A report presented at the 18th Zionist Congress looks at the present and future of Jewish agricultural settlement and expansion in Mandatory Palestine, including the export market.
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.
This four-page assessment notes multiple Jewish contributions to Palestine’s development: expansion of health care, advancement of agricultural methods, government revenue, industrial growth and Jewish building expansion. It notes that the Jewish economy has attracted Arab immigration to Palestine for jobs and the mushrooming of the Jewish education system from Jewish sources. Without saying so directly, its contents tout Jewish state building.
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.
After outbreak of communal violence, the British investigatory committee suggests partition of Palestine, seeking to create two states for two peoples.
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.
Chaim Weizmann, a top Zionist leader, vividly pronounced parallel Jewish realities in 1938: disaster confronting Jews in Europe and advanced state building in Palestine. Ten years later history was written.
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.
A British investigation in 1939, before the release of that year’s anti-Jewish White Paper, finds that the area of Palestine was not promised to the Sharif of Mecca during World War I as part of a caliphate.
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.
Moshe Dayan, celebrated fighter for Zionism and the state, provides detailed and gripping glimpses of how he and his cohorts fought for Zionism in Syria in the early 1940s.
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, Moshe Shertok (later Sharett) argues for a Jewish commonwealth/state in Palestine. Pragmatically he realizes Arabs in Palestine oppose the Jewish presence, yet he rejects a potential binational Arab-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.
