the commissioners are particularly large. For example, Lord Peel’s personal papers concerning his political career were destroyed by his daughter (Cameron Hazlehurst, Sally Whitehead, and Christine Woodland, A Guide to the Papers of British Cabinet Ministers, 1900–1964, Royal Historical Society Guides and Handbooks, no. 19 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Historical Society, 1996], 295), and no papers on Palestine are contained in his file at the Oriental and India Office Collection (OIOC MSS Eur D528). Rumbold’s papers are extensive, but there are, for example, no letters to his son (to whom he wrote quite regularly) between February 10 and July 5, 1937 (Rumbold MSS, Modern Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford). Perhaps most disappointing are the papers of Reginald Coupland; in all of his papers there is one memorandum on Palestine, from after the publication of the Woodhead Report (MSS. Medit. s 36, Rhodes House, Oxford), and though there are diaries for virtually every place Coupland visited, there are none for his time in Palestine (MSS. Brit. Emp. s 7–15, Rhodes House, Oxford). 4. Horace Rumbold to Tony Rumbold, November 26, 1936, MS Rumbold Additional, box 5: Modern Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford. 5. Horace Rumbold to Tony Rumbold, January 15, 1937, MS Rumbold Additional, box 5: Modern Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford. 6. “Notes of Discussion at Helouan,” January 21, 1937, 1, TNA, CO 733/346/19. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 2. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., 3. 11. Ibid., 5. 12. Ibid.

216 / Notes to Pages 110–115 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 6. The original anecdote, which has Weizmann emerging from the lengthy meeting about partition and declaring to those waiting outside, “Friends, today we laid the basis for the Jewish State!” appears in Meyer W. Weisgal and Joel Carmichael, eds., Chaim Weizmann: A Biography by Several Hands (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1963), 240–41. It has been repeated numerous times, though there are discrepancies about the date of the conversation and, of course, about its content. Horace Rumbold to Tony Rumbold, January 11, 1937, MS Rumbold Additional, box 5: Modern Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford. “Notes of Discussion at Helouan,” January 21, 1937, 6, TNA, CO 733/346/19. Ibid., 8. “Notes of Discussion at Helouan,” January 22, 1937, 5, TNA, CO 733/346/19. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 7. Ibid. “Summary Note of Discussion at Helouan,” January 23, 1937, TNA, CO 733/ 346/19. Horace Rumbold to Tony Rumbold, February 10, 1938, MS Rumbold dep. 42: Modern Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Ibid. Coupland’s comment about the opinions of Harris and Andrews (see above) supports this supposition, as does the secret evidence of Winston Churchill in which the commissioners press him for an opinion on partition, which he declines to give. Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Companion Part III, 601–17. “Drastic New Plans for Palestine,” Daily Herald, April 2, 1937. Peel to Hankey, February 19, 1937, TNA, CO 733/346/9. “Notes of an informal discussion between the Chiefs of Staff Sub-Committee and members of the Royal Commission on Palestine,” March 1, 1937, 12, TNA, CO 733/346/9. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 13. “Future Strategical Considerations in Regard to Palestine,” enclosure to Ellington to Peel, March 3, 1937, TNA, CO 733/346/9. Peel to Ellington, March 4, 1937, TNA, CO 733/346/9. See Coupland, “Note for Discussion of Partition,” n.d., TNA, CO 733/346/9, where Coupland mentions desired changes to the boundaries on the map circulated while the commissioners were in Jerusalem. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 8. Peel Report, 385–86. “Drastic New Plans,” Daily Herald, April 2, 1937. “Summary of Comments in the Palestine Press on the Alleged Cantonization Scheme Reported in the English Press as Being under Consideration by the Royal Commission,” April 8, 1937, 1, TNA, CO 733/348/9. Ibid., 3. A. Wauchope to W. Ormsby-Gore, April 10, 1937, TNA, CO 733/348/9.

Notes to Pages 116–122 / 217 44. “Palestine: Extract from enclosure to Rome despatch no. 297,” P 1670/38/150, TNA, CO 733/348/9. 45. A. C. Kerr to J. M. Maffey, April 7, 1937, TNA, CO 733/348/9. 46. See Aaron S. Klieman, “The Divisiveness of Palestine: Foreign Office versus Colonial Office on the Issue of Partition, 1937,” Historical Journal 22 (June 1979): 423–41. 47. Fahmi El Husseini to A. Wauchope, April 10, 1937, TNA, CO 733/348/9. 48. Untitled translation, April 11, 1937, TNA, CO 733/348/9. 49. Moss Greenberg to C. E. R. Brocklebank, MP, n.d., enclosure to Brocklebank to Ormsby-Gore, May 27, 1937, TNA, CO 733/348/9. 50. H. M. Downie, “Note of a Discussion with Mr. Aksim [sic; Aksin is correct] of the New Zionist Organisation,” May 17, 1937, TNA, CO 733/348/9. 51. “Extract from ‘Note of Interview [with Jacob Rosenheim and Paul Goodman],’” April 26, 1937, TNA, CO 733/348/9. 52. For more on the role of British politicians in shaping the partition proposal in favor of the Zionists, see Rose, Gentile Zionists, 123–77. 53. See, for example, Moshe Sharett, Yoman Medini [Political Diary], vol. 4 (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1968), 84–87. 54. Minute by J. M. Maffey, June 3, 1937, TNA, CO 733/348/9. 55. Rutenberg to Maffey, June 5, 1937, TNA, CO 733/384/9. 56. Weizmann to Ormsby-Gore, June 15, 1937, TNA, CO 733/348/9. 57. “Notes on a dinner party,” June 8, 1937, unsigned (presumed C. Weizmann), CZA, S25/4418. 58. Amery to Ormsby-Gore, June 26, 1937, TNA, CO 733/351/2. 59. Ormsby-Gore to Amery, June 30, 1937, TNA, CO 733/351/2. 60. Peel Report, 381–82. 61. “Notes of an informal discussion between the Chiefs of Staff Sub-Committee and members of the Royal Commission on Palestine,” March 1, 1937, TNA, CO 733/346/9. 62. Coupland, “Note for Discussion of Partition,” n.d., TNA, CO 733/346/9. This note was probably written in early to mid-June 1937. 63. Katz, Partner to Partition, 29–30. 64. Quoted in ibid., 30. 65. See, for example, Fraser, “Sir Reginald Coupland, the Round Table and the Problem of Divided Societies,” 411. 66. Sir John Martin, “Some Recollections of the Palestine Royal Commission,” lecture given at the Israel National Academy, November 8, 1978. Transcript accessed July  10,  2013, http://www.davidrossmartin.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/David %20Martin/index.htm. 67. Peel Report, 2. 68. See J. G. Lambton, Report on the Affairs of British North America, from the Earl of Durham, 8 vols. (London: Ridgway, 1839). 69. Reginald Coupland, The Empire in These Days: An Interpretation (London: Macmillan, 1935). 70. Peel Report, 11. 71. Ibid., 13–14. 72. Ibid., 6. 73. Ibid., 4. 74. Ibid., 5. 75. Ibid., 15 76. Ibid., 38.

