Mandatory Palestine 
 Aviva Halamish
The Open University of Israel

Reprinted from the Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, Summer  2002 (with changes in orthography to HTML standards).
Copyright 2002 by the Middle East Studies Association of North America
Partner to Partition: The Jewish Agency’s Partition Plan in the Mandate Era, by Yossi Katz. xii+209 pages, maps, notes, sources, index. London: Frank Cass Publishers, 1998. $24.50 (Paper) ISBN 0-7146-4846-9

Ploughing Sand: British Rule in Palestine 1917-1948, by Naomi Shepherd. x+290 pages, illustrations, maps, sources, notes, index. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000. $28.00 (Cloth) ISBN 0-8135-2765-1

Palestine—A Twice-Promised Land? volume 1: The British, the Arabs & Zionism 1915-1920, by Isaiah Friedman. lxxvii+411 pages, maps, notes, appendices, index. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2000. $49.95 (Cloth) ISBN 1-56000-391-X

These three recently published books, which examine various aspects of the history of Palestine under British rule, validate the saying of Italian historian and philosopher Bendetto Croce: “All history is contemporary history.” The troubled present and foggy future of that conflict-stricken territory are felt throughout not only by the reader but also in the awareness of the authors, as Friedman implicitly acknowledges: “I, for one, have endeavored to treat the subject matter as a purely academic issue. Intellectual curiosity alone propelled my research and examination of a huge mass of documentation” (p. xviii).

Friedman’s systematic examination of documents in the Public Record Office in London revealed layers of academic writing, memoirs, and emotional observations, epitomized by Elizabeth Monroe’s declaration that from the British point of view the Balfour Declaration “was one of the greatest mistakes in our imperial history” (p. xv); and by some more ostensibly sound claims to the effect that the Declaration of November 1917 contradicted previous obligations Britain had undertaken during World war I, namely the McMahon-Hussein correspondence and the Sykes-Picot Agreement. The main contention of Friedman’s book, alluded to in its title: Palestine—A Twice Promised Land?, is the author's answer—an unequivocal ‘No.’ In his meticulously annotated study he shows that McMahon’s letter of 24 October 1915 to the Sharif Hussein of Mecca was never relevant to Palestine. Although this claim is not new, it is here substantiated through photocopies of the Arabic version of McMahon’s letter and its original English translation. These authentic documents demonstrate that Palestine was not included in the area over which Great Britain was prepared to acknowledge the independence of the Arabs, and that Hussein was fully aware of it.

Another issue painstakingly analyzed by Friedman is the Weizmann-Feisal Agreement of 1919, embodying the mutual recognition of Arab and Zionist national aspirations in their respective territories, pending Zionist economic assistance to the Arab state. The distribution of roles in this episode, paraphrasing the title of a famous western film, is that the (Hashemite) Arabs and the Zionists played the ‘good;’ the French, who frustrated the fulfillment of the agreement by refusing to deliver the goods promised to Faisal by the British, played the ‘bad;’ and the British, whose conduct Friedman attempts to defend, were the ‘ugly.’ The punch line is that the blame for the failure of the agreement rests mainly on the Jews who “failed to make their promised financial and territorial assistance good” (p. 232). Indeed, the agreement can be viewed in retrospect as a missed opportunity, an episode evoking a bitter-sweet reflection: in fact, things could have been different.

Another such crossroads, where history could have taken a different course, is the period between 1937 and 1938 examined in Katz’s Partner to Partition, when two (of the three) sides to the conflict considered partition as a solution. The majority of the delegates to the Twentieth Congress of the Zionist Organization endorsed the idea of partition in principle in return for obtaining a sovereign state, but rejected the boundaries drawn up by the Peel Committee, and they entrusted the Jewish Agency Executive to negotiate an improved partition map. The issues that confronted the Jewish Agency sixty-five years ago are strikingly familiar to today’s newspaper readers: boundaries, Jerusalem, transfer of population, and the status of the Arab minority in the Jewish state. The Jewish Agency Plan differed from the Peel Commission in proposing an enlarged Jewish area, changing the status of substantial sectors from Arab sovereignty to British Mandate, and dividing Jerusalem into three regions—a Jewish part, an Arab part, and a permanent Mandatory enclave including the Old City. In Katz’s view, the 1938 Jewish Agency Plan marked a turning point in the Zionist attitude to partitioning the country, and actually determined the country’s frontiers and shaped the character of Israel in its early years.

Whereas Friedman and Katz both examine a defined issue over a limited period of time, Shepherd surveys British rule in Palestine in a more comprehensive manner. She undertakes quite an ambitious task: “to penetrate beyond the familiar claims and counter-claims, indictments and defences, and to try to put together a portrait of the British rule in Palestine” spanning more than thirty years (p. 3). It is not easy to open a new furrow in that thoroughly ploughed field, but Shepherd carves a distinctive niche by focusing almost entirely on British officials in Palestine. She set out to present “Jews and Arabs…primarily through British eyes” in order to find out “why the Jews in Palestine were able to turn numerical and political weakness into strength, and for the catastrophe which overtook the Palestinian Arabs” (p. 4). The distinct contribution of Ploughing Sand is mainly in the sphere of social history, dealing with some previously neglected fields of research, such as health, education, and law.

Shepherd points at the positive contribution of British rule to the development of the Jewish national home in the crucial 1920s and 1930s. The British turn out in Shepherd’s book to be ‘good’ for the Zionists and ‘bad’ for the Arabs, who—under their rule—lost the chance for statehood. Indeed, both Friedman and Shepherd share the view that Whitehall was more sympathetic to Zionist aspirations than the men on the spot, who were much more pro-Arab than their superiors. Nevertheless, all three books conform to a long-established tradition in the historiography of the Palestine conflict of almost exclusive use of British and Zionist sources, with the absence of Arab and Arab-language materials. Thus extensive fields still remain for future historians to plough.