"The tragedy in Palestine is not just a local one; it is a tragedy for the world, because it is an injustice that is a menace to the world's peace." Arnold Toynbee, British historian
Our story starts here in 1799, outside the walls of Acre in Ottoman-controlled Palestine.
An army under Napoleon Bonaparte besieged the city, all part of a campaign to defeat the Ottomans and establish a French presence in the region. In search of allies, Napoleon issued a letter, offering Palestine as a homeland to the Jews, under French protection. He called on the Jews to 'rise up' against what he called their oppressors.
Napoleon's appeal was widely publicised. But he was ultimately defeated.
In Acre today, the only memory of him is a statue atop a hill overlooking the city.
Yet Napoleon's project for a Jewish homeland in the region under a colonial protectorate did not die.
Forty years later, the plan was revived by the British, this time, as a means of thwarting the rising power of Egyptian governor Mohammad Ali.
In 1840 British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston wrote to his ambassador in Constantinople