280 • 16 THE CONTEST FOR PALESTINEthe British authorities in developing that national home, which none
dared to call a "state."
The Palestine mandate could not be the same as the League's mandates
for Syria and Iraq, which were to help them evolve into independent states
(thus requiring that they be given constitutions within three years). Syri¬
ans and Iraqis were told that the mandates would prepare them for self-
rule, although many doubted that the French and British would really do
so. In Palestine, however, although most of its inhabitants were Arabs, it
was the Jewish national home that was to be created, a publicly declared
intention to create a Western colonial entity. What was the real meaning of
the Palestine mandate's call for "self-governing institutions," with no defi¬
nite deadline for their creation? The Arabs suspected that the British man¬
date would hold them in colonial bondage until the Jews achieved a
majority in Palestine and could set up their state.
Beginnings of the Anglo-Zionist Rift
In reality, though, the British started effacing the mandate's pro-Zionist
features before the ink was even dry. In 1922 Colonial Secretary Winston
Churchill issued a white paper denying that the British government meant
to make Palestine as Jewish as England was English (Weizmann's expres¬
sion) or to give preference to Jews over Arabs. Its fateful provision was to
restrict Jewish immigration to fit Palestine's "absorptive capacity." This re¬
striction did not hurt Anglo-Zionist relations in the 1920s, when Jewish
immigration rarely filled the quotas, but after the rise of Hitler the question
of Palestine's ability to absorb Jews would become a major issue indeed.
Another British action that seemed to violate the mandate was the cre¬
ation of the Emirate of Transjordan, removing the two-thirds of Palestine
that lay east of the Jordan River from the area in which the Jews could de¬
velop their national home. Actually, there could hardly have been many Jews
wanting to settle in the lands once held by the heirs of Gad, Reuben, and
Manasseh, but the Zionists viewed Britain's attempt to give Abdallah a king¬
dom as a needless concession to Arab nationalism. The British claimed that
this first partition of Palestine was only temporary. But as the French did
not leave Syria and as Abdallah built up a bureaucracy and an army (the
British-officered Arab Legion) in Amman, the separation of Transjordan
became more and more set in stone. Most Jewish leaders in Palestine still
chose to work with the British, but some turned to direct and even violent
resistance, especially a group known as the Revisionists. They were formed
by Vladimir Jabotinsky, who had set up a Jewish legion during World War I