Britain Dbq Essay

Research Question: To what extent was Britain’s interference a factor to the termination of the Mandate for Palestine by the United Nations’ partition?

Section B:

The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 was preceded by decades of proposals on how to best partition the land and sovereignty of the region. The establishment of the British Mandate for Palestine’s prolonged presence in the region and its subsequent downfall play an essential role in the establishment of Israel as it is known presently. Britain’s role in the fragmentation of peace in Palestine is relatively undisputed, however the impetus of Britain’s attempts to maintain control in Mandatory Palestine remains up for debate.

Many historians agree to some extent that Britain’s

conflicting promises and attempts to balance legitimacy of two states and nations under one mandate led to its fragmentation. Historian Feith comments on Britain’s conflict of interest in Palestine, arguing that from the beginning, Britain favored the Jewish people, abusing the mandate which was meant to secure land for natives to instead benefit the Zionists. The idea that Britain’s intentions were self-serving in an attempt to amass more power over land to safeguard their future endeavors persists in some capacity even as new information comes to light about Mandatory Palestine and its ramifications.

A further developed approach to explaining the issue proposes that Britain’s decisions in Palestine grew increasingly dependent on maintaining their international reputation and Anglo-American relations due to Palestine’s detrimental impact on Britain’s reputation and economy. Ravndal concludes, similarly to Sachar, that “economic and strategic considerations” led to the termination of Mandatory Palestine to guarantee a prosperous future of Anglo-Middle Eastern relations. Ultimately, relinquishing control to the United Nations was a strategic forfeit used to ensure that when Britain was more economically stable, the nation’s Middle Eastern influence would be restored.

La Guardia regards the Balfour Declaration as enacted by the British solely for their own gain, affirming that they wanted to exploit the Jewish people and gain notoriety as supporters of Zionists while simultaneously maintaining economic interests in the Arab world. Sachar concurs with La Guardia on the subject of Britain’s intentions to control Palestine in order to secure military interests in the Middle East through a Jewish state rather than an Arab state, reinforcing the idea that Britain saw a Jewish state as a strategic boon.

The most basic conclusion about the factors leading to the failure of Mandatory Palestine is exemplified in Reynold’s argument that the failure was due to the lack of “genuine interest or initiative on the British side to make [the Mandate for Palestine] work”.

He supports this claim by discounting the intricacies of the Zionist movement, placing the blame on Britain for failing to forge a trustworthy relationship with the Yishuv who, along with the Zionists, supposedly falsely anticipated a simple route towards a Jewish state due to the 1917 Balfour Declaration. According to Reynolds, the Balfour Declaration existed merely to advance the interests of the British in the Middle East while maintaining international consent. While Britain’s selfish colonial tendencies played a role in the downfall of Mandatory Palestine, such a conclusion is incomplete as it fails to address the numerous factors and perspectives that swayed Britain’s

hand.

For example, the issue of illegal immigration plays a significant role in the fragmentation of Mandatory Palestine. Historian Goldscheider takes an entirely different approach in proposing that problems caused by illegal immigration of Jews into Palestine forced Britain to choose between Arab and Zionist interests. Goldscheider’s suggestion that Britain was compelled by Arabs to take such a stance of Jewish immigration represents a close-minded perspective that fails to incorporate the complexities of the issue. In a similar tone sympathetic to the British and placing the blame on Arabs, Ravndal cites the Arab Revolution in response to increasing Jewish immigration as the root cause of restrictions on immigration. Ravndal cites immigration as a cause of international intervention through the United Nation’s plan for partition in describing the impact of the international outcry against the British as a result of the 1939 White Paper.

La Guardia takes a stance strongly against the White Papers, proposing that they were used to retain Arab allies with little concern for the international implications of the decision. In stark contrast to Goldscheider and Ravndal, but in a similarly close-minded manner, La Guardia argues that Britain restricted immigration purely for their own gain and without concern for those displaced by the Holocaust. In a more comprehensive approach, Margulies argues that Zionists hostility towards the British through Paramilitary attacks by the Yishuv during World War II in response to the White Papers incentivized the British to hand over control of Mandatory Palestine to the United Nations. Due to Britain’s fragile post-war economy combined with Prime Minister Bevin’s continuation of the White Paper despite the events of the Holocaust, Britain’s reputation grew vulnerable and led to the temporary relinquishment of power in the Middle East.