218 / Notes to Pages 122–134 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

Ibid., 41. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 48. Ibid., 119. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 117. Ibid. Ibid., 120. Ibid., 307. Ibid., 363–68. Ibid., 368. Ibid., 373. Ibid., 379. Ibid., 374. Ibid., 380. Fraser, “Sir Reginald Coupland, the Round Table and the Problem of Divided Societies,” 411. CHAPTER FIVE

1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

CM 46(37)5, December 8, 1937, TNA, CAB 23/90. On Arab reactions, see Dothan, Land in the Balance, 222–33. Zionist reactions and alternate partition plans are well covered in Katz, Partner to Partition. On British media and Parliamentary reactions, see Aaron S. Klieman, “In the Public Domain: The Controversy over Partition for Palestine,” Jewish Social Studies 43 (Spring 1980): 147–64. Cohen, Palestine, Retreat from the Mandate, 32–49; Klieman, “Divisiveness of Palestine.” Cmd. 5513, Palestine: Statement of Policy by His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom (London: HMSO, 1937), 1. Minutes of Cabinet meeting, June 28, 1937, TNA, CAB 23/88. Ibid. Minutes of a meeting between Ormsby-Gore and Melchett, July 22, 1937, CZA, S25/7563. In a note to the surviving members of the Peel Commission sent just before the publication of the Woodhead Report, Coupland lamented the fact that they had not been able to “to secure the proper execution of the policy they recommended.” Apparently while still in Palestine, a member of the commission (perhaps Coupland) had suggested that the commission announce its support of partition in an interim report and that several members stay on to continue working “with a view to producing a reasonably complete scheme of Partition by the autumn.” Peel apparently rejected this suggestion. See Reginald Coupland, “The Sequel to the Palestine Royal Commission,” undated manuscript, Rhodes House Library, Oxford University, MSS Medit. s 36. It is worth reiterating here that this section surveys publicly declared opinions about partition. Privately, both opponents and supporters expressed much more nuanced

Notes to Pages 134–140 / 219

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

views on partition, but the high stakes surrounding public debates tended to encourage extreme positions. David Lloyd George, “A Scandalous Report,” Sunday Express, July 18, 1937. HC Deb., 5th series, vol. 326, cols. 2235–2367. Ibid., col. 2264. Ibid., cols. 2283, 2277. “Notes on a dinner party,” unsigned (presumed C. Weizmann), June 8, 1937, CZA, S25/4418. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Most scholars see this as having been a tactical blunder on the part of the Zionist leadership, though as several point out, the Executive was internally divided (BenGurion being a less than enthusiastic recent convert to partition), and it did not necessarily have the ability to rein in its British allies. See Cohen, Palestine, Retreat from the Mandate, 34–38. Diary entry for June 9, 1937, in Blanche Dugdale, Baffy: The Diaries of Blanche Dugdale, 1936–1947, ed. N. A. Rose (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1973), 45. HC Deb., 5th series, vol. 326, col. 2298. This despite a strong Government majority in the House. Rose argues that the Government did not want to make Palestine a “source of party bickering.” See Rose, Gentile Zionists, 140. See G. W. Rendel to Secretary-General of the League Joseph Avenol, July 6, 1937, reproduced in Minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission, Thirty-Second [Extraordinary] Session Devoted to Palestine (1937), 225–26. See League of Nations, Official Journal (December 1937): 1094. Minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission, thirty-second session (1937), 226. Ibid., 227. Ibid., 231. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 20. As Ormsby-Gore knew, and as previous chapters show, this was far from the truth. Ibid., 38. The commission was particularly concerned about the latter point, in part because it had just witnessed firsthand the interference of an outside state in the affairs of Palestine. During the course of its meeting, the commission received a telegram from the government of Iraq that spoke of Iraq’s special concern for the problems in Palestine and the “gravest moral responsibility” it accepted toward the Arabs there. See ibid., 85. On the Mandates Commission’s treatment of settler colonial projects, including the Zionist one, see Susan Pedersen, “Settler Colonialism at the Bar of the League of Nations,” in Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices, Legacies, ed. Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen (New York: Routledge, 2005). Minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission, thirty-second session (1937), 87. Ibid., 93. Ibid., 179. Ibid., 207. Ibid., 143.

220 / Notes to Pages 140–147 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43.

44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

52. 53.

54. 55.

