The Palestine Mandate: Background

1. The Palestine Mandate:Background HIST 4339

2. Outline • Zionism • Arab nationalism • Britain’s conflicting promises • Structure of empire • Post-WWI events

3. Palestine Region Before World War I • 80% Muslim • 10% Christian • 8% Jewish

4. Zionism • Modern political movement for Jewish state in Palestine • Reaction to European anti-Semitism             —1880s pogroms in Russia                         >>>Bilu Manifesto             —1894 Dreyfus Affairs in France                         >>>Herzl’s The Jewish State (1896)

5. Zionism • Jewish disillusionment with assimilation, conviction of need for own homeland

6. Arab Nationalism • George Antonius as scholar-advocate • Favored pan-Arabism over pan-Islam • The Arab Awakening (1938) • 1916: Arab uprising against Ottoman rule  

7. Britain’s Conflicting Promises •  1915-16 McMahon-Hussein Correspondence • 1917 Balfour Declaration • British attempt to play both sides?

8. Structure of Empire • Result of imperial structure? (IO, CO, FO, Cabinet, PM)             —Antonius (397): “the British right hand was sometimes completely ignorant of what the left hand had done or was about to do.”

9. Focus of British Empire in West Asia • Effort to resolve conflicting promises • Exacerbation of existing religious/ethnic tensions

10. Postwar Events • 1919: Feisal-Weizmann Agreement • 1920: Jewish-Arab violence in Palestine

11. Postwar Events • Churchill’s post-Cairo Conference attempts to allay Arab fears: Jewish national home in Palestine would be “good for the world, good for the Jews, good for the British Empire, but also good for the Arabs who dwell in Palestine . . . They shall share in the benefits and progress of Zionism.”