Zionist Commission for Palestine was a commission chaired by Chaim Weizmann, president of the British Zionist Federation [1] following British promulgation of the pro-Zionist, Balfour Declaration. The Commission was formed in March 1918 and went to Palestine to study conditions and submit recommendations to the British authorities. [2]
The Zionist Commission consisted of Weizmann with Israel Sieff as secretary, and Joseph Cowen, Dr. M. D. Eder, Leon Simon from Britain; Commandante Angelo Levi Bianchini from Italy; and Professor Sylvain Lévi from France. There were no representatives from America or Russia. [3] With Weizmann's approval, William Ormsby-Gore served as British military liaison officer.
The Commission reached Palestine on 14 April 1918; it ran into difficulties with the British military administration (OETA), which was far from sympathetic to Zionist aspirations. The Commission had gone to Palestine with the consent of the British Government and stayed there for some years. [4]
The Commission carried out initial surveys of Palestine and aided the repatriation of Jews sent into exile by the Ottoman Turks during World War I. It restructured the Palestine Office, previously founded by the Zionist Organization (ZO) in 1908, [5] into small departments for agriculture, settlement, education, land, finance, immigration, and statistics. The Palestine Office was merged into the Zionist Commission. [6]
In June 1918, representing the Zionist Commission, Weizmann traveled to southern Transjordan to meet Emir Feisal, during the British advance from the south against the Ottoman Empire in World War I. The intended purpose was to forge an agreement between Feisal and the Zionist movement to support an Arab Kingdom and Jewish settlement in Palestine, respectively. Neither side considered it necessary to consult the wishes of the Palestinian Arabs. [7]
Arab opposition to establishing a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine was voiced by the newly formed Muslim-Christian Associations and the Palestine Arab Congress. On 19 April 1920, elections were held for the Assembly of Representatives of the Palestinian Jewish community. [8] The Palin Report 1920 on the April riots, submitted in August 1920, though never published, was critical of both sides. By the time the Report was presented, the British Occupied Enemy Territory Administration had been replaced by a High Commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel. Weizmann became president of the Zionist Organization (ZO) in 1920. Also in 1920, Menachem Ussishkin (who had made aliyah to Palestine in 1919) was appointed head of the Zionist Commission. [9]
Further rioting took place in Jaffa between 1 and 7 May 1921. In October 1921, the Haycraft Commission of Inquiry blamed the Arabs for the violence during the Jaffa riots, but identified a series of grievances concerning the way Arab interests were apparently being subsumed to the interests of Jewish immigrants, who were then around 10% of the population and increasing rapidly. [10] Some measures to ease Arab unhappiness were taken, but Jewish communities were helped to arm themselves and ultimately the report was ignored.
In 1921, the Zionist Commission became the Palestine Zionist Executive, which was designated the Jewish Agency for the purpose of Article 4 of the Palestine Mandate, [11] to advise the British mandate authorities on the development of the country in matters of Jewish interest. [12] In 1929, the Palestine Zionist Executive officially became the Jewish Agency for Palestine at the 16th Zionist Congress, held in Zurich.
The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British government in 1917 during the First World War announcing its support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population. The declaration was contained in a letter dated 2 November 1917 from the United Kingdom's Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. The text of the declaration was published in the press on 9 November 1917.
Chaim Azriel Weizmann was a Russian-born biochemist, Zionist leader and Israeli statesman who served as president of the Zionist Organization and later as the first president of Israel. He was elected on 16 February 1949, and served until his death in 1952. Weizmann was fundamental in obtaining the Balfour Declaration and later convincing the United States government to recognize the newly formed State of Israel.
The Churchill White Paper of 3 June 1922 was drafted at the request of Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for the Colonies, partly in response to the 1921 Jaffa Riots. The official name of the document was Palestine: Correspondence with the Palestine Arab Delegation and the Zionist Organisation. The white paper was made up of nine documents and "Churchill's memorandum" was an enclosure to document number 5. While maintaining Britain's commitment to the Balfour Declaration and its promise of a Jewish national home in Mandatory Palestine, the paper emphasized that the establishment of a national home would not impose a Jewish nationality on the Arab inhabitants of Palestine. To reduce tensions between the Arabs and Jews in Palestine the paper called for a limitation of Jewish immigration to the economic capacity of the country to absorb new arrivals. This limitation was considered a great setback to many in the Zionist movement, though it acknowledged that the Jews should be able to increase their numbers through immigration rather than sufferance.
