Picture a small strip of land on the eastern Mediterranean coast. By the early 1900s, two different peoples were coming to see it as their national home — and outside powers were about to make matters much, much worse.
In the 1890s, a movement called Zionism took shape in Europe. Its founder, Theodor Herzl, argued that centuries of persecution — culminating in violent anti-Jewish riots called pogroms in the Russian Empire — proved Jews needed their own state. Palestine, the ancestral Jewish homeland, was the obvious target.
Concept lens: perspectives: From this point on, almost every event in this story looks different depending on whose eyes you see it through.
Zionists
- Saw a persecuted people returning home
Palestinian Arabs
- Had lived in the land for generations
- Saw settlers arriving to claim it
Hold both views: Keep both perspectives in view. Paper 3 essays reward you for holding them together, not picking one and ignoring the other.
Small waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine, called aliyah, had already begun before WWI. But the war changed everything, because Britain made a set of promises about the same land to different people — and those promises did not fit together.
- McMahon-Hussein Correspondence (1915-16) — Britain, needing Arab help against the Ottoman Empire, exchanged letters with Sharif Hussein of Mecca that appeared to promise a large independent Arab state after the war, in territory many Arabs believed included Palestine.
- Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916) — At the very same time, Britain secretly agreed with France to carve up Ottoman Middle Eastern territory into their own zones of control; Palestine was marked out for special international administration.
- Balfour Declaration (1917) — Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour then wrote to Lord Rothschild, a leader of British Jewry, declaring that Britain viewed 'with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people' — while adding that nothing should 'prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.'
Notice the problem. Britain had essentially promised the same territory to Arab nationalists, to its French ally, and to the Zionist movement — three commitments that could not all be kept in full. Historians still argue fiercely about how deliberate this was.
Britain acted cynically
- Balfour wanted Jewish-American support to pull the USA into the war.
- Britain wanted a friendly presence near the Suez Canal and route to India.
- The vague wording ('a national home', not 'the national home') let Britain dodge a firm commitment either way.
Britain acted out of wartime pragmatism
- Each promise made sense to the officials who made it, given what Britain needed at that exact moment in the war.
- No single person coordinated all three deals, so contradictions were more accident than conspiracy.
- Britain genuinely believed a Jewish homeland and Arab self-rule could coexist under its supervision.
Whichever explanation you find more convincing, the effect was the same: two national movements now had a legitimate-sounding claim to the same land, backed by the world's most powerful empire.
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After WWI, the Ottoman Empire collapsed and its Middle Eastern lands were reorganised under the new League of Nations. In 1922, Britain was formally awarded the Palestine Mandate — legal permission to govern Palestine, but with a catch.
A Mandate with two masters: The Mandate text told Britain to do two things at once: prepare Palestine for eventual self-government, AND put the Balfour Declaration into practice by facilitating Jewish immigration and settlement. Since the Arab majority overwhelmingly opposed a Jewish national home, 'self-government' and 'Balfour' pulled in opposite directions from day one.
Meanwhile, Arab nationalism was growing across the Middle East, fuelled by anger at broken wartime promises and at seeing British and French mandates replace Ottoman rule instead of the independence many Arabs expected. In Palestine specifically, this nationalism increasingly focused on one goal: stopping the growth of a Jewish national home.
| Wave of immigration (Aliyah) | Approx. dates | Main driver |
|---|---|---|
| Third Aliyah | 1919-1923 | Zionist pioneers after WWI and the Balfour Declaration |
| Fourth Aliyah | 1924-1929 | Economic hardship and antisemitic restrictions in Poland |
| Fifth Aliyah | 1929-1939 | Nazi persecution in Germany after 1933; worsening conditions across Europe |
The numbers tell the story. In 1922 Jews made up roughly 11% of Palestine's population; by 1939, after the Fifth Aliyah brought tens of thousands fleeing Hitler's Germany, that figure had risen to around 30%. Jewish-owned land, agricultural output and urban development expanded fast too.
Land purchase
Jewish organisations bought land, often from absentee Arab landlords living outside Palestine, which was then closed to Arab tenant farmers who had worked it for generations.
Displacement
Thousands of Arab peasant families lost access to land they depended on, fuelling resentment even where sales were technically legal.
Urban-rural divide
Jewish immigration concentrated in growing cities like Tel Aviv, while economic change reshaped the countryside, deepening Arab anxiety about being outpaced.
Buy the land, lose the farmer, fear the future — the chain reaction behind Arab anger.
So by the early 1930s, Palestine held a demographic and economic transformation happening faster than most Arab leaders could accept, and a Zionist movement that saw the same trend as simply not fast enough given the danger building in Europe.
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Trapped between its two promises, Britain kept changing its Palestine policy — and every change made someone furious.
- 1922 Churchill White Paper — tried to reassure Arabs that Britain did not intend an entirely Jewish Palestine, while still allowing continued Jewish immigration.
- 1930 Passfield White Paper — proposed restricting Jewish immigration and land purchases after Arab riots in 1929; Zionist protest was so fierce that Britain largely reversed it within a year.
- 1939 White Paper — after the Arab Revolt, capped Jewish immigration at 75,000 over five years, restricted land sales, and promised an independent Palestine within a decade; Zionists saw this as a betrayal on the eve of the Holocaust.
This back-and-forth is a textbook case of continuity and change: British goals stayed constant (keep control, avoid open war, honour Balfour just enough), but the policy zig-zagged wildly because neither community would accept a middle path.
The breaking point came in 1936. Arab frustration — over immigration, land loss, and the sense that independence was being indefinitely postponed — exploded into the Arab Revolt, a general strike in April 1936 that grew into an armed uprising against both British rule and Jewish settlement.
Structure the revolt in two phases: For essays, split the Arab Revolt into two clear phases: Phase 1 (1936) was mainly a general strike and boycott; Phase 2 (1937-1939), after the Peel Commission's partition proposal was rejected, turned into a much more violent guerrilla insurgency, met with harsh British military repression.
Britain sent the Peel Commission in 1936-37 to investigate. Its 1937 report concluded that Arab and Jewish national aims were simply incompatible in one state, and recommended partition into separate Arab and Jewish states. Arab leaders rejected partition outright, wanting all of Palestine; many Zionist leaders accepted the principle, though they debated the proposed borders.
Jewish responses to rising tension
- Built strong institutions: the Jewish Agency, the Histadrut labour federation, and elected communal bodies.
- Formed the Haganah in 1920 for self-defence, which grew far more organised during the revolt.
- Practised largely unified 'restraint' (havlagah) as official policy, though some breakaway groups used retaliatory violence.
Arab responses to rising tension
- Formed the Arab Higher Committee in 1936 under Haj Amin al-Husayni to lead the revolt, but Palestinian Arab politics stayed split between rival clans, chiefly the Husaynis and Nashashibis.
- Relied more on strikes, boycotts and armed guerrilla bands rather than centralised institutions.
- Suffered heavy losses: thousands killed (mostly Arabs), leaders exiled or imprisoned by 1939, leadership badly weakened.
By the time Britain crushed the revolt in 1939, the imbalance this comparison reveals — organised, resourced Jewish institutions against a fragmented, battered Arab leadership — would matter enormously in the next stage of the conflict, after 1945.