Jews and Arabs in Palestine, to 1939

At the beginning of the century the Jews in Palestine numbered around 70,000 and were about ten percent of the population, and in Jerusalem they outnumbered the Arab Muslims and Christians.  They were ruled by the Ottoman Turks, but neither they nor the Arab Muslims around them had much yearning for national independence. The Jews already had a sense of independence. They thrived in communities in many of Palestine's towns, and they welcomed those few immigrant Jews who were trickling into Palestine, mostly from Europe.

In Europe, a Zionist movement was starting to build, rising from Theodore Herzl's observations in France at the time of the Dreyfus Affair in the 1890s, when mobs of French stormed through the streets shouting "Down with the Jews." In the first decade of the twentieth century, social Darwinism and theories of racial superiority were on the rise. So too was hostility toward Jews. And Zionist organizations had begun supporting a homeland for Jews as an escape from the discrimination and persecutions in Christian dominated lands.

World War I was disruptive for the Jews in Palestine and brought a new overlord: the British. On November 2, 1917, Britain issued its Balfour Declaration, which proclaimed that Palestine was to be "a national home for the Jewish people" - the British wanting in part at least to make trouble for Germany, which had a sizable Jewish population.

The Allies won the war. Rule over Palestine, Iraq and Transjordan passed from the Turks to the British, and rule in Lebanon and Syria passed to the French. The peace treaty signed at Versailles in 1919 authorized these power grabs, which went under the title of League of Nations mandates, and the Arabs disliked them. Jews had suffered during World War I, and after that war an upsurge in violence against Jews by Russians and Ukrainians contributed to an increase in the migration of Jews to Palestine.

The word "Palestine," originally used by the Romans, had been in disuse for centuries, but the British revived it, with "Palestinian" meant to describe Muslims, Jews and all others living in the region. And land east of the Jordan River, which they had also acquired, they called Transjordan (to be renamed Jordan in 1949). The word Arab referred more to those who spoke Arabic than to people purely Arabic, and included Christians.  Previous to the arrival of the British, the Arabs in Palestine had thought of themselves as Arabs rather than as Palestinians.

Arabs were unhappy about being ruled by foreigners, and they believed that the British favored Jews from outside Palestine - the Zionists - at their expense. They disliked Britain's Balfour Declaration and its reference to them as "existing non-Jewish communities. And they disliked being referred to in the League of Nation's Mandate Agreement as "the other sections."

Arab frustrations produced attacks on Jews - easier targets than the British army. In Jerusalem in 1920 five Jews were killed and eleven wounded. In response, Jews in Jerusalem organized a self-defense league. The British forbade the carrying of arms and imprisoned the group's leader. Jews set up a clandestine organization for defense, called the Haganah, which had only minor successes in 1921, when Arab attacks became more intense. There were more Arab attacks against Jews in Jerusalem. In Jaffa, Arabs killed forty Jews and wounded around two hundred, and the attacks on Jews spread to other towns.

The British were concerned about the hearts and minds of the Arabs across their vast holdings in the Middle East, and they responded to the unrest by trying to please the Arabs rather than the Jews. They suspended Jewish immigration and "redefined" the Balfour Declaration. In January 1922, they named al-Hajj Amin al-Huseini permanent president and mufti (interpreter of Islamic law) of a newly created Supreme Muslim Council. In July, British rule under the Mandate of the League of Nations became official, the British moving to a civilian from a military administration in Palestine. And, in August, the British gave the Palestinians a constitution and a legislative body, the legislative body consisting of ten Arabs (eight of them Muslims and two of them Christians) and two Jews.

By now, according to a new census, the Jews were a little over 11 percent of the population, judged to be around 83,790. [note]  Since the beginning of the century the population of the Jews had risen only around one percent.

The 1929 Rising against Jews

The British were determined to keep Jewish immigration limited. The Zionists were also concerned about the burdens that immigration imposed on available resources in Palestine and about their own resources in supporting immigration. Migrating to Palestine was recognized as an economic hardship, especially for Jews accustomed to European or American standards. A young Jewish woman from the United States, Golda Meir, wrote to friends that those joining her in Palestine may have to suffer a lot economically. And, she wrote, "There may be riots again."

In the twenties, Zionists did buy some land for agriculture in Palestine, and Muslims who were poor and landless resented it. The Grand Mufti, al-Huseini, and other Muslim aristocrats made money selling this land to Zionist organizations at prices higher than they could sell to their fellow Muslims, but they also complained about Jews. According to hostile accounts they played a roll in stirring up additional hostilities against the Jews. According to friendly accounts, Muslim leaders advocated calm and peace rather than hostility.

During the first half of 1929, conflict erupted between Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem. Huseini accused the Jews of having seized Muslim holy places in Jerusalem - Al Aqsa and Al-Haram - atop the Jewish holy place called the Temple Mount. In response, enraged Arab mobs attacked Jews in Jerusalem and looted their homes, and the attacks and looting spread to other cities.

