Why Mandate Period History Is Essential

Many times, during interviews, I have been asked not to deal with "history".

Well, Sir Sherard Cowper Coles, former UK Ambassador to Israel, is interviewed on BBC (k/t: HR) and at 1:25 states that Israel should:

make the peace that has been on offer essentially since 1937 when the Peel Commission recommended partition..."

Some people think that Cowper-Coles has been in his recent diplomatic endeavors "out of his lane".  And Melanie Phillips slices him thin.

But let's get back to Peel.

Some of the commission's content:

...The continuous impact of a highly intelligent and enterprising race backed by large financial resources on a comparatively poor, indigenous community, on a different cultural level, may produce in time serious reactions. The principle of economic absorptive capacity, meaning that considerations of economic capacity and these alone should determine immigration, is at present inadequate and ignores factors in the situation which wise statesmanship cannot disregard. Political, social and psychological factors should be taken into account. His Majesty's Government should lay down a political high level of Jewish immigration. This high level should be fixed for the next five years at 12,000 per annum. The High Commissioner should be given discretion to admit immigrants up to this maximum figure, but subject always to the economic absorptive capacity of the country.

...The Palestine Order in Council and, if necessary, the Mandate should be amended to permit of legislation empowering the High Commissioner to prohibit the transfer of land in any stated area to Jews, so that the obligation to safeguard the right and position of the Arabs may be carried out. Until survey and settlement are complete, the Commission would welcome the prohibition of the sale of isolated and comparatively small plots of land to Jews...At present, and for many years to come, the Mandatory Power should not attempt to facilitate the close settlement of the Jews in the hill districts generally.

...The articles of the Mandate concerning the National Home do not apply to Trans-Jordan and the possibility of enlarging the National Home by Jewish immigration into Trans-Jordan rests on the assumption of concord between Arabs and Jews. Arab antagonism to Jewish immigration is at least as bitter in Trans-Jordan as it is in Palestine. The Government of Trans-Jordan would refuse to encourage Jewish immigration in the teeth of popular resistance.

...As regards the Jews' claim for a larger grant for their system of education, the Commission consider that, until much more has been spent on the development of Arab education, so as to place it on a level with that of the Jews, it is unjustifiable to increase the grant to the latter, however desirable it might be in other circumstances. The extent to which the Jews have taxed themselves for education is one of the best features of the National Home; and such "self-help" deserves all support; but it should not be given by altering the present proportion between the grant to the Jews and the amount spent on the Arabs; it should result from an increase in the total expenditure on education.

...The Arabs of Palestine, it has been admitted, are as fit to govern themselves as the Arabs of Iraq or Syria. The Jews of Palestine are as fit to govern themselves as any organized and educated community in Europe. Yet, associated as they are under the Mandate, self-government is impracticable for both peoples. The Mandate cannot be fully implemented nor can it honourably terminate in the independence of an undivided Palestine unless the conflict between Arab and Jew can be composed.

And the above is described so:

They are the best palliatives the Commission can devise for the disease from which Palestine is suffering, but they are only palliatives. They cannot cure the trouble. The disease is so deep-rooted that in the Commissioners' firm conviction the only hope of a cure lies in a surgical operation.

That 'surgical operation' includes these ideas:

...The continuance of the present system means the gradual alienation of two peoples who are traditionally the friends of Britain.

The problem cannot be solved by giving either the Arabs or the Jews all they want. The answer to the question which of them in the end will govern Palestine must be Neither. No fair-minded statesman can think it right either that 400,000 Jews, whose entry into Palestine has been facilitated by he British Government and approved by the League of Nations, should be handed over to Arab rule, or that, if the Jews should become a majority, a million Arabs should be handed over to their rule. But while neither race can fairly rule all Palestine, each race might justly rule part of it.

The idea of Partition has doubtless been thought of before as a solution of the problem, but it has probably been discarded as being impracticable. The difficulties are certainly very great, but when they are closely examined they do not seem so insuperable as the difficulties inherent in the continuance of the Mandate or in any other alternative arrangement. Partition offers a chance of ultimate peace. No other plan does.

