Arabs not only against the Jews but also against
the British. In the spring of 1936 an Arab strike
was called and violence broke out. Jews were
once again the target and for a time the Arab
political leadership presented an unaccustomed
united front. But the British hit back, refusing
to reduce Jewish immigration and imprisoning
Arab terrorists. Palestine was on the verge of civil
war. Determined to restore order and to find a
solution, the British responded with troop rein-
forcements. A Royal Commission was sent to
investigate and its conclusions were embodied
in the Peel Report, published in July 1937. The
commissioners concluded that the Arab and
Jewish communities were irreconcilable and rec-
ommended that Palestine should be partitioned
between Arab and Jew. Partition of a small coun-
try was a bitter pill for both Zionists and Arabs to
swallow. The Zionists, after careful deliberation,
finally accepted partition as a solution that would
give them a small state in northern Palestine. It
was a starting point. But the Arabs rejected inde-
pendence if it meant partitioning Palestine; no less
unacceptable to the Palestinian Arabs was the loss
of Jerusalem which, under the partition plan,
would have remained a British mandate.
The British government accepted the report as
the basis of policy in Palestine. But it was one
thing to adopt a policy, quite a different matter
to enforce it against strong opposition. The
Palestinian Arabs were reacting with increasing
violence, and in 1938 their revolt was renewed;
there was fighting throughout Palestine, with
Jewish settlements and British troops and police
being attacked by militant Palestinian Arabs. The
British reacted fiercely, executing convicted Arab
terrorists and arming the Jews to defend their
outlying settlements which, in turn, strengthened
the Haganah, the Jewish secret army. The Arab
revolt continued into 1939. Despite Britain’s firm
response in Palestine, in London the government
retreated from forcible partition against Arab
wishes. Just when the need for Jews to leave
Europe became most urgent, Britain further
restricted immigration into Palestine. For five
years Jewish immigration would be limited to
75,000 and thereafter would be permitted to con-
tinue only with Arab consent. The Zionists
reacted with predictable anger: the new quota
meant not only that the threatened Jews of
central Europe could not be rescued, but that the
Arabs would remain a large majority in an un-
partitioned Palestine. British calculations were
simple: the Arabs far outnumbered the Jews in
the Middle East; in a war with Nazi Germany,
Arab friendship was important and uncertain,
while Jewish support could, it was thought, be
counted on.
In Palestine, British troops finally crushed the
Arab revolt but the Palestinian Arab political
leadership continued to protest that British policy
was too favourable to the Jews and was denying
Palestinians their independence. The Second
World War and the mass murder of 6 million
European Jews by Hitler’s executioners trans-
formed the Palestine question. From this searing
experience the State of Israel emerged, peopled
by Jews ready to defend with their lives a country
of their own. In their eyes the injustice to the
Palestinian Arabs paled in significance when com-
pared with the fate that had befallen European
Jews under Nazi rule in a world that had even
placed obstacles in the way of saving them and
their brethren. Such murderous indifference
created a new hardness and bitterness among
Jews. The Arab cause, in the meantime, was not
helped by the attitude of the Arab political lead-
ership to the global contest. The Second World
War found the Arab world on the sidelines, more
hostile to its British ‘protectors’ than to the Nazi
aggressors. In 1941 the Mufti became Hitler’s
ally and tool, the chosen Führer of the Arabs: a
German victory, it is clear, would have meant the
destruction of the Jews of Palestine as well. But
even while Jews all over the world wanted the
Allies to win and fought in Allied armies, Zionists
were preparing for the post-war period. Among
them were extreme nationalists ready to fight not
only the Arabs but also the British rulers if nec-
essary to create a Jewish nation.