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.
Correctly observing that the vast majority of Palestinian Arab peasants were trapped in debt with interest rates between 30% and 70%, this British civil servant suggested establishing agricultural cooperatives. But neither Arab leaders nor British bureaucrats wanted to provide the funding. For the duration of the Mandate, the Palestinian peasant remained hard-working, sullen and impoverished.
Palestinian Arabs’ own words, backed by the observations of British and Zionist officials, show that their awareness that their own people were helping the Zionist causes through land sales, often displacing Arab peasants.
An invaluable glimpse at Palestine’s population: gaping socio-economic distances and vast communal differences between Muslims, Christians and Jews that set the strong preferences for separation of the populations.
Zionists decide to hold the first international sports games in Tel Aviv bringing 400 Jewish athletes from 18 countries. The games open on March 28, 1932. Zionists value the games as a “possible awakening of youth in the Diaspora” to Zionism and the positive economic outcome for the Jewish community in Palestine.
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.
From the end of World War I until the June 1967 war, American Jewish attitudes toward Zionism moved from lukewarm embrace to full-throated support. The debate of American rabbis in the 1940s exemplified by this letter reflects attitudinal differences. The Holocaust, Israeli statehood and Israel’s stunning military success in June 1967 established Israel as a valued element in American Jewish identities.
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.
