communities. The majority of the Arab population
was seen by the Zionists and their Western sup-
porters as benefiting rather than suffering from this
economic development of the barren Palestine soil,
which Jewish zeal and skill would turn into pro-
ductive plantations. It was a vision wounding to
the pride of the Arab elites, conscious of their own
culture and resenting the label of backwardness.
From this followed the Arab identification of
Zionism with ‘Western imperialism’. There were
also educated, moderate Arabs who got on well
with their Jewish neighbours, but the Jewish and
Arab societies in Palestine were different from the
beginning and the differences widened rather than
narrowed. With the growing influx of Jewish
immigrants, Jewish society became overwhelm-
ingly European, democratic and socialist. Arab
society, on the other hand, was traditional and
patriarchal, and the few wealthy Arab landowners
dominated the poor tenants scratching a living
from the soil. Paradoxically, Arab landowners prof-
ited greatly from Zionism: because the Jews were
eager to buy land, property values soared, and Arab
wealth was hugely augmented. The growth of
Jewish industry and commerce also introduced a
new factor and built, adjoining an Arab town like
Jaffa, the modern Tel Aviv. Development increased
the gulf between the more prosperous urban and
agricultural Jews and the mass of poor Arabs. The
fundamental problem was whether Arab or Jew
would ultimately control Palestine.
The rate of Jewish immigration and the related
question of Jewish land purchases were, in the
early years, at the heart of that problem. The Arabs
did not, after all, turn out to be a negligible polit-
ical factor. There was indeed a widespread Arab
reaction against the Balfour Declaration. Arab
nationalism and expectations had been aroused by
Faisal’s establishment of an Arab kingdom in
Damascus in 1918.
In October 1919 Curzon, who did not share
his predecessor’s Zionist sympathies, replaced
Balfour as foreign secretary. British official views
were hardening against the wider Zionist aspi-
rations and moving towards a policy of even-
handedness as between Arabs and Jews, which
meant taking the Arab point of view into account.
What the Arabs feared was that, as soon as a large
Jewish population was built up in Palestine, the
Zionists would impose their own Jewish state on
all the Palestinian people. Accordingly, they
wished Jewish immigration to be restricted. By
early 1920, tension between the Zionists and
the Arabs had risen dangerously. The British
responded by limiting Jewish immigration and
imposing a quota of 16,500 for one year. This
was, even so, more than the Arab political lead-
ership could accept and they organised their fol-
lowers to react with violence. In May 1921 Arabs
attacked Jews and Jews retaliated. By the time the
British could bring the violence under control,
forty-eight Arabs and forty-seven Jews had been
killed. It was the beginning of the tragic sequence
of bloody Arab–Zionist conflicts.
The British now tried to allay Arab fears and
to make further concessions to their views. First
immigration was suspended, then it was an-
nounced that Jewish immigration would be
strictly controlled, restricted to the economic
absorptive capacity of the country. The Jews were
not to take over the whole of Palestine: their
National Home would be established in only a
part of the country. But this reassurance had a
boomerang effect, for Churchill, as colonial
secretary, also explained that the Palestinian Arab
majority could not expect to be set on the path
to independence like the other Arab mandates,
owing to the pledge of a National Home given
to the Jews. The denial of independence to the
Jews because of the Arabs, and to the Arabs
because of the Jews, had all the makings of a
bankrupt policy. Finally, the British undertook to
take some account of local political attitudes; a
legislative council, with more Arab members than
Jewish, as well as British nominees, would be set
up. The British hope was that the Jews and Arabs
would work together in this forum, but the Arabs
rejected the proposal out of hand. They also
refused to form any representative Arab organisa-
tion in parallel with the existing Zionist organi-
sation, later known as the Jewish Agency. The
refusal of the Arabs to cooperate politically with
the British, and to provide an elective Council of
Palestinian Arabs, weakened their position. The
Jewish Agency, meanwhile, became the nucleus of
an effective government for the Jews.