1800s-1948: Pre-State

Emir Feisal, acting on behalf of Sherif of Mecca and Chaim Weizmann on behalf of the Zionist Organization exchange recognition of cordiality and kinship between a future Arab state and Palestine, where Zionists seek to establish their national home. Mutual assistance is offered by one of the other.

International legitimacy is granted to establish a Jewish National Home in Palestine. Rules for its establishment clearly give Jews in Palestine distinct advantages over the local Arab population.

Two letters detail how Arab peasants are sometimes swindled out of their lands by Arab land brokers and effendis, noting economic harm to them, and how they learn to avoid landlords and sell directly to Jewish buyers. Intra-Arab communal tension rises.

These Palestinian Arab newspaper materials and other quotations about Arab land sales to the Zionists during the British Mandate were first read and collected at the National Library at the Hebrew University on the Givat...

Dr. Kenneth Stein, Professor Emeritus, Emory University, kenstein@israeled.org, November 2024 Sources: Minutes of JNF meetings, statements by JNF officials, comments in the Palestinian Arab Press, remarks by British Colonial officials, and official reports. All KKL...

Five Arab political parties sent a memorandum of protest to the British asking for a halt to Jewish immigration, a stoppage in Arab land sales to Jews,and a measure of self-determination. The British did not change their policies in these three areas. In 1939, they did severely limit Jewish land purchases and severely curtailed Jewish immigration.

Ben-Gurion recognized that Arab opposition to Zionism is a national feeling and that Palestinian Arab leadership had done little to help the majority impoverished peasant population.

At the conclusion of a four-day conference in Cairo, Egypt, Arab leaders adopt the Resolutions of the Inter-Parliamentary Congress. The conference and resolutions are a response to the British Peel Commission Report of 1937.

A map shows the partition of Palestine proposed by the Peel Commission in 1937.

This document was secured at the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem. Less than a year before Hitler invaded Poland, Arab leaders with an interest in Palestine are starkly disappointed that the the German government did not go to war against the Zionists in Palestine. The same leaders give the Zionist national builders high marks for their perseverance against terrorist bands in the Palestinian countryside. They worry that unless Arab states come to the Palestinians’ assistance, Palestine will be lost to the Zionists. A remarkable assessment for Palestinian Arab leaders and their supporters.

Zionist leaders—David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann and Eliezer Kaplan—learning of the British intent to limit severely the Jewish national home’s growth. Increasingly, they are also aware of the German government’s hostilities towards European Jewry.

Cohen shows regular Palestinian Arab collaboration with Zionists before Israel was established and asserts that local and family loyalties, with identity to villages, and not to a nation, did severe harm to the Palestinian struggle against Jewish nation building. (Presented with permission of the author, June 2024).

No document better reveals the hostility which most Arab leaders and Arab states had in 1947 for Zionism and for a possible Jewish state. The Saudi King notes "that US support for Zionists in Palestine is an unfriendly act directed against the Arabs." The King's views were totally supported by US State Department officials including Loy Henderson and George Kennan who advocated strongly against Truman's support of a Jewish state.

In this 46-minute video recorded Dec. 25, 2022, two emeritus professors from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem joined President Ken Stein to discuss the key period when the Zionists succeeded in creating and securing a...

The Status-Quo Agreement is an understanding reached between David Ben-Gurion, then the chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive, and the religious parties in the period before Israel became a state.

Earlier in 1947, Great Britain turned the future of the Palestine Mandate over to the newly established United Nations. Then in August 1947, the UN suggested that establishing an Arab and Jewish state with a federal union would be the best solution for the communal unrest there.

The UN suggested partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states with an economic union between them and an internationalization of Jerusalem.

September 29, 1947 The Arab Higher Committee for Palestine formally rejects the U.N. Special Committee on Palestine’s partition plan, which advocates for the division of the land into a separate Jewish and Arab states and...

The area of Israel expanded and the potential area for a Palestinian Arab state decreased because of the 1948-49 war, Israel’s War of Independence. The Arab rejection of the 1947 U.N. partition plan thus hurt...

In March 1948, two months before Israel’s establishment, the US State Department sought to reverse the US vote in favor of partition for the creation of Arab and Jewish states in Palestine.

Musa Alami, “The Lesson of Palestine,” Middle East Journal, Volume 3, No. 4, October 1949, pp. 373-405 Reprinted with permission of The Middle East Institute, October 2021 In this 1949 article published in Middle East...

With crisp analysis, Haganah Commander Yigal Allon, later a Prime Minister of Israel attributes Israel's successes to multiple factors including the absence of a centralized Arab command, limited Arab military training, underestimating the potential fighting capabilities of local Arabs, and Israel's success in integrating its citizens into the war effort.