Abstract
The Palestine Mandate remains one of the most controversial topics in the historiography of twentieth-century British foreign policy. With the publication of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, Britain committed itself to the Jewish restoration of the Holy Land. Almost immediately, Britain found itself at the center of a longstanding feud between Jews and Arabs. The nature of the conflict pitted Pro-Zionist policymakers inside the British government against policymakers sympathetic to the Arab people. Parallel to the Jews and Arabs fighting for supremacy in the Middle East, administrators inside the offices of colonial and foreign affairs were locked in an ideological battle, pulling British foreign policy into two opposing directions. By 1936, Palestine became ungovernable due to a series of work strikes and escalating violence between the Jewish settlers and Palestinian Arabs. In turn, the Arab Rebellion of 1936 transformed the political landscape of the Middle East by forcing Britain to retreat from its earlier commitment to the Jewish people. In 1939, the British government published a new “White Paper” that restricted the number of Jewish immigrants allowed entry into Palestine every year. The purpose of this policy reversal was to placate the demands of Arab states, and shore up their support for Britain against the Axis Powers of Germany and Italy. Yet, the 1939 White Paper did not guarantee an end to hostilities between Britain and the Arab world. Rather, it had dire consequences for Britain’s relations with the Zionist leadership, heretofore Britain’s most dependable ally in the region. Forced into a corner, David Ben-Gurion, leader of the Labor Bloc in Palestine and executive officer of the Jewish Agency, executed a series of campaigns designed to subvert and undermine Britain’s presence in Palestine. In the decade that followed the publication of the White Paper, it was the Yishuv of Palestine, not the Arab states, that forced Britain to withdraw from Palestine completely.
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