League of Nations, Official Journal (December 1937): 1094. Ibid., 1093. Ibid., 907. Ben-Gurion had apparently been worried enough over the pro-/antipartition split within the movement that he had considered postponing the Congress. See Dothan, Land in the Balance, 210. Weizmann’s speech appeared verbatim in the Manchester Guardian, August 9, 1937. See enclosure to letter from Weizmann to Shuckburgh, September 30, 1937, TNA, CO 733/332/10. For more on the pro-partition Arab faction and the terror campaign against it, see Porath, Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement, 228–32; Hillel Cohen, Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917–1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 122; Nasir al-Din Nashashibi, Jerusalem’s Other Voice: Ragheb Nashashibi and Moderation in Palestinian Politics, 1920–1948 (Exeter, UK: Ithaca, 1990), 101; Cohen, Palestine, Retreat from the Mandate, 52. For Abdullah’s interest and role in partition, see Avi Shlaim, Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). For a summary of Foreign Office views on pan-Arabism, see Klieman, “Divisiveness of Palestine,” 427–31. Ibid., 439. The Colonial Office was much more concerned with the question of how to uphold the promises made in the Balfour Declaration than was the Foreign Office. The latter was quite content to suggest that Britain admit it could not implement the Balfour Declaration and instead offer the Jews territory elsewhere in the British empire, or at most fix the Jewish population at 40 percent of the total in Palestine. See memorandum by L. Baggallay, August 13, 1937, TNA, FO 371/20811, and minute by G. Rendel, October 14, 1937, TNA, FO 371/20816. See memorandum by A. Eden, CP 281, November 19, 1937, TNA, CAB 24/273. See memorandum by W. Ormsby-Gore, CP 289, December 1, 1937, TNA, CAB 24/273. This strategy was discussed at a meeting between Eden, undersecretaries of the Foreign Office Robert Vansittart, Viscount Cranborne, and Lancelot Oliphant, and Rendel. See note on a meeting, December 7, 1937, TNA, FO 371/20822. See Cabinet meeting minutes, December 8, 1937, TNA, CAB 23/90a. Cmd. 5634, Policy in Palestine (London: January 1938), 3–4. This confirmed the Government’s firm rejection of the Peel Commission’s suggestion that Britain might institute compulsory population transfer on the model of the Greek-Turkish exchanges. Ibid., 4. By this late point, of course, the Zionists were disturbed by this slow approach, seeing it as a sign that the Government was losing its nerve. For a discussion of how much or, more accurately, how little the Zionists knew of the unofficial Government movement away from partition, see Rose, Gentile Zionists, 151–77. See minute by L. Baggallay, March 16, 1938, TNA, FO 371/21862. The Foreign Office, however, did not stop trying to win the argument over partition. In May MacDonald prevented the Foreign Office from sending to the Woodhead Commission a memorandum laying out in great detail the arguments against partition. See MacDonald to Halifax, May 27, 1938, TNA, CO 733/381/1.

Notes to Pages 147–157 / 221 56. Many of these statistics had been compiled late in 1937. See, for example, D. G. Harris, “Memorandum on the Royal Commission’s Proposal for the Partition of Palestine,” November 10, 1937, TNA, CO 733/354/4. 57. MacDonald, report on his visit to Palestine, August 6–7, 1938, TNA, FO 371/21863. 58. Minutes of a Cabinet meeting, October 19, 1938, TNA, CAB 23/96. 59. Both Halifax and MacDonald had tried, unsuccessfully, to ascertain at least the thrust of the report much earlier, but to no avail. See Cohen, Palestine, Retreat from the Mandate, 69–70. 60. One member supported none of the proposed plans. An unpublished sketch done by the special assistant to the police, Charles Tegart, after the release of the report drove home the report’s absurdity: under the heading “Plan D,” a rough map of Palestine is shown carved up into dozens of humorously labeled areas. Tegart Papers, file 3, folio 3, Middle East Centre, St. Antony’s College, Oxford. 61. Woodhead Report, 246. 62. Ibid., 263–81. Quotation from 281. 63. Cmd. 5893, Palestine: Statement by His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom (London: HMSO, 1938), 3. 64. Ibid. 65. See Cohen, Palestine Retreat from the Mandate, 87. 66. Ibid., 86. 67. Cmd. 6019, Palestine: Statement of Policy (London: HMSO, 1939), 6. 68. Minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission, thirty-sixth session (1939), 98. 69. Ibid., 275. Pedersen details how this sentence, which linguistically left open the possibility that the interpretation of the mandate might alter, was the product of an intense and savvy campaign by the recently retired Cabinet secretary and new member of the commission Sir Maurice Hankey. The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 389–91. CONCLUSION

1. 2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

For a detailed treatment of the post-1943 partition plans, including Harris’s role in developing them, see El-Eini, Mandated Landscape, 344–69. Cabinet-level planning has been documented and analyzed extensively. Foundational works include Cohen, Palestine, Retreat from the Mandate; Cohen, Palestine and the Great Powers; Louis, British Empire in the Middle East, pt. IV; Louis and Stookey, End of the Palestine Mandate; Louis, Ends of British Imperialism, chap. 16. Cmd. 6019, Palestine: A Statement of Policy [1939 White Paper], para. 16 (London: HMSO, 1939). Stein, Land Question in Palestine. Land Transfer Regulations, 1940, Palestine Gazette, Extraordinary No. 988, February 28, 1940, supplement II, 327. On details of the creation and regulation of these zones, see El-Eini, Mandated Landscape, 260–69. By all indications, these regulations did little to actually restrict Jewish land purchases. See Stein, Land Question in Palestine, 64. Unsigned memorandum (author later referred to as D. G. Harris), “Regulation of the Transfer of Land in Palestine,” undated, enclosure II to secret letter, Harold MacMichael to Malcolm MacDonald, June 16, 1939; Minute by S. E. V. Luke, October 27, 1939, TNA, CO 733/392/8. Memorandum from Chancellor to Passfield, January 17, 1930, TNA, CO 733/182/9. Letter of January 15, 1930, Rhodes House, Chancellor 16/3, quoted in G. Sheffer,

