1918 - 1948: The British Mandate over Palestine

The British administration brought a new element to Palestine, the rule of law, or at least attempts to enforce the rule of law. As virtually all Arab-Jewish crime and violence was initiated by the Arabs they saw the British as unfairly supporting the Jews.

Mohmsen Mohammed Saleh: 483,000 Jews migrated to Palestine during the British Mandate period and by 1948 they were 646,000 (31.7% of the population) and controlled 6% of the land holding 291 settlements. All the land the Jews purchased was sold by Arabs or Ottomans. Every large landowner knew he was making his tenants, the long-term clients of his family, landless. The fellaheen had already been steadily losing "their" land due to debt, drought and poor farming practices. The patron-tenant relationship was a one-way power relationship.

At the end of the British Mandate period only 25% of the land was registered for private ownership

  • 12% of the land was owned by Palestinian Arabs
  • 7.5% of the land was owned by Jews

Further Information

The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, established to examine the situation of European Jewry and the Palestine problem, visited Palestine from March 6, 1946, to March 28, 1946. Benny Morris in 1948 wrote:

The Palestinians' "Arab Office," headed by Musa al Alami, cautioned the AAC against regarding "Jewish colonization in Palestine and Arab resistance to it in terms of white colonization of America and Australia and the resistance of the Red Indians and Aborigines." Nor would Zionist-engendered prosperity persuade the Arabs to shelve their opposition to a movement that was bent on their dispossession. 71 The Jewish Agency presented a report that emphasized Arab (and specifically Palestinian Arab) backwardness and Zionism's role as a bearer of enlightenment and progress. The agency offered reams of statistics and graphs to demonstrate Zionist beneficence. Of particular effect was the month the committee members spent touring DP camps, especially in Poland. Jewish Agency agents, working behind the scenes, made sure that the committee met and heard only Jews propounding the Zionist solution. The committee found that the displaced Jews in Poland lived in an "atmosphere of terror," with "pogroms … an everyday occurrence." (Indeed, some fifteen hundred Jews were slaughtered by antiSemitic Poles in the year following the end of World War II.) The committee members were persuaded of the need for wholesale immigration of the DPs to Palestine.

Before reaching Palestine, the members visited Arab capitals. At Riyadh, King Ibn Saud told them: "The Jews are our enemies everywhere. Wherever they are found, they intrigue and work against us. … We drove the Romans [Byzantines] out of Palestine. … How, after all this sacrifice, would a merchant [that is, Jew] come and take Palestine out of our hands for money?" Ibn Saud then presented each member with a golden dagger and an Arabian robe and headdress and showed off his harem. He offered to find Judge Singleton a spouse.72

In the hearings in Palestine, the Jewish leaders again offered statistics and graphs and argued that the Arabs already had a number of states; the Palestinian Arabs did not need a separate state of their own. Ben-Gurion banned all but mainstream Zionist spokesmen from appearing before the AAC (though, defying the leadership, Hebrew University president Yehuda Leib Magnes also testified, advocating a binational solution). The Arabs preferred to impress the AAC with "a sumptuous luncheon at Katy Antonius's or a ceremonial visit to a large estate rather than any systematic marshalling of facts and figures to make a convincing presentation."73

But perhaps more important than the formal testimony were the committee's tours around the country. The contrary realities of Zionist and Arab existence left an abiding impression. After visiting Kibbutz Mishmar Ha'emek, at the western edge of the Jezreel Valley, Crossman wrote: "I've never met a nicer community anywhere." By contrast, two hundred yards down the road, he later reported, was "the stenchiest Arab village I have ever seen," where Crossman was treated to tea "on the [earthen] floor of a filthy hovel."74

And Aydelotte later wrote: "I left Washington pretty strongly anti-Zionist. … But when you see at first hand what these Jews have done in Palestine … the greatest creative effort in the modern world. The Arabs are not equal to anything like it and would destroy all that the Jews have done. … This we must not let them do."75 Buxton was later to compare the Haganah to the American revolutionary army, "a rabble in arms in the fine sense."76

One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate - Tom Segev

One morning, sometime after General Sir Evelyn Barker had arrived in Palestine to suppress the Jewish terrorist organizations, he heard Irving Berlin's "Dancing Cheek to Cheek" on the radio program Musical Clock. That was in the summer or autumn of 1946, at 7:15 in the morning. The general immediately sat down to write to Katy Antonius: "You are the first woman I've ever done it with," he wrote, referring apparently to dancing cheek to cheek. "I enjoyed every moment and wished it could have gone on." She had told him that he had, perhaps, fallen in love with her. Barker appreciated her comment more than anything, he wrote, because in fact he had been in love with her for months.1

Their love story is revealed in close to one hundred letters that the general wrote on official army stationary and sent by special messenger, his driver, to his beloved's house in east Jerusalem, a few blocks from his own home on the city's west side. The letters tell a story of ecstasy and tragedy, pathos, mystery, and deception, danger, hope, and disappointment, romance, tears, and kisses - all against the background of nationalist terror, the crumbling of an empire, the birth of one nation and the devastation of another.

