British plans for the partition of Palestine, 1929–1938

Key takeaways

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Reading notes

• 15 years during the endorsement of the mandate by the council of the league of Nations, a central question ''was Palestine a unified nation or did it contain multiple national bodies?'

• Jews were the only group labelled 'national' in the mandate period

• Only suggestion of Arab nationality occurred in article 22 of the mandate which establish Arabic as one of the three official languages of Palestine

• Violence in the 20's and 30's indicated a presence of national groups

• Article 6 directed Britain to facilitate Jewish immigration 'under suitable conditions'

• More Jewish immigrants increased the Jewish population and demand for land

• Cantonisation followed the swiss model of federation compared to partitions more clean cut approach

• Most comprehensible plans pre-Peel is from Shmuel Dothan

• See the growing plans as a move away from unitary nationalism

• Whilst Coupland was an important influence upon the partition plan, he was not, as some have argued, the sole advocate and mastermind of partition

• Was the partitions author in so much as he wrote the majority of the Peel report

• Tracing evolving roots of partition has two benefits; examining the notion of territorial division helps to highlight a central concern underlying the structure and function of the mandate, and the existence of territorial division as a persistent trend in British thinking before the peel commission plan of 1937 demonstrates that the repot and its plan were part of a dialogic continuum and were far less individual or idiosyncratic productions

• Weizmann according to Chesterton floated the possibility of cantonization; he did not see why it should not be a commonwealth of cantons like Switzerland

• First recorded instance of British desiers of division came from its failure to institute a legislative council and of Arab disturbances in 1929

• Partition was considered the primary method after the unrest of 1936

• On 28 February 1932 the Russian language Jewish periodical Rassweit- in Paris ran an article claiming that British plans for dividing Palestine with the Mufti had been hatched in 1931

• In private, both Palestinian and Jewish leaders were not opposed to cantonization or partition, but publicly they refused it outright

• Weizmann discussed the ideas of partition with Mussolini who was attempting to style himself as a protector of the Jews

• The colonial office was ambivalent to the notion of partition

• More concrete proposals were emerging from Jewish Zionist circles, but if published, were published in Hebrew, to which the British officials knew very little of

• 1935 saw the publication of 'Palestine of the Arabs' a book arguing a concrete cantonisation proposal (Erskine's Arab friend)

• Cantons were to be treated as sovereign states that would join the league of nations, but these cantons would grant most authority to a central Supreme Council composed of Arab, Jewish, and British representatives

• Argued for re-joining Transjordan to Palestine and carving an H-shaped Jewish canton from Jaffa up to Haifa, Tiberia and then to Rosh Pina

• February 1935 saw Archer Cust submit a memorandum to the colonial office that he had written whilst still assistant district commissioner of Jerusalem

• Proposed three cantons, and two mandated enclaves: Arab canton could cover the hills and joined with Transjordan- rule by the Emir, Jewish canton would compromise heavy Jewish centres, and a mixed canton, with Britain ruling voer holy cities

• Colonial office reaction was largely sceptical

• In Cust's lecture in 1936 he posited the notion of the existence of two nationalities within Palestine

• On the other hand his language suggested a unified nation riven by factionalism

• During 1936 Cust visited Jewish, Arab, and colonial office leaders

• Weizmann expressed interest, though the four arab leaders he talked to said they could not speak for Palestinian leaders- though also expressed some interest

• By the time the colonial office heard that the Jewish Agency in Palestine had vetoed cantonisastion in a meeting with the high commissioner, Custs plans appeared to be floundering

• Ormsby-Gore told Weimann of the cantonisation notion it ''would merely result in a repetition of the ghetto''

• Douglad Harris and Lewis Andrews (department of development in Palestine) wrote up a cantonisation proposal in July 1936

• Edward Keith-Roach dismissed it as ignoring the actual territorial distribution of the population

• The best land would go to the Jews

• With 10,000s being displaced on the wrong side of the canton system

• Keith-Roach precipitated the final demise of the cantonisation ideas and therefore championed the more extreme option- partition

• Harris argued that economies of scale would make cantons more expensive to operate, as opposed to say local government

• Britain would arguably have to support the Arab cantons also

• Harris instead advocated for sub-district councils similar to that of rural England (gerrymandering district lines)

• Cantonisation would also exacerbate the immigration problem

• Whilst Keith-Roach argued from a point giving weight to implications of cantonisation for Palestine, Harris addressed the matter of wider public perception and opinion

• Partition thus became the dominate model over cantonization from the summer of 1936

• Major purported reason for the 36 uprising was a failure to create a legislative council

• Which also led to the creating of the Royal Commission

• Only in mid-October after the intervention of rulers from Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, and Saudi Arabia was the strike called off

• The peel report gave structure to the years of debate; the problem with Palestine could not be solved without comprehensive restructuring of the body politic

• Rather than strengthening its proposal, the vague quality of the Peel report led to its undoing

• The sending of the Woodhead Commission to establish a detailed partition plan, on the condition of recommending against partition is no reasonable and equitable plan could be reached

• Contained three plans; a majority and two minority opinions

• As partition was being brought on the table the issues of Austria and Czechoslovakia in Europe meant that the Foreign Offices desire for stability trumped that of the colonial office's preoccupation with the problems of Palestine