Last year marked the centenary of the British Mandate for Palestine in 1922, which formalised Britain’s presence in the Holy Land following the First World War.
The Palestine Mandate fell within a system devised by the League of Nations, in which the European imperial powers were theoretically intended to prepare non-European peoples for eventual self-government. In reality, those who lived under the mandates recognised them as continuations of European colonialism by another name.
Nowhere was this truer than in Palestine. Arthur Balfour, the wartime foreign secretary, wrote in 1919 that, “in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country.”
Until Britain’s chaotic and dishonourable withdrawal in 1948, British actions during the Mandate were largely guided by the policy to which the then-foreign secretary lent his name, the Balfour Declaration, in which the government pledged to “use their best endeavours” to enable the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”
For context, in the early nineteenth century, estimates indicate that the Jewish population of Palestine was around 7,000, compared to 268,000 Muslim and Christian Arabs; by 1914, there were 94,000 Jews, compared to 595,000 Arabs. Britain’s immigration policies allowed the Jewish proportion of the population to grow to a third.
True to Balfour’s word, Palestinians’ opinions on the drastic changes in their homeland held no sway in Whitehall. During the years 1947-49, which saw the military action accompanying the creation of Israel, referred to by Palestinians as the Nakba or “catastrophe”, over 750,000 Palestinians became stateless refugees, which their descendants remain today.
Britain’s intervention in Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century is key to understanding what some journalists and political scientists have dubbed the “Arab-Israeli conflict” – today a “conflict” between a largely defenceless population and an occupying power with one of the most advanced militaries in the world, with some of the region’s Arab states scrambling to sign agreements with Israel.
Yet when I was researching my book Palestine in the Victorian Age, I found that the roots of Britain’s interference in the region stretch much further back, deep into the nineteenth century, with consequences that reverberate today.
Victorian Britain was gripped by what Isabel Burton, wife of the infamous adventurer and orientalist Richard Burton, accurately described as “Holy Land on the brain.”
Imperial desires for the territory of the crumbling Ottoman Empire and Evangelical Protestant beliefs about the role of the Holy Land and the Jewish people in biblical prophecy combined to create a veritable obsession for Palestine among upper- and middle-class Victorians.
They flocked to the Eastern Mediterranean in their thousands: in 1869, a group of tourists were taken to Egypt and Palestine by the Baptist preacher Thomas Cook, signalling the birth of the package tour.
But the British didn’t come only to admire the holy sites of Jerusalem, Bethlehem and the Galilee. Military officer Charles Warren who surveyed Jerusalem for the Palestine Exploration Fund, an organisation founded with Queen Victoria’s patronage in 1865, spelled out his plans in an 1875 pamphlet ominously entitled The Land of Promise.
Warren envisaged an entity “similar to the old East India Company” funded by European capital, which would replace the Ottomans as Palestine’s administrators.
Yet Warren’s motive was not only profits for the European shareholders: over 40 years before the Balfour Declaration, he explicitly stated that it would be Britain’s “avowed intention of gradually introducing the Jew [sic], pure and simple, who is eventually to occupy and govern this country.”
Others went further in their schemes to see Palestine populated by Jews. James Finn, Britain’s consul in Jerusalem for 17 years in the mid-nineteenth century, was an Evangelical Christian so deeply obsessed with the Jewish people that he described himself as “half a Jew”, despite having no Jewish ancestry.
Before his consulship, he was closely associated with the London Jews Society, an Anglican missionary organisation which sought the conversion of Jews to Christianity in order to fulfil their interpretation of prophecies.
Just outside Jerusalem’s walls, Finn and his wife Elizabeth founded a farm for Jewish workers in 1854, in an attempt to begin Palestine’s transformation into a country of Jewish settler farmers.
The farm continued after James Finn’s death under Elizabeth’s management. She was not averse to weaponizing British antisemitism in order to raise funds for the project: playing on fears of an influx of Jewish refugees from Russian pogroms in the 1880s, she wrote to a newspaper that her aim was to find “wholesome work out of England” for Jews.
Some were prepared to see Jewish populations replacing the local Palestinians if necessary. Laurence Oliphant, a prominent novelist, adventurer and former Member of Parliament, travelled to the Eastern Mediterranean in 1879, searching for a region where a large Jewish colony sponsored by Britain could be established.
He was forced to admit defeat in present-day Israel/Palestine, as the fertile regions were already “in the highest state of cultivation” by the Palestinian peasantry. Oliphant thus looked east of the Jordan River, where the land was more sparsely populated. Yet semi-nomadic Bedouin tribes still threatened his plans.
He therefore advocated “a firm hand upon the Arabs”, including their ethnic cleansing, writing imperiously that “there would be no difficulty in clearing them out” of the area he desired for a colony. Oliphant remains warmly remembered in Israel, where three streets are named after him, with another in the occupied Golan Heights.
The present-day situation in Israel-Palestine, which in recent weeks has seen a grim upturn in violence in the West Bank (according to the United Nations, 2022 was the deadliest year for Palestinians since 2005) and tensions over Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right settler allies who make Israel’s new government the most ideologically extreme in the country’s history, has its roots partially in the historic actions of Britain.
Not only the British Mandate for Palestine, but the decades of intervention stretching back deep into the nineteenth century, helped pave the way for the plight of the Palestinians today.
Gabriel Polley completed his PhD in Palestine studies in the European Centre for Palestine Studies, University of Exeter, UK in 2020, under the supervision of Professor Ilan Pappe. He previously taught in the occupied West Bank. He currently works in London in the translation and international development sectors. Palestine in the Victorian Age is his first book.
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