222 / Notes to Pages 159–166

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

“Intentions and Results of British Policy in Palestine: Passfield’s White Paper,” Middle Eastern Studies 9, no. 1 (January 1973): 45. On MacMichael’s turn to partition, see Gavriel Cohen, “Harold MacMichael and Palestine’s Future,” Studies in Zionism 2 (April 1981): 133–55. War Cabinet, Committee on Palestine, Minutes, August 4, 1943, 4. P.(M)(43) 1, TNA, CAB 95/14. See minutes of the meetings in P.(M)(43), TNA, CAB 95/14. David Horowitz, State in the Making, trans. Julian Meltzer (New York: Knopf, 1953), 20. War Cabinet, Committee on Palestine, Report of the Committee, December 20, 1943, P.(M)(43) 29, TNA, CAB 95/14. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 5. Ibid. 11. War Cabinet, Committee on Palestine, Note by Chairman, January 21, 1944, covering a copy of a minute dated January 16, 1944, from the prime minister to the secretary of the War Cabinet. P.(M)(44) 4, TNA, CAB 95/14. Telegram from Churchill to Eden, January 12, 1944, TNA, FO 371/40133. Partition for Jerusalem was eventually abandoned under a new district commissioner in favor of a system of rotation. The entire episode is detailed in TNA, Foreign and Commonwealth Office 141/14273–76. Of note, these three files were originally Chief Secretariat files of the Palestine Government and were evidently repatriated to the UK and illegally held outside the National Archives in the so-called “migrated archive” until April 2013. These files do not appear in the Palestine Government files held in the Israel State Archives. War Cabinet, Committee on Palestine, Report of the Committee, September, 1944, 6, P.(M)(44) 12, TNA, CAB 95/14. War Cabinet, Committee on Palestine, Memorandum by the Secretary of State for the Colonies, March 30, 1945, para. 5. P.(M)(45) 1, TNA, CAB 95/14. Ibid. For the Biltmore program, see “Declaration adopted by the Extraordinary Zionist Conference at the Biltmore Hotel of New York City,” May 11, 1942. UNISPAL: https://uniteapps.un.org/dpa/dpr/unispal.nsf/0/F86E0B8FC540DEDD85256CED 0070C2A5. Cabinet, Palestine Committee, “A New Policy for Palestine,” September 1, 1945, para. 4. P.(M)(45) 11, TNA, CAB 95/14. Telegram from Ambassador in the United Kingdom Averell Harriman to Secretary of State James Byrnes, July 19, 1946, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, The Near East and Africa, vol. 7, doc. 506. Cmd. 6808, Report of the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry regarding the Problems of European Jewry and Palestine (London: HMSO, 1946). On the Anglo-American Committee, see Amikam Nachmani, Great Power Discord in Palestine: The AngloAmerican Committee of Inquiry into the Problems of European Jewry and Palestine, 1945– 46 (London: Frank Cass, 1987); Allen Howard Podet, The Success and Failure of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, 1945–46: Last Chance in Palestine (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1987). C.P. (46) 258, July 8, 1946, 6. TNA, CAB 129/11/8. C.M. (46) 67th Conclusions, July 11, 1946, TNA, CAB 128/6/5. On the talks, see Nachmani, Great Power Discord in Palestine, 234–48.

Notes to Pages 166–175 / 223 29. Telegram from Harriman to Byrnes, July 24, 1946, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, vol. 7, doc. 514. 30. Ibid. 31. HC Deb., 5th series, vol. 426, col. 979, July 31, 1946. 32. Telegram from Truman to Attlee, October 3, 1946, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, vol. 7, doc. 548. 33. TNA, CAB 128/9, CM22(47). 34. HC Deb., 5th series, vol. 433, col. 988, February 18, 1947. 35. Elad Ben-Dror, “How the United Nations Intended to Implement the Partition Plan: The Handbook Drawn Up by the Secretariat for the Members of the United Nations Palestine Commission,” Middle Eastern Studies 43, no. 6 (November 2007): 997–1008. 36. On Bunche’s involvement in the Palestine question, see Elad Ben-Dror, Ralph Bunche and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: Mediation and the UN, 1947–1949 (London: Routledge, 2015). 37. Harris’s draft and a final printed memorandum, “Palestine: Study of Partition,” April 1947, TNA, FO 371/61858. 38. George Symeonides, “Background Story on Palestine Report,” August 31, 1947, United Nations Press Release, UN doc. PAL/91. 39. Elad Ben-Dror, “The Arab Struggle against Partition: The International Arena of Summer 1947,” Middle Eastern Studies 43, no. 2 (March 2007): 259–93, examines Arab relations with and lobbying around UNSCOP, though fairly unsympathetically. 40. On the long Zionist campaign to secure partition, and partition in its ideal form, see Jørgen Jensehaugen, Marte Heian-Engdal, and Hilde Henriksen Waage, “Securing the State: From Zionist Ideology to Israeli Statehood,” Diplomacy & Statecraft 23, no. 2 (June 1, 2012): 280–303. 41. United Nations General Assembly, 2nd Session, supplement no. 11, United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, Report to the General Assembly, September 3, 1947, UN doc. A/364. 42. UN General Assembly, 2nd Session, supplement no. 11, United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, Report to the General Assembly [UNSCOP Report], September 3, 1947, UN doc. A/364, 42, 44. 43. Shlaim, Collusion across the Jordan. 44. UN General Assembly, 2nd Session, supplement no. 11, United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, Report to the General Assembly [UNSCOP Report], September 3, 1947, UN doc. A/364, 45. 45. Ibid., 50. 46. Ibid. 47. United Nations General Assembly, Future Government of Palestine, November 29, 1947, UN doc. A/RES/181(II). 48. Among others, see Katz, Partner to Partition; Stein, Land Question in Palestine. 49. Ben-Dror, “Arab Struggle against Partition,” 998. 50. Shira Robinson extends this argument into the post-1948 period. Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). 51. Tom Segev, 1949: The First Israelis, trans. Arlen Neal Weinstein (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), 21. 52. On Palestinian Arab refugees, see, among many others, Benny Morris, The Birth of

224 / Notes to Page 178 the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Morris discusses the controversy over the number of refugees and suggests an estimate of 700,000 (602–4). 53. R. Coupland to W. Ormsby-Gore, June 27, 1937, TNA, CO/733/351/2. 54. Woodhead Report, 41.

