With more Arab sale offers than funds for purchases, Zionist leaders decide on strategic priorities and designate areas around Haifa, Jerusalem-Jaffa road, and the Galilee near headwaters of the
Jordan River.
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.
Pressure from Arab leaders in states surrounding Palestine, growing instability in the eastern Mediterranean, and a firm opposition voiced by the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Miles Lampson, caused the British to withdraw the idea of resolving the Arab-Zionist conflict with a two-state solution. Instead, heavy restrictions were imposed in 1939 on the growth of the Jewish National home. Coincidently this policy statement is issued, two days after Nazi Germany attacks Jewish, homes, businesses and synagogues, in what came to be known as Kristallnacht.
A description details the economic devastation caused by the 1936-1939 Arab disturbances in Palestine to the majority rural population. This followed the annually poor crop yields of the early 1930s, and the vast rural wreckage caused by WWI.
Mufti opposes Arab majority state in ten years contrary to wishes of a dozen key other Palestinian leaders. Mufti wants no Jewish political presence in Palestine whatsoever.
March 16, 1939 Was the area of Palestine excluded from British promises made to Sharif Hussein of Mecca during World War I? A British investigation in 1939 said it was not part of a British…
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.
Over four decades, Winston Churchill’s views on Zionism and Jews varied greatly. Without knowing his long held personal beliefs or the policies he adopted while the Jewish state developed, and only reading this speech, one would not know that he was a political opportunist and certainly not a “Gentile Zionist.”
Jewish Agency head David Ben-Gurion emphasizes that a Jewish state will be a place for all, including Arabs, and calls for Jews to be better educated about the elements of a state.
In New York, urging American (Jewish) support, Ben-Gurion proclaims the eventual establishment of a Jewish state.
A key figure in the Jewish Agency’s Political Department, Shertok, later Moshe Sharett argues for a Jewish commonwealth/state in Palestine. Pragmatically he realizes Arabs in Palestine oppose Jewish presence, yet he fully rejects a potential binational Arab-Jewish state, suggesting that the end of WWII will be a turning point in favor of a Jewish state.
This analysis was undertaken and written at the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem by Jewish observers of the Arab riots and rebellion that took place between April 1936 and early 1939.
Before ending his term in 1944 as Palestine’s High Commissioner, Sir Harold MacMichael suggested the partition of Palestine, “Jews and Arabs alike would enjoy the possession of their own respective territories, the former protected by international guarantees for their security, and the latter relieved from fear of further encroachments.”
Steady disintegration of Palestinian Arab society from 1945-1949 is detailed by five Arab and non-Arab historians citing local social cleavages, economic impoverishment, fear, indebtedness, and political dysfunction.
Moshe Sharett urges the British and Americans to open Palestine to unimpeded Jewish immigration from Europe.
Gerda Luft’s, “Cultural Life in Palestine,” is representative of the dozens of excellent analyses of Jewish life and politics in Palestine/Israel and the world located in the annual Palestine Yearbooks, later the Israel Yearbook, published from 1945 forward.
Circumventing the existing law on prohibition of land sales to Jews, Palestinian Arabs are found selling lands regularly and furtively to Zionists.
From the beginning of the Palestine Mandate in 1920, Arabs in Palestine opposed Zionism; Arab states and leaders joined the opposition to Zionism in the 1930s. After WWII, Arab states were vehement in their opposition to Zionism, though the merits of their arguments were genuine, Arab leaders were more interested in controlling the land of Palestine than in the Palestinians themselves.
With the British spending local revenue on strategic needs — ports, roads and communication systems — scant funds were devoted to education in the Mandate. Already baked into diasporic habits, the Jewish community raced forward in educating its own in Palestine to inculcate penetrating attachments to Palestine as the Jewish national home. Arab youth literacy ran in place, with separatist education contributing mightily to communal divisions, as occurred simultaneously in the economic and geospatial spheres.
April 20, 1946 Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, Report to the United States Government and His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom, meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland, 1946. Unsure how to manage Palestine’s future, the British and…
For information on accessing pre-1947 FRUS documents relating to Palestine, click here. FRUS 1947 Vol. V — The section on Mandatory Palestine, including the Arab-Zionist controversy and the United Nations, begins on Page 999 and ends…
Fearing Communist penetration of the Eastern Mediterranean, Truman at the beginning of the Cold War defines the region as a sphere of US national interest.
Despite an officially anti-Zionist stance, the Soviet Union, hoping to adopt Israel as a Soviet proxy, takes a pragmatic stance and supports the U.N. partition plan of Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states.
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.
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