...The problem cannot be solved by giving either the Arabs or the Jews all they want. The answer to the question which of them in the end will govern Palestine must be Neither. No fair-minded statesman can think it right either that 400,000 Jews, whose entry into Palestine has been facilitated by he British Government and approved by the League of Nations, should be handed over to Arab rule, or that, if the Jews should become a majority, a million Arabs should be handed over to their rule. But while neither race can fairly rule all Palestine, each race might justly rule part of it.

The idea of Partition has doubtless been thought of before as a solution of the problem, but it has probably been discarded as being impracticable. The difficulties are certainly very great, but when they are closely examined they do not seem so insuperable as the difficulties inherent in the continuance of the Mandate or in any other alternative arrangement. Partition offers a chance of ultimate peace. No other plan does.

The political division of Palestine could be effected in a less thorough manner than by Partition...

If Partition is to be effective in promoting a final settlement it must mean more than drawing a frontier and establishing two States. Sooner or later there should be a transfer of land and, as far as possible, an exchange of population.

...To both Arabs and Jews Partition offers a prospect--and there is none in any other policy--of obtaining the inestimable boon of peace. It is surely worth some sacrifice on both sides if the quarrel which the Mandate started could he ended with its termination. It is not a natural or old-standing feud. The Arabs throughout their history have not only been free from anti-Jewish sentiment but have also shown that the spirit of compromise is deeply rooted in their life.

That is a solution?

UPDATE

Benny Morris on Peel via a book review:-

What’s more, in dealing with the Revolt, Bird makes an unforgivable—and tendentious—elision. He completely ignores the Peel Commission’s labors and proposals. The royal commission had gone to Palestine in November 1936, six months into the revolt, to investigate the inflamed situation. In July 1937 it proposed an end to British rule, the partition of Palestine into two polities, one Jewish the other Arab (the latter to be eventually joined to neighboring Transjordan), and the orderly, compensated transfer (and, if need be, expulsion) of Arabs inhabiting the area earmarked for Jewish sovereignty. This was the first international proposal for a two-state solution to the Palestine problem. The Jews were to be awarded 17 percent of Palestine’s land, with the Arabs getting the rest—save for the Jerusalem-Bethlehem area—with a corridor to the Mediterranean Sea via Ramle, which was to be retained by (Christian) Britain. But the Palestinian Arabs, guided by their leader, Haj Amin al Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem and the head of the Arab Higher Committee, flatly rejected the proposal, demanding all of Palestine for Arab sovereignty.

And George Antonius, who emerged as the preeminent Palestinian Arab spokesman (despite his Lebanese Christian origins), likewise rejected Peel. Bird quotes at length from Antonius’s book without mentioning Peel, and without quoting Antonius’s specious zero-sum-game argument. Antonius wrote: “No room can be made in Palestine for a second nation except by dislodging or exterminating the nation in possession”—even though Peel had only assigned 17 percent of the land to the Jews and recommended the removal of Arabs, or “the Arabs,” only from that 17 percent. Antonius, using a sleight of hand in order to persuade his readers of the immorality of the Peel proposals, implied that the proposed settlement involved the complete dispossession or extermination of Palestine’s Arabs.

Bird completely omits mention of Peel or his 17 percent solution—which the Zionists regarded quite understandably as unjust, though they grudgingly accepted the core notion of partition—and selectively quotes from The Arab Awakening: “The establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine … cannot be accomplished without forcibly displacing the Arabs …[Palestine should become an independent Arab state] in which as many Jews as the country can hold without prejudice to its political and economic freedom would live in peace, security and dignity, and enjoy full rights of citizenship.” Such a state “would enable the Jews to have a national home in the spiritual and cultural sense, in which Jewish values could flourish and the Jewish genius have the freest play to seek inspiration in the land of its ancient connection.”

Right. A multinational, multicultural paradise, oiled by tolerance and democracy—for which the Arabs were then, and are today, famous—with an undefined Jewish minority whose size the Arabs would determine in line with their “political” and “economic” calculations. This was what Antonius was selling to his English-speaking readers in the United States and Britain—while back home, in Palestine, intolerance ruled, as Husseini’s gunmen shot and knifed their internal Arab opponents and “moderates” (as well as Jewish farmers and British soldiers).

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