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INDEX

Abdelhadi, Auni Bey, 78, 101–3 Abdelhadi, Ruhi Bey, 95f Abdullah, Emir, 4, 54, 110, 123, 132, 142, 163, 171 Abraham, 121 Abyssinia, 20, 139, 145, 211n20 Agudath Israel, 116, 199n26 AHC (Arab Higher Committee), 9–11, 65, 78, 88, 101, 106, 142 Ali, Shaukat, 42, 207n70 Allied Supreme Council, 3 Amery, Leo, 40, 118, 134–35 Andrews, Lewis, 11, 58–60, 85, 88, 110, 144, 165–66, 216n28 Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, 165–68 Anglo-Zionists, 135, 154 anti-Semitism, 35, 43, 47, 109, 123, 171 Antonius, George, 41, 50, 90–91 Arab Higher Committee (AHC), 9–11, 65, 78, 88, 101, 106, 142 Arabic, 7, 41, 98–99 Arab-Israeli war, 1–2, 17 Arab League, 163–64, 168 Arabs: academic work on, 23–24; development of territorial solutions to Palestine and, 44–63, 205n32; and early work of the Peel Commission, 65–74, 78, 81–106, 205n32, 214n114; opposition to Jewish settlement by, 6–8, 20, 122; Palestine mandate and the situation of, 6–12; and revival of partition and, 156–63, 168–75, 180; and shaping of partition, 109, 113–15, 118–28, 205n34;

suppression of and discrimination against, 10–11, 91, 95–96, 123–24, 205n27; and the turn away from partition, 131–34, 138–53, 178; and the turn toward partition, 20–23, 27–29, 32–45. See also nationalism Arab uprising (1921), 28 Arab uprising (1929), 8, 28, 38, 45, 123, 206n59 Arab uprising (1933), 8, 28 Arab uprising (1936–39), 2, 8–9, 16, 23, 26–27, 61–65, 72, 120–23, 137–38, 142, 171, 178 Arab uprisings, 8, 200n32 Arslan, Shakib, 41 Assyrians, massacre of, 180, 205n32 Attlee, Clement, 135, 164 Aydin, Cemil, 207n69 Balfour, Arthur, 5, 40 Balfour Declaration: British responsibility for the, 4–5, 20, 207n6, 220n46; creation of the, 26, 77, 206n60; and the Palestine mandate, 8, 78, 122, 197n7; and the shaping of partition, 43–45, 70, 78, 99–100, 144, 150. See also Zionism Beethoven, Ludwig van, and the Palestine Symphony Orchestra concert, 124 Ben-Avi, Itamar, 208n13 Bengal, 23–25, 29 Ben-Gurion, David, 119, 214n125, 219n18, 220n40 Bennett, Maurice, 85–87 Bevin, Ernest, 165–68

246 / Index Biger, Gideon, 13, 197n3 Bilad, Al, 116 Biltmore Program, 163 black letter, 100, 129, 152 Bombay Reorganization Committee, 79–80 Bowman, H. E., 32, 98–99 Brahms, Johannes, and the Palestine Symphony Orchestra concert, 124 Britain: and academic work on Palestine, 12–15; and revival of partition, 155– 81; roots of partition and, 16, 22–23, 44–64; and shaping of partition, 70–73, 83–84, 90–91, 100–101, 106–16, 122, 126–27; and the turn away from partition, 105, 129–54, 207n6, 220n46, 220n51; and the understanding of the Palestine problem, 16–43, 202n49; withdrawal from Palestine of, 1–2, 17, 172 Brodetsky, Selig, 50 Brook, Norman, 166 Bunche, Ralph, 169 Butts, Isaac, 25

the, 157–59; shaping of partition and the, 43, 49–58, 74, 77–79, 82, 113–19; and the turn away from partition, 132– 33, 143–45, 220n46; turn to partition and the, 16, 20, 36. See also Foreign Office Committee on Palestine, 160–65 Communist Party (Britain), 134 Coupland, Reginald: background of, 29– 33, 40, 76; and the early development of partition plans, 81–82, 91, 98–104, 205n38, 208n8, 208n10; failure of partition and, 132–33, 177; and the negotiation of partition, 108–21, 126– 27, 216n28, 216n36; papers of, 215n3, 218n8; role in writing the Peel Report of, 2, 46, 133. See also Peel Commission Covenant of the League of Nations, 102, 193–94 Cranborne, Viscount, 220n49 Cromer, Evelyn Baring, 27 Curzon, George, 4, 24 Cust, L. G. Archer, 29, 53–58, 102, 209n37

Cairo Conference, 4 Canada, 31, 120–21 cantonization: early plans for, 23, 29, 38, 42, 45–63, 208nn13–14, 209n39; and the endurance of territorial separatism, 155–59, 165–66, 170; failure of territorial separatism and, 141, 177; the Peel Commission and, 103, 112–14, 125. See also partition Carter, Morris, 31, 76, 108, 111 Casey, Richard, 159, 163 Catastini, Vito, 51–52 Cazalet, Victor, 135 Central Zionist Archives, 82 Chamberlain, Neville, 136, 144, 147 Chancellor, John, 49, 157, 206n59 Chatfield, Ernle, 113 Chesterton, G. K., 47–48, 208n14 Christians, Palestinian, 9–10, 42 Churchill, Winston, 4, 20, 33, 109, 118, 135–36, 159, 162–64, 212n48, 216n28 Churchill White Paper (1922), 6, 50, 84, 99 citizenship of Palestine, 122, 171–72 Clayton, Gilbert, 28 colonialism. See imperialism Colonial Office: legacies of partition and

Daily Herald, 113–15 Daily Telegraph, 75 Dajani, Hassan Sidki Bey, 95 Daniel Sieff Research Institute, 124 Darwaza, Izzat, 40 Dawe, M. T., 213n65 decolonization, 1–3, 15–17, 22–23, 26, 63–64, 172 de Penha Garcia, José, 57 de Rothschild, James, 135 Deverell, Cyril, 113 Dodge, Toby, 205n30 Dothan, Shmuel, 13, 208n8, 215n2 Downie, H. M., 116 “D plan” (Tegart), 178–80, 221n60 Dugdale, Blanche, 135–36 Durham, Lord, 120 economic absorptive capacity, 84–85, 91– 93, 100, 124 economies of Palestine, Jewish and Arab, 11, 92–96, 200n35, 213n88 Eden, Anthony, 131–33, 143–47, 162, 220n49 education, 12, 32, 96–99, 205n38 Egypt, 22, 27–28, 33, 176 El-Eini, Roza, 13, 208n8, 215n2

