How Helpful was the British Mandate?

I have just managed to read the introductory chapter of  Matthew Hughes' "Britain's Pacification of Palestine: The British Army, the Colonial State, and the Arab Revolt, 1936-1939 (Cambridge Military Histories) and discovered the name  el-Asi, the nom de plume of Assistant District Commissioner Aubrey Lees. He served in various administrative offices during 1929-1938 in Haifa, Gaza, Hebron and Jaffa dealing with matters of land settlement.

Lees was kicked out of the Mandate administration for his too pro-Palestinien Arab views and for criticizing the Palestinian Government's attitude towards alleged Jewish atrocities and he was eventually imprisoned by Britian during World War II as a fascist. In 1939 he was accused of expressing anti-Semitic views and refused a reappointment back in Palestine and he continued his anti-Semitism in England.

Hughes, quoting an internal US Consulate General report from January 11, 1930 (867N.00/77-330 [Reel M#1037/1], NARA II), notes there were many British Mandate officials who had 'no real sympathy' for Jewish claims to Palestine and felt an injustice was being donw to the local Arabs. That is a repeat of the 1918-1920 period when British Military Government officers, before the Mandate was in place, almost succeeded in sabotaging the Jewish national home project at its start, including prodding Arabs to riot and kill Jews.

^

Revisiting "Palestine is Southern Syria; Palestinians are Southern Syrians"

I see Elder of Ziyon has found more interesting material confirming my assertion that "Palestine" was never an independent entity in Arab history (and if it weren't for the Zionists, Palestine would have disappeared from out memory).

He quotes Nazmi Al Jubeh, Bir Zeit University's Associate Professor of History and Archaeology and the director of Birzeit University Museum.

Elder quotes from this article: "Palestinian Identity and Cultural Heritage" and I will limit my quotations to a few excerpts:

The Palestinian people are not different from other Greater Syrian (Bilad al-Sham) peoples. They are the result of accumulated ethnic, racial, and religious groups, who once lived, conquered, occupied, and passed through this strip of land. Wars and invasions have never totally replaced the local population in any period of history; they rather added to, mixed with and reformulated the local identity. The Palestinian people are the Canaanites, the Philistines, the Jabousites, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Aramaeans, the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Turks, the Crusaders, and the Kurds, who once settled, conquered, occupied or just passed through Palestine. [no Jews. or Israelites, or Judahides? In another section he complains that the "treatment of the history of Palestine starts with abstaining from deliberately marginalizing or even erasing the history of others."]

...The artificial division of Greater Syria [after World War One] was imposed on the people. If there had been no Sykes-Picot Agreement, I am not sure that the Palestinian people would have chosen an independent state as a container of their identity...The idea of an independent Palestinian state was raised quite recently; as a matter of fact, the Palestinian national movement continued to market the conflict as an “Arab-Israeli” one and not as a “Palestinian-Israeli” one. The idea of the Palestinian independent state was raised in 1973 in the aftermath of the October War and specific international, regional, and national political developments;...

Oh, and as regards "Palestine" being the name of a country, he notes:

the word “Palestine” is not clear; there are different interpretations of its meaning. (Brug 1985, Deger-Jalkotzy 1983, p. 99-120). As an administrative terminology, it was used since the Greco-Roman period in the first and second centuries BC. It is worth mentioning that Herodotus (ca. 490-430 BC) had already written about Palestine, meaning of more or less the now familiar land of Palestine...Herodotus extends the term “Palestinian Syria” to the entire coastal strip between Phoenicia (roughly today’s Lebanon) and Egypt. The Greek term “Palestine” was then transferred into Latin: “Palestina”. This Latin term, starting from 135 A.D., meant to the Romans the entire province of “Judea” and was introduced in order to erase the use of the term “Judea” after they had put down the Jewish rebellion against the Romans, to challenge the memory of the Jews. Jerusalem was renamed “Aelia Capitolina” (Wilkinson 1975, p. 118-136).

Thank you Prof. Al-Jubeh who, I am positive, I heard at lectures I attended at the Abright Institute (and about which I may have blogged).

___________

P.S.

On the Syria aspect:

The Peace Conference, as a result of the dissatisfaction, appointed [in 1919] an inter-Allied commission to ascertain the wishes of the people. France, who claimed the whole of Syria, which included Palestine, declined to send out her representatives; and her example was followed by England. The work of the Commission, therefore, devolved upon the two American representatives, Ambassador Crane and President King. This Commission held a most impartial and exhaustive inquiry, hearing delegates from almost every town and village. In order to be ready to give useful information before the Commission, branches of the Moslem and Christian League were formed at Jaffa, Gaza, Hebron, Djenin, Nablus, Acre, Haifa, Safed, and other places. All branches worked under a constitution approved by the Military Governor of Jerusalem. It was decided to draw up three resolutions to be presented to the Commission:

1. The independence of Syria, from the Taurus Mountains to Rafeh, the frontier of Egypt.
2. Palestine not to be separated from Syria, but to form one whole country.
3. Jewish immigration to be restricted.

The entire Christian and Moslem population agreed to these resolutions.

And at IV here:

"It should be said here that there is no justification, from an ethnological or geographical point of view, for dividing Syria into the northern part under the French and a southern part, namely Palestine, under the British. This has already been pointed out by the greatest authority on the history and geography of Palestine, Sir George Adam Smith. One race, the Syrian, or Palestinian, is dominant throughout the territory, from Aleppo to Beersheba; and there is no natural frontier that can divide the two halves of this land."

^

When A Congressman Compared the Jordan River to the Mississippi

When the US Congress had no problem supporting Zionism, criticizing pro-Arab diplomacy and...comparing the Jordan River to the Mississippi River:-

Members of the Senate and the House of Representatives joined today in condemning on the floor of their respective Houses the granting of independence to Transjordan. One Congressman suggested that the matter to placed before the Security Council of the UNO by the U.S. delegation.

Senator Claude Pepper, Democrat of Florida, sharply attacked British policy in Transjordan and Palestine, in a general statement in the Senate on foreign policy with particular reference to the Iranian situation. The British Mandate over Palestine “should have been repealed a long time ago,” he said.

Rep. Gordon McDonough, California Republican, urged the State Department to consult with the British Foreign Office “to assure the British that the heroic and creative Hebrew people, who have already worked such marvels in transformation in the insert of Palestine, can, by their friendship and trust, be infinitely better guarantors of western principals of peace and freedom in the Near East than can illiterate, comedic Bedonine,” McDonough asked that the American delegates to the UNO be instructed to investigate this matter in the Security Council.

Rep. Angnatua Bennett, New York Republican, compared the separation of Palestine and Transjordan to a situation that might develop should the U.S. be divided at the Mississippi. He recalled the treaty of 1924, in which Great Britain promised not change the status of Transjordan under the Mandate without the approval of the U.S. Government. “To my knowledge,” he said, “that approval has not been granted.

Senator Owen Browster, Republican of Maine, told the Senate that the State Department should “investigate the sudden creation of this new independent state of Transjordan.”

JTA, April 4, 1946.

Background.

^