The 1920 Nebi Musa riots or 1920 Jerusalem riots took place in British-controlled part of Occupied Enemy Territory Administration between Sunday, 4 April, and Wednesday, 7 April 1920 in and around the Old City of Jerusalem. Five Jews and four Arabs were killed, and several hundred were injured. The riots coincided with and are named after the Nebi Musa festival, which was held every year on Easter Sunday, and followed rising tensions in Arab-Jewish relations. The events came shortly after the Battle of Tel Hai and the increasing pressure on Arab nationalists in Syria in the course of the Franco-Syrian War.
The Faisal–Weizmann agreement was signed by Emir Faisal, the third son of Hussein ibn Ali al-Hashimi, King of the short-lived Kingdom of Hejaz, and Chaim Weizmann, President of the Zionist Organization on 3 January 1919. Signed two weeks before the start of the Paris Peace Conference, it was presented by the Zionist delegation alongside a March 1919 letter written by T. E. Lawrence in Faisal's name to American Zionist leader Felix Frankfurter as two documents to argue that the Zionist plans for Palestine had prior approval of Arabs.
Revisionist Zionism is a form of Zionism which is characterized by territorial maximalism. Revisionist Zionism promoted expansionism and the establishment of a Jewish majority on both sides of the Jordan River.
The World Zionist Organization, or WZO, is a non-governmental organization that promotes Zionism. It was founded as the Zionist Organization at the initiative of Theodor Herzl at the First Zionist Congress, which took place in August 1897 in Basel, Switzerland. The goals of the Zionist movement were set out in the Basel Program.
Musa Kazim Pasha al-Husayni held a series of senior posts in the Ottoman administration. He belonged to the prominent al-Husayni family and was mayor of Jerusalem (1918–1920). He was dismissed as mayor by the British authorities and became head of the nationalist Executive Committee of the Palestine Arab Congress from 1922 until 1934. His death was believed to have been caused by injuries received during an anti-British demonstration.
The Jewish Resistance Movement, also called the United Resistance Movement (URM), was an alliance of the Zionist paramilitary organizations Haganah, Irgun and Lehi in the British Mandate of Palestine. It was established in October 1945 by the Jewish Agency and operated for some ten months, until August 1946. The alliance coordinated acts of sabotage to undermine the British authority in Mandatory Palestine.
As an organized nationalist movement, Zionism is generally considered to have been founded by Theodor Herzl in 1897. However, the history of Zionism began earlier and is intertwined with Jewish history and Judaism. The organizations of Hovevei Zion, held as the forerunners of modern Zionist ideals, were responsible for the creation of 20 Jewish towns in Palestine between 1870 and 1897.
The Haycraft Commission of Inquiry was a Royal Commission set up to investigate the Jaffa riots of 1921, but its remit was widened and its report entitled "Palestine: Disturbances in May 1921". The report blamed the Arabs for the violence, but identified a series of grievances concerning the way their interests were apparently being subsumed to the interests of the Jewish immigrants, who were then around 10% of the population and increasing rapidly. Some measures to ease Arab unhappiness were taken, but Jewish communities were helped to arm themselves and ultimately the report was ignored. Publishing it was considered a propitiatory measure.
The Palin Commission or Palin Commission of Inquiry or Palin Court of Inquiry was the first British Commission of Inquiry on the question of Palestine.
The Palestinian people are an Arabic-speaking people with family origins in the region of Palestine. Since 1964, they have been referred to as Palestinians, but before that they were usually referred to as Palestinian Arabs. During the period of the British Mandate, the term Palestinian was also used to describe the Jewish community living in Palestine. The Arabic-language newspaper Falastin (Palestine) was founded in 1911 by Palestinian Christians.
The intercommunal conflict in Mandatory Palestine was the civil, political and armed struggle between Palestinian Arabs and Jewish Yishuv during the British rule in Mandatory Palestine, beginning from the violent spillover of the Franco-Syrian War in 1920 and until the onset of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
Events in the year 1935 in the British Mandate of Palestine.
The Mandate for Palestine was a League of Nations mandate for British administration of the territories of Palestine and Transjordan, both of which had been conceded by the Ottoman Empire following the end of World War I in 1918. The mandate was assigned to Britain by the San Remo conference in April 1920, after France's concession in the 1918 Clemenceau–Lloyd George Agreement of the previously-agreed "international administration" of Palestine under the Sykes–Picot Agreement. Transjordan was added to the mandate after the Arab Kingdom in Damascus was toppled by the French in the Franco-Syrian War. Civil administration began in Palestine and Transjordan in July 1920 and April 1921, respectively, and the mandate was in force from 29 September 1923 to 15 May 1948 and to 25 May 1946 respectively.
Mandatory Palestine was a geopolitical entity established between 1920 and 1948 in the region of Palestine under the terms of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine.
This is a timeline of intercommunal conflict in Mandatory Palestine.