The Jews in Hebron suffered the most. There, sixty-seven Jews were killed and others injured. The attackers did not spare women, children and the aged. Hebron was a holy city for the Jews, but its settlement of 700 people came to an end. Survivors fled to Jerusalem.

At Tel Aviv, armed Jews counterattacked and killed six Arabs. A British force rushed from bases elsewhere in the Mediterranean and ended the violence, the British killing 87 Arabs and wounding many more. The total Jewish dead from the disturbances was 133. [note]

The uprising against the Jews proved counter productive for the Arabs, not only in Arab deaths but in the attitudes of Jews. Muslims had been arguing that it had been the Zionists who had been stirring up trouble, that the Jews they had been living alongside for centuries had wanted no separate state for Jews. Now, with the uprising against Jews, the Zionists and recent immigrants were winning the argument for a separate state.

This was of little concern to angry Muslims who wanted no accommodation with the Jews. By now, many Palestinian Arabs were describing Jews in general as an enemy, that it was the Jews who had tortured Christ and poisoned Muhammad. Arabs were urging a boycott of Jewish shops in order to save the "Fatherland from the grasp of the foreign intruder and greedy Jew."

"The Hebron Pogrom of August 1929," by Shira Schoenberg

"The Hebron Pogrom of August 1929," by Shlomo Hersh

The Great Depression and Immigration, to 1939

By 1931, the British had restored order in Palestine. An official census late that year counted 759,952 Muslims, 90,607 Christians (mostly Arab Christians), and 175,006 Jews. Jews were now 17 percent of the population).

Then came the Great Depression. And in 1933 in Germany, Hitler came to power. Hostility toward Jews intensified, not only in Germany but in Poland and Romania. Palestine was for many Jews the only refuge. Financial support for Jewish migration was burdened by the Great Depression, but it continued. German authorities were happy to see the Jews leave, but the Jews could take with them no more than ten marks ($2.50), and Jews were prohibited from sending merchandise to be sold abroad.

Jewish migrants from Germany and elsewhere in Europe took with them to Palestine their skills and entrepreneurship. Jewish immigration reached its peak in 1935, their number counted officially at  61,854 (around 19,000 more than Jewish immigration for the four-year period of 1920 to '24).  Palestine became a place of economic vigor while economies were stagnating in France, Britain and the United States. Jews invested in urban development, new industries and citrus plantations. The economic growth in Palestine was accompanied by a shortage of workers, and Arabs came from lands outside of Palestine to take jobs as laborers, contributing significantly to what continued to be an Arab majority.

By 1936, Jews in Palestine became almost 30 percent of the population. Palestine's Arabs were demanding an end to all Jewish immigration. Arabs organized committees across Palestine. They joined in the creation of a political body knows as the Arab High Committee, which was headed by their Grand Mufti, Huseini. The Arabs joined together in a general strike against British authority. The British declared the Palestinian committees illegal., and fearing arrest, on October 12, 1937, Huseini donned a disguise and fled to Lebanon, where the French gave him asylum. In 1939, Huseini would move to Germany, where, during World War II,  he would broadcast anti-British and anti-Jewish commentary for the Germans.

Members of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers played a part in the great Palestinian revolt of 1936. In 1945, Sa'id Ramadan created the first branch of the movement in Jerusalem; two years later, there were 25 branches, with a total membership of between 12,000 and 20,000. During the 1948 war, several hundred volunteer Arab members of the Muslim Brotherhood were involved in the fighting.

Attacks on Jews intensified beginning in 1936. Jewish homes were set afire, shops looted and orchards destroyed. While trying to maintain order in 1936, British soldiers killed more than 140 Arabs and suffered 33 deaths. The British sent Charles Wingate to Palestine to organize a Jewish defense.

In addition to protecting Jews, the British wanted to appease the Arabs who lived across the whole of Britain's holdings in the Middle East. In 1937, Britain's House of Commons announced that it was sending a commission to study the unrest in Palestine. In March 1939, Hitler seized Bohemia and Moravia. Britain's prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, saw war coming. The British decided that if the Arabs were unfriendly to Britain it would jeopardize their security in the Middle East during the war, and in May, 1939, Britain produced a White Paper on British rule in Palestine. It held that Jews were prohibited from buying more land outside their existing settlements and that Jewish migrations to Palestine were to be restricted to 75,000 in the coming four-year period to 1944. The British believed that this would keep the Jews as a permanent minority in Palestine. And British authorities were determined to turn back ships carrying "illegal" Jewish immigrants to Palestine - a problem that would intensify during the coming war in Europe.

Recommended Books

Israel: a History, by Martin Gilbert, 1998