In any discussion of Israel-Palestine, it would be an injustice to neglect to address the Arab-Israeli conflict. By promising the land of the former Ottoman Empire to the Zionists, the French, and the Arabs, Britain placed itself in a precarious position in the Middle East as early as 1917. The British used promises of sovereignty to persuade the Arabs to fight against the Ottoman Empire during World War I, but by dividing power over the region with the French in the mandate system and designating sovereignty in Mandatory Palestine to the Zionists, Arabs were ultimately given no concrete power in their homeland. The struggle to satisfy British interests as well as the interests of dissimilar nations led to neglect of important sectors such as communication between Arabs, Jews, and the British which was ultimately a significant factor in the fall of Mandatory Palestine.

Reynolds argues that because Britain consulted both Arabs and Jews on the subject of Palestine, they created a state of perpetual unrest and dissatisfaction.

By providing a voice to the indigenous Arabs, Britain fostered noncompliance which was exacerbated and made “the failure to reprimand the Arab leadership after 1929 riots, the British rejection of the partition plan, the 1929 white paper, and the policy of appeasing the Arabs at all costs” inevitable. By appeasing the Arabs and providing them with a level of sovereignty that was supposed to be allotted to Jews as a national home, Britain failed to fulfill the mandate established by the League of Nations in 1922. The initial failure to acknowledge Palestinian Arabs and to fulfill the behemoth promises to the Zionists for a homeland resulted in Britain’s inability to compromise the two nation’s interests of sovereignty for single state without the intervention of the United Nations. Galnoor discounts the impact of the 1937 Peel Commission, which revealed that the mandate could not be permanent because of lack of stability between Jews and Arabs, arguing that it led to the internal turmoil in Palestine that necessitated partition and forced Britain to take action due to international support for a Jewish

state.

Kamel argues that Palestine was not entitled to sovereignty in the land because it never had a historical claim over the land as Palestine was neither a nation nor an ethnicity prior to the Mandate thus the creation of the Palestinian nation itself posed another problem to Mandatory Palestine. By creating new borders in the Middle East, the Mandates of former Ottoman territory served to contort the historic connection between Arab peoples. Kamel notes that because the Arabs were not given an adequate advocate for their aspirations in comparison to the proponents of the Zionists, the League of Nation designated Mandates were partial from the start. Furthermore, the attempt to integrate two diametrically opposed nationalities under one peaceful state with shared sovereignty was an implausible goal that appeared to necessitate the intervention of the United Nations’ partition plan as a desperate pursuit for peace. Both people groups opposed their own union as planned by Britain and other world powers, with the Jewish Agency specifically opposed to “a unitary state in Palestine” contrasting the Arab Higher Committee’s refusal of anything resembling a plan for partition. These differing views represent the different values of the two peoples, with the Jewish favoring sovereignty and the Arabs favoring a cohesive land mass. Johnson clearly addresses the conflicting perspectives, stating that “Israel saw the armistice as a prelude to peace . . . For the Arabs, armistice was the continuation of war by other means.” However, the two nations failed to convey these opinions to one another, a transgression that later manifested in the failure to attempt to understand the motivations of the other side.

Britain’s interference in the Middle East through the Mandate for Palestine alone cannot sufficiently explain its failure and the subsequent intervention of the United Nations. The interests of Britain to gain economic and political power in the Middle East undoubtedly influenced their actions in Mandatory Palestine. However, unpredictable factors such as a changing worldview of the Zionist movement due to the Holocaust, the augmentation of Arab nationalism in spite of the divisions of the League of Nations’ mandate system, and necessary reactions to illegal immigration and revolutions together contributed much more heavily to both Britain’s actions and the intervention of the United Nations. As Britain grew more economically unstable following World War II and ultimately less capable of quelling the festering discord in the Middle East, an internationally overseen partition of the two hostile nations unwittingly compelled into inhabiting the same state.

Word Count: 1554