Biblical Palestine was a familiar concept in the
West, but at the close of the First World War few
people in Britain or elsewhere had more than the
vaguest notion of its geographical extent; King
David’s and Solomon’s empire had included much
of today’s Syria and Jordan, Egypt’s Sinai as well
as contemporary Israel. There was no simple guide
to what the modern territorial frontiers should be
since Palestine as a country had ceased to exist
under the Ottoman Turks. It was the British who
re-created Palestine within its post-1919 frontiers.
To the north were Syria and Lebanon: how far
should these countries extend? Agreement on the
frontier was reached with the French government;
then, in 1922, the British decided to divide their
sphere along the River Jordan, which thus formed
the eastern frontier of Palestine. Beyond the river
to the east a new country was created: the British
Mandate of Transjordan.
The importance of these artificial frontiers was
never accepted as final by the peoples who lived
within them. Syria could dream of being reunited
with the Lebanon and of establishing a greater
Syria by incorporating land belonging to present-
day Israel. Jordan claimed Palestinian lands west
of the river, including Jerusalem. Israel claimed
the West Bank – in biblical times Judaea and
Samaria – which before 1947 was part of the
Palestine Mandate. Possession has been decided
by war and conquest and the Arab Palestinians
have no country of their own. Within the man-
dated territory of Palestine as geographically
defined in 1922 the Jews were to be permitted to
build their National Home among the 650,000
Palestinian Arabs already living there.
As only 68,000 Jews inhabited Palestine in
1919 there could be no question of forming a
Jewish state immediately. A National Home was
a vaguer phrase; but there was no doubt about
the end in view. Zionists, and also such powerful
statesmen as Churchill, Smuts and Lloyd George,
believed that a progressive Jewish state would, in
future years, be re-created; the Balfour Declara-
tion of 1917 was seen as providing a promise of
assistance towards the goal of a pro-British Jewish
state. Until events proved otherwise, the Pales-
tinian Arab population was regarded by the
British as too sunk in poverty and backwardness
to merit consideration. In some official papers
they were contemptuously referred to as mixed
‘Levantines’. The racial arrogance of an out-
moded imperialist frame of mind was thus super-
imposed on the complicated Palestine issue.
There was a significant silence about the political
rights of the majority of the inhabitants of
Palestine in the Balfour Declaration; they were
given no more than an assurance that the ‘civil
and religious rights’ of the ‘non-Jewish popula-
tion’ would not be prejudiced, although they
were the overwhelming majority. Leading Zion-
ists recognised that a Jewish state was a distant
prospect and would require large-scale immigra-
tion of Jews; but that Jews in their masses would
actually come was a matter of faith.
In 1919 the majority of Palestine’s 68,000
Jews were settled in Jerusalem, most of them
orthodox Jews who had lived there under
Ottoman rule for four centuries in their own reli-
gious communities. These religious Jews were
generally opposed to the aims of the ‘new’ late
nineteenth-century Jewish immigrants from
Europe inspired by Zionist ideals of nationalism
and statehood. It was persecution of Jews in the
Russian Empire especially, and widespread anti-
Semitism, which had led to the birth of Zionism
before the First World War. Some 16,000 Zionist
pioneers had settled in what had been part of the
Ottoman Empire, mainly in agricultural colonies
but also in towns. Working on the inhospitable
land they had been inspired by the belief that they
were laying the basis of a state for the Jewish
people. Zionists asserted, with Theodor Herzl,
that the Jews were a people, dispersed in history,
but one people wherever they now lived. One day
they would return to Palestine, their historical
country. The early Zionists saw themselves as
colonisers reclaiming Jewish land, precursors of
the Jewish nation. But the world was ruled by the
great powers, so the Zionists would need the
sympathy and protection of one of these if they
were to set about building their own nation.
Theodor Herzl had tried to enlist the help of the
German kaiser. The Zionist leader Dr Chaim
Weizmann turned to Britain.
The Jews bought land in Palestine and on this
land built their kibbutz, their own agricultural
1
THE MIDDLE EAST BETWEEN TWO WORLD WARS, 1919–45 427