Index / 247 Ellington, Edward, 113–14 English, 7, 19, 41, 98 Erskine, Steuart (Beatrice), 53–54, 209n39 evidence on partition and the Peel Commission, 9–16, 32, 41, 71–114, 119, 199n24, 205n38, 212nn47–49, 216n28. See also Peel Commission Feisal (king of Syria), 8 Filistin, 197n3 Foreign Office, 19–20, 116, 130–33, 142– 45, 160–62, 209n29, 220n46, 220n55. See also Colonial Office Fraser, T. G., 208n10 Galnoor, Itzhak, 13 George V (king), 209n37 geostrategic assets, 3, 33, 39, 47, 67, 73, 162, 165, 171 Gort, Lord, 163 Government of India Acts, 25–26, 30–31 Government of Ireland Act, 25 Grady, Henry, 166 Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. See Haj Amin al-Husseini Greater Syria, 40, 163 Greece, 29, 69–70 Grigg, Edward, 163 Haj Amin al-Husseini, 10–11, 21, 27, 41– 42, 49–50, 101, 142, 171, 207n69 Halifax, Viscount, 75, 147, 221n59 Hall, George, 165 Hall, J. Hathorn, 18, 33, 138–41 Hammond, Laurie, 31, 76, 85, 91, 100, 103, 108–14, 127 Hankey, Maurice, 113, 221n69 Harris, Douglas, 29, 32, 58–62, 79–80, 85– 87, 110, 148, 154–66, 170, 216n28 Harris-Andrews plan, 58–60, 210n58 Haycraft Commission, 28 healthcare, 12, 96–97, 214n114 Heathcoat-Amory, P. G., 31f Hebrew, 7, 19, 52, 209n35 Hebrew University, 118 Heron, G. W., 96–97, 214n114 Hexter, Maurice, 87–89 high commissioner system, 19–21, 203n4 High Commission for Refugees Coming from Germany, 35 Hilmi, Abbas, 49

Histadrut, 92–93 Hitler, Adolf, 109, 123. See also Nazism Hoare, Samuel, 75 holy sites, 3, 54, 67, 121, 126, 146, 171–72. See also Jerusalem Home Rule movement, 25, 204n21 Hoofien, Siegfried, 93 Hope-Simpson, John, 28–29, 157, 205n34 Hope-Simpson Commission, 28 Horowitz, David, 159 Hos, Dov, 92–94 Hunt, Lynn, 204n17 Husseini, Jamal, 57, 101–2 Hussein-McMahon correspondence, 78, 122 Hyam, Ronald, 27 Ibn Saud, 132 immigration, Jewish: Arab response to, 42, 65, 78, 91, 109, 123; British policy on, 2, 6, 19–21, 29, 78, 129, 206n59; and the development of territorial solutions to Palestine, 35–39, 43, 55, 60–63, 106; and the Palestine mandate, 6–11, 100– 101; and racial division in Palestine, 8, 55; revival of partition plans and, 159, 163–68; and the turn away from partition, 150–52; and the turn toward partition, 70, 84–94, 109–12, 117–18, 121–25 imperialism: academic treatment of the partition of Palestine and, 13–17, 201–2nn45–46; British tactics of, 204n15, 205n27; and the emergence of territorial separatism, 18–33, 44–57, 63–64, 83–84; the Peel Commission and, 71–76, 89–91, 106; revival of partition and, 155–65, 171–81; shaping of partition and, 106, 113–16, 120–21; summary of partition plans for Palestine and British, 1–5, 16–17; turn away from partition and, 130–33, 136, 151 Independence party, 78 India, 22–32, 42, 164, 172, 175 Indian Councils Act, 25 India Office, 20, 32 indirect rule, 21, 27, 205n27 Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, 168 Iraq, 4, 33, 41, 45, 123, 126, 180, 205n27, 219n30

248 / Index Ireland, 22–26, 29–30, 33, 204n13 irrigation, 87, 213n65 Israel, 175–77 Italy, 20, 139, 145 Jabotinsky, Vladimir, 81 Jackson, Alvin, 204n13 Jacobson, Victor, 47–49 Jaffa Riots, 28 Jamal, Shibli, 57 Jerusalem, 3, 49, 52–54, 115–18, 121, 160– 63, 170–71, 222n19 Jesus, 121 Jewish Agency for Palestine: development of territorial solutions to Palestine and the, 50–51, 57–58; political influence of the, 6–11, 21, 27, 34, 174, 211nn18–19, 212n44, 212n50; and the shaping of partition, 71–72, 77–84, 87–93, 106, 118 Jewish National Fund, 37 Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), 49 Jews: British policy and, 4–12, 19–23, 37– 39, 205n34; conditions in the Palestine mandate and, 7–12; development of the Peel Report and, 107–29; early work of the Peel Commission in Palestine and, 65–106, 205n32; opposition to settlement of Palestine by, 7–8, 29, 39, 42–43, 65, 206n59; revival of partition and, 156–80; shaping of partition and, 207n61, 212n50; turn away from partition and, 129–35, 139–54, 220n46; turn toward partition and, 32–61, 208nn13–14. See also Zionism Joseph, Bernard, 86, 90–91 JTA (Jewish Telegraphic Agency), 49 Katz, Yossi, 13 Kaufman, Asher, 197n6 Keith-Roach, Edward, 58–60 Kelly, Matthew Kraig, 200n32 Kenya, 29, 31, 55 Kerr, Archibald Clark, 116 Khalidi, Ahmed, 52, 209n31 Khalidi, Hussein al-, 95 Khalidi, Rashid, 205n27 Khilafat Committee, 42 Khoury, Emile, 57 King-Crane Commission, 199nn19–20 King David Hotel bombing, 166, 172

