Ironically, British policy in Palestine was heading the opposite direction.
British policy in Palestine was inconsistent, except that it was consistently
two-faced. This lack of integrity stemmed from the fact that the primary con-
cern of British colonial policy was not the Middle East, but India. Thus,
British policy in Palestine often reflected an overarching concern to placate
Muslims in the Middle East in order to appease Muslims in India. Moreover,
Gandhi also supported the Arabs in Palestine, whom he regarded as non-
Europeans ostensibly oppressed by Europeans; he, too, wanted to placate
Muslims in India. As the British became more desperate during the 1920s to
hold on to India as the sun set on the British Empire, they offered more and
more concessions to the Muslims in Palestine.
The upshot is that the British government reneged on the Balfour
Declaration almost immediately, largely in response to complaints from Arab
leaders, and imposed a series of quotas on Jewish immigration to Palestine dur-
ing the interwar period. This shift in policy was articulated in several White
Papers, which emphasized that a Jewish national home in Palestine did not nec-
essarily mean a sovereign Jewish state there. On the contrary, White Papers and
other policies restricted immigration and areas of Jewish settlement.
British policy and Arab violence, coupled with the deteriorating situation
of Jews in east-central Europe, led to the emergence of Revisionist Zionism
under the leadership of the Polish Jew Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Jabotinsky
disagreed with many existing Zionist views and tactics. In contrast to those
Zionists who believed that the Jewish state would be a cultural center for
Jews in the diaspora, he called for an immediate mass transfer of Jews from
Poland and Romania. He also disagreed with ben-Gurion regarding the use of
military action. Ben-Gurion believed that Jewish military action should be
exclusively defensive. Jabotinsky advocated violence against Arab and British
military personnel as an acceptable response to anti-Jewish violence. The
escalation of Arab violence at the end of the 1930s convinced him that his
assessment and tactics were correct.
By the end of the 1930s, Britain began to recognize that a major change
was necessary. In 1937, the Peel Commission recommended partitioning
Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state. The Zionists accepted the recom-
mendation; Arab leaders rejected it. For the moment, the British left the
status quo intact, allowing only 12,800 Jewish immigrants to enter Palestine
in 1938, despite the rapidly deteriorating situation of the Jews in Poland and
Nazi-occupied central Europe. These restrictions would remain in effect
throughout the Second World War.
Interwar America
The end of Jewish immigration from eastern Europe accelerated the already
rapid acculturation of American Jews. Even before the curtailment of
From renewal to devastation, 1914–45 217