Barker was forty-two, married, and the father of a son. Before arriving in Palestine in May 1946 he had enjoyed a celebrated military career that began when he decided in his youth, a short time before World War I, to enlist in the army and become a professional soldier like his father. In the 1930s, Barker was sent to Palestine for the first time to help the army suppress the Arab rebellion. In World War II, he participated in the invasion of Normandy. He distinguished himself in the battle to liberate Le Havre, as a result of which the king granted him a knighthood. Afterward he joined the VIII Corps, which crossed the Rhine under General Montgomery and advanced through northern Germany. On April 15, 1945, his men liberated the Bergen-Belsen death camp. An officer of the old school, he exuded colonial arrogance - tall, thin, slightly bent, with a steely, penetrating gaze devoid of emotion. Yet in his letters to Katy Antonius he sounds like a schoolboy in love.*

The widow of George Antonius, Katy was the daughter of Dr. Faris Nimr Pasha of Alexandria, senator, expert on the Arab language, and owner of the prestigious newspaper Al-Muqadam. From a young age she had been taught that her culture was European. She kept company with Western diplomats and spoke a number of their languages as if they were her own. Her sister married Sir Walter Alexander Smart, a high official in the British embassy in Cairo. "Katy Antonius was an intelligent, bright, and witty woman, full of humor and charm," Anwar Nusseibeh said of her, "always up-to-date on the intricacies of political events, pretty, good-hearted, and generous." She lived in a house that was owned by the mufti and was a high-society hostess; her guests included everyone who was anyone in the British administration - Western politicians, journalists, artists, notables from around the world, as well as many leaders from the Arab countries.5

One of her guests, British journalist and politician Richard Crossman, described her house as a political salon in the French style. He wrote of one magnificent party: "Evening dress, Syrian food and drink, and dancing on the marble floor." As far as he could make out, the guests were a mix of Arabs and Britishers. "It is easy to see why the British prefer the Arab upper class to the Jews," Crossman went on. "This Arab intelligentsia has a French culture, amusing, civilized, tragic and gay. Compared with them the Jews seem tense, bourgeois, central European." In the car that took Crossman back to the King David Hotel, a British official explained that there were two societies in Jerusalem, not three - one Anglo-Arab, the other Jewish, and the two could not mix.6

Barker seems to have fallen in love with Katy Antonius at one of those parties. When they saw each other at social events they would keep a discreet distance; the following day he would write how hard he had found being in her company without touching her. He frequently visited her home in the evenings, and the next morning would write to her how much he enjoyed her company, how important she was to him, how much he loved her. "I am not sentimental," he wrote once during a flight home, "but am sensitive to love and kindness. I could not keep the tears away from my eyes as I drove off this morning - stupid as you may think me."7 By the time Barker's plane had landed he had written Katy another letter.8 He promised over and over again that he was on the Arab side and made her party to several military secrets, including some dealing with the fight against Jewish terrorism.

In the wake of the King David bombing, Barker translated these instructions into an order declaring all Jewish establishments, including restaurants and places of entertainment, off-limits to British soldiers. He knew this would be difficult, Barker wrote to his men, but the Jews had to learn just how much the British despised them, and the best way to punish them was by striking at their pockets, which the race particularly disliked. His choice of words was unfortunate. They were interpreted as antisemitic and caused an uproar. Katy Antonius preserved among her papers a caricature that appeared in England showing Barker brandishing his statement while standing on a copy of Hitler's Mein Kampf. Barker was soon returned to England. Many years later he claimed, in a conversation with Lord Nicholas Bethell, that it had been "a rotten letter written on the spur of the moment."43

But Barker's disclaimer was false. Sometime after returning to England, he wrote to Kate Antonius. "They do hate having their pockets touched, as I said in my letter," he noted, adding, "I hope the Arabs will no longer think we are afraid to hang Jews." Two terrorists had committed suicide in prison before being executed, and Barker commented, "So that's two more less." His hostility to the Jews was clearly an inseparable part of his love for his Katy, and that love was part of his hostility. He would gaze at her picture, his eyes growing damp: "Katy, I love you so much, Katy," he wrote her. "Just think of all this life and money being wasted for these b - y Jews. Yes I loathe the lot - whether they be Zionists or not. Why should we be afraid of saying we hate them - it's time this damned race knew what we think of them - loathsome people."44

  • Zionism and the Palestinians - Flapan Simha