KS3 / KS4 / GCSE History: Origins of the Arab-Israel two-state solution

ARCHIVE NEWS: "Adolf Hitler, the indomitable Nazi leader, is now Chancellor of Germany. Inspired by his…"

REPORTER: The rise of Nazism in Hitler's Germany opened a new horrific chapter of antisemitism. Throughout the 1930s, Jews fled from Europe to settle in Palestine. Immigration quadrupled. But the Arabs resented their arrival and the Jews soon came under attack in their new homeland.

ARCHIVE NEWS: "At the Wailing Wall, refugees under British protection leave their quarters where terrorists have instituted the rule of force. British police search for arms in a country where in just over a month nearly 40 people have been killed in the disturbances."

Because they failed to respond to Arab fears, the British came to be seen as hostile to the Arab cause and they too began to come under attack. Arab discontent erupted into widespread civil disobedience with a general strike in 1936.

As things got worse, in 1937 Britain set up a royal commission to look at the issue, headed by the Secretary of State, Lord Peel. The Peel Commission recommended that the Mandate for Palestine should be ended. It called for the land to be divided into Jewish and Arab states.

The Peel Commission of Inquiry and its report was significant in the history of the conflict because the analysis was correct: they were two nations, and they could not be reconciled, and the only solution was partition. Palestinian and Arab representatives rejected this. They demanded an end to immigration and the setting up of an independent Arab state.

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ARCHIVE NEWS: A new Jerusalem, built for peace, today is the centre of turmoil and riot. British patrols in the city adopt the sternest methods to keep order.

REPORTER: In the summer of 1937, the Arab Revolt, that had been suspended during the deliberations of the Peel Commission, reignited. "Royal Engineers purged with dynamite the area where many have met a violent death."

That revolt, in turn, forced the British to bring in an unprecedented concentration of forces: tens of thousands of troops, squadrons of planes, and on the eve of World War II, which everyone knew, by the late 30s, was coming, put Britain in an impossible situation.

Once they'd crushed the revolt, the British began to rethink the way they ran the Mandate, trying to keep order in an increasingly tense environment. They were paying the price for their earlier double-dealing. That rethink resulted in a dramatic change of direction from Balfour's promise to the Zionists.

In 1939 a British Government white paper proposed that Palestine should be one country with Arabs and Jews sharing authority. For five years there'd be strict limits on Jewish immigration. Beyond that, new immigrants could come only if the Arabs agreed.

MORRIS: Just at the moment when the Jews most needed a state, a place to run away to, a haven for their persecuted brethren, the British closed the gates and left them stranded, in effect, in Europe, which ultimately meant that they were going to die at Nazi hands. I mean, the British didn't necessarily know this but they knew that the Jews were being persecuted and nonetheless they switched policy and closed Palestine to Jewish immigration.

In 1939 the British government published a white paper on Palestine which, looking back now, could have given the Arab community virtually all it wanted so long as it allowed continuing Jewish inward migration, but Jews would then have had to live within an Arab state of Palestine. And it was a historic error, on the part of the Palestinian leadership of that time, that it rejected the British white paper.