Kligler, I. J., 97 Knabenshue, Paul, 48–49 Labour Party (Britain), 134–35, 164 Lacy Baggallay, Herbert, 147 Land in the Balance, A (Dothan), 215n2 Land of Progress (Norris), 201n45 land settlement. See immigration, Jewish land transfer, 6–8, 39, 69, 90–91, 117, 156– 59, 171–74, 206n59, 213n70, 221n5. See also immigration, Jewish; population transfer Land Transfers Regulations, 156–59, 221n5 Lausanne peace conference, second, 30 Law, Richard, 160 League of Nations: Covenant of the, 5, 193–94; negotiation of partition and the, 116, 122–23, 202n49, 211n20; redrawing of boundaries and the, 3–4; and the turn away from partition, 133, 136–41, 144–46, 152–53, 180–81; turn toward partition and the, 16–19, 27, 34–45, 51–53 League of Nations Archives (LNA), 206nn46–47 Lehi (militant group), 163 Lend-Lease program, 164 Liberal Party (Britain), 134–35 Lie, Trygve, 169 Lloyd George, David, 1, 134 LNA (League of Nations Archives), 206nn46–47 Lourie, Arthur, 212n44 Lugard, Frederick, 27, 40 Luke, Stephen E. V., 157 Lurie, Joseph, 98 MacDonald, Malcolm, 144, 147–48, 153, 220n55, 221n59 MacDonald, Ramsay, 100, 129, 152–53 MacDonald letter, 100, 129, 152 Macker, J. B., 82 MacMichael, Harold, 148, 159, 163 Maffey, John, 117 Malcolm, James A., 211n30 mandate, Palestine: about the, 3–12; academic work on the, 13–15, 201n45, 202n49; Arab opposition to the, 122– 23; creation of the, 197n7, 198n11; development of territorial solutions and the, 16–21, 27, 33–49, 54–57, 60;

Index / 249 early work of the Peel Commission and the, 66–77, 82–105, 211n18; revival of partition and the, 155–56, 160, 165–80; shaping of partition and the, 99–104, 125–28; termination of the, 137, 170; turn away from partition and the, 135– 41, 146–53, 221n69; turn toward partition and the, 107–27. See also partition Mandated Landscape (El-Eini), 215n2 Mansour, George, 96 Martin, John M., 31f, 77, 82, 113–15, 120, 205n38 McDonnell, Michael, 77 McMahon, Henry, 122 medical care. See healthcare Mills, Eric, 92–93 minorities treaties, 3, 7 minority protection, 25–27, 69, 116, 146, 171 minority status of Jews, 6, 116, 121, 143–44 Modern Egypt (Cromer), 27 Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, 25 Morley-Minto Reforms, 25 Morris, Benny, 202n49 Morris, Harold, 31f, 76, 81, 99, 108, 111–13 Morris, R. Hopkin, 28 Morrison, Herbert, 166 Morrison-Grady plan, 2, 166–68, 170 Moyne, Lord, 159, 163 Mufti of Jerusalem. See Haj Amin al-Husseini Murison Commission, 28 Murray, Wallace, 48 Muslim League, 25 Muslims, 10, 21, 25–27, 42, 116, 121, 131, 207n69 Mussolini, Benito, 52, 73 Nashashibi, Ragheb Bey, 95f Nashashibi family, 142 National Council (Va’ad Leumi), 10, 78, 99 nationalism: within the British empire, 22– 23, 31, 76, 120, 164; influence of Arab, 16, 23, 33–34, 39–43, 69, 122–27, 175; Palestine mandate and Arab, 7–11, 27; Palestinian, 41, 95, 98–99, 123–24; suppression of Arab, 200n32, 205n27. See also Zionism National Political League, 206n43 Nation Arabe, La, 41 Native Lands Trust Ordinance, 91

Nazism, 109, 123, 171. See also antiSemitism Near East and India, The, 56 Newcombe, S. F., 77 Newton, Robert, 163 New Zionist Organisation, 116 Nicolson, Harold, 76 Norris, Jacob, 201n45 Northern Scheme, 118 Oliphant, Lancelot, 220n49 Ormsby-Gore, William: beliefs about the Palestine problem of, 19, 22, 58, 73, 78; correspondence of, 73, 115, 147, 211n20; failure of partition and, 131– 32, 136–47, 153, 219n28; influence of Zionism on, 40, 113–18 Orts, Pierre, 37–38, 138–40 Ottoman Empire, 3–5, 21, 24, 31, 122, 180, 198n17, 213n55 Ottoman Land Code, 86 Palacios, Leopoldo, 37–38, 139–40 Palestine. See mandate, Palestine; partition Palestine Arab Congress, 8–10, 36 Palestine Exploration Fund, 197n6 Palestine Information Centre, 206n43 Palestine of the Arabs (Erskine), 53 Palestine Royal Commission. See Peel Commission Palestine Symphony Orchestra, 124 Palestine Weekly, 48 Pan-Arab Congress, 142 Pan-Islamism, 22, 34, 42, 207n69 Papineau, Louis-Joseph, 120 Parkinson, Cosmo, 20, 52, 56, 73–74, 79, 116 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 25 partition: about the Palestine mandate and, 4–12; academic treatment of, 13–15; development of the ideas of cantonization and, 44–64, 208nn13–14; early work of the Peel Commission and, 65–106, 208n10; evidence on, 9–16, 32, 41, 71– 114, 119, 199n24, 205n38, 212nn47–49, 216n28; initial turn toward, 16–43, 205n38, 208n10; and its emergence as a central theme of the Peel Report, 16, 107–28; legacies of, 16, 155–78; military interests and, 67, 112–14, 118, 127, 131–33, 142, 151, 162; religion and,

250 / Index partition (continued) 7–10, 23–29; summary of British policy on Palestine and, 1–5, 198n11; turn away from, 12, 40, 129–54, 218nn8– 9, 219n21, 219n28, 220n40, 220n49, 220n51, 220n53, 222n19 Passfield White Paper, 74, 129, 152 Pedersen, Susan, 221n69 Peel, Robert, 1 Peel, William: about, 1, 30–32, 46; negotiation of partition and, 108–14; and the work of the Peel Commission, 66, 74–77, 80–81, 86–94, 97, 100, 213n70, 214n100, 215n3 Peel Commission: about the, 28–32, 145, 208n10, 211n16, 215n3; development of territorial solutions and the, 29, 40–41, 45–46, 60–63; formation and early work of the, 28, 65–106, 199n24, 199n26, 212nn47–49, 216n28; revival of partition and the, 155–80; turn away from partition and the, 2, 129–41, 149– 50, 153–54, 218n8, 219n30, 220n51; turn toward partition and the, 1–2, 9, 12, 16, 32–33, 107–28, 205n32, 205n38 Peel Report. See Peel Commission Peirse, R. E. C., 113 Permanent Mandates Commission of the League: Arab opposition to the Palestine mandate and the, 8–10; failure of partition and the, 136–38, 140–41, 144, 153; negotiation of partition and the, 72–74, 77, 80, 89, 100, 104–5, 130, 212n42; turn toward the partition of Palestine and the, 18–19, 34–47, 57, 205n32 “Plan D” (Tegart), 178–80, 221n59 population transfer: and development of partition plans, 29, 69–70, 119; GreekTurkish, 29, 69–70, 198n17, 220n51; revival of partition plans and, 171–72, 175–78; turn away from partition and, 3, 139–40, 146–48, 220n51. See also land transfer Porath, Yehoshua, 211n16 Potsdam Conference, 164 provincial autonomy plan, 165–68 Punjab Land Alienation Act, 91 Qassam, Izz ad-Din al-, 41 Qawuqji, Fawzi al-, 40

