It was British colonial machinations that turned initial Arab acceptance of a Jewish homeland in British-protected Palestine into unmitigated and disastrous hostility. British behavior in the Middle East in general, and in Palestine in particular, was common colonial practice: divide and rule. In India, it enabled the British to subdue the subcontinent with few troops by pitting hostile segments of the indigenous population against each other. They employed this strategy in Palestine too.
From the very first days of the mandate, a group of very influential British officials in the Colonial and the War Offices, who wanted to maintain control over the land and to prevent the establishment of an independent Jewish national home, started undermining their government’s efforts to fulfill its obligation toward the Jews. These British officials, many of them avowed anti-Semites, fanned Arab resentment over broken British promises to make the Arabian chieftain Faisal king of Damascus and Syria, and redirected it against Jewish aspirations in Palestine.
In 1923 the British unilaterally removed from the original mandatory area all the land east of the Jordan River 75 percent of the territory promised to the Jews and gave it to the Emir Abdullah of Arabia, Faisal’s brother, in compensation to the Hashemite family for other broken promises. They did so despite objections from the League of Nations. The small area that had been designated as a home for the Jews was thus reduced to a mere sliver.
A distinct Palestinian Arab nationalism evolved only after the dream of an Arab Syrian kingdom – the brainchild of T. E. Lawrence – was shattered when the French evicted his protégé, the Emir Faisal, from Damascus in 1920. Only then did the South Syrian Arabs living under Britain’s Palestine mandate separate themselves from Syria and start defining themselves as Palestinians. The process was accelerated by their growing negative reaction to the League of Nations? designation of Palestine as a Jewish national home.
The British helped make hostility to Zionism the defining issue of local Arab politics, and assisted in its exploitation as a lethal weapon in bloody Arab inter-clan struggles for dominance. Muslim clerics and Arab effendis exploited hostility against the Jews, always convenient scapegoats, to deflect the rage of their destitute, exploited people. The British appointed an extremely radical upstart politician, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, with a record of violence and incitement, as chief mufti of Jerusalem. They gave him the authority of a spiritual leader to the Arabs, and control of the considerable funds and properties managed by Muslim religious trusts. The mufti promptly proceeded to exploit these resources for his nefarious campaign against the Jews and against his Arab opponents much as Arafat does today.
The mufti was, in fact, the originator of the murderous religious incitement used so effectively today by Arafat. From the beginning of the British mandate in 1920, he used mosques, schools, and charitable associations to mount a racist campaign against the Jews, accusing them of betraying the Prophet Mohammed and of trying to defile and destroy Islamic holy places. The incitement resulted in periodic outbreaks of violence which culminated in several massacres and the eviction of Jews from Arab-dominated areas notably in Hebron, where the Jews, who had lived there for centuries, were butchered by their Arab neighbors after the mufti spread a rumor through the preachers in the mosques that the Jews were conquering and defiling the Al-Aksa Mosque.
The British not only failed to stop the carnage, but also arrested any Jew who bore arms in defense. British colonial officials then exploited Arab rage as an excuse to put more and more restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine and land purchase. They reneged, in fact, on their obligation to establish a Jewish national home. They even illegally blocked the entrance of Jews who were desperately trying to escape Europe. They did so even when the danger to Jewish life became obvious, helping Hitler to trap and kill many Jews.