race, 8–9, 26–29, 32, 55–56, 61. See also Arabs; Jews racism, 123–24, 205n30 Rappard, William, 37–38, 40, 138–39, 144 Rassweit, 50 Rathbone, Eleanor, 75 Register of Landless Arabs, 88 Reid, Thomas, 150 Rendel, George, 20, 132–33, 147, 220n49 Re-Peel Commission. See Woodhead Commission representative government, 6, 44–47, 54, 65, 73, 109, 120, 152 Revisionist Zionism, 5, 49–50, 116, 198n11 Rose, Norman Anthony, 219n21 Rumbold, Horace, 30–31, 75–76, 81, 87– 89, 106–13, 127, 215n3 Ruppin, Arthur, 87–89, 208n13, 213n70 Rutenberg, Pinchas, 117 Saba, Fuad Effendi, 96 Sachar, Howard M., 208n10 Salmon, Frederick, 85–87 Samuel, Herbert, 4, 37, 44–45, 54, 109 San Remo Conference, 3–4, 8 Seikaly, Sherene, 200n35 self-determination, 7, 43–45, 67, 75, 96, 101, 120–21, 127, 174–75 self-government, 37–38, 44–45, 60, 101 Shaw, Walter, 28 Shaw Commission, 28, 77 Sherif Hussein of Mecca, 4, 8, 122 Shertok, Moshe, 94 Shuckburgh, John, 20 Sinclair, Archibald, 118, 134–35 Sind Financial Inquiry Committee, 79 Sluglett, Peter, 202n46 Snell, Henry, 28 Sobolev, Arkady, 168 South Africa, 31 Southern Scheme, 118, 148 Stanley, Oliver, 159, 163, 168 Stein, Leonard, 77–78, 99–103 Stern Gang, 163 St. James’s Conference, 151, 154 Storrs, Ronald, 28, 209n37 Sunday Express, 134 Supreme Muslim Council, 10, 27 Switzerland, 46–48 Sykes, Mark, 211n30 Sykes-Picot Agreement, 1

Index / 251 Syria, 4, 8, 33, 41, 126, 162–63, 176 Syro-Palestinian Congress, 41 Szold, Henrietta, 97 Tannus, Izzat, 57 Tegart, Charles, 178–80, 221n59 territorial separatism. See cantonization; partition Theodoli, Marquis, 37–38, 45, 52, 139 Thomas, J. H., 65 Tolkowsky, Shmuel, 92, 214n100 Toscanini, Arturo, 124 Totah, Khalil, 98–99 Townshend, Charles, 204n15 Transjordan, 4–5, 53–54, 67, 115, 132, 142, 148–50, 160–63, 171 Truman, Harry S., 164–65, 168 Trusted, H. H., 57 Turkey, 22, 29 two-state solution. See partition United Nations, 1–3, 16–17, 46, 71, 155, 164, 168–73, 177 United States, 109, 164–65, 168 UN Partition Commission, 169 UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), 156, 169–74 Va’ad Leumi, 10, 78, 99 Van Rees, D. F. W., 37, 138 Vansittart, Robert, 220n49 Waley-Cohen, Robert, 77 War Cabinet, Britain, 2, 160–63, 168 Wasserstein, Bernard, 198n11, 202n49, 207n6 Wauchope, Arthur, 52, 66, 73–74, 77–80, 115, 118, 212n42 Wedgwood, Josiah, 81, 135–36 Weizmann, Chaim: failure of partition and, 135, 141–42, 163; negotiation of partition and, 113–18, 129, 216n17; Peel Commission and, 82, 92, 100–104, 110,

208n10, 211n18, 213n88; turn toward partition and, 20, 37–40, 47–48, 51–53, 57–58, 62, 207n61 White Paper (1922), 6, 50, 84, 99 White Paper (1930), 74, 129, 152 White Paper (1938), 130 White Paper (1939), 1–2, 13, 16, 129–30, 152–56, 159, 164 White Paper (1948), 146, 150–51 Williams, O. G. R., 20, 50 Willingdon, Lord, 75 Wilson, Woodrow, 101 Woodhead, John, 130, 147 Woodhead Commission: history of partition and the, 28, 71; Plan C and the, 148–50, 157; revival of partition and the, 71, 157, 160, 169–71, 174, 178–80; turn away from partition and the, 2, 130, 145–51, 154, 220n55 World Zionist Organization, 49 Zetland, Lord, 131 Zionism: and academic treatment of partition, 13–15; and assumed unity of Jews, 9, 199n26; and the development of territorial solutions to Palestine, 47–54, 57, 62, 202n49, 205n34, 208n13; and the emergence of partition as the focus of the Peel Report, 109–23, 127–30; and the initial turn toward the partition of Palestine, 16–20, 32–43; and legacies of partition plans, 157–59, 165, 168– 74; opposition to, 8, 199n19; and the Palestine mandate, 5–7, 10–11; political influence of, 10, 206n43; and the shaping of partition, 15, 77–78, 101–5; terrorism and, 163–64; and the turn away from partition, 131–35, 138–42, 152–54, 219n18, 220n53. See also Jews Zionist Congress, 5, 132, 142 Zionist Executive, 49, 208n13, 219n18 Zionist Organization, 40, 43, 50–51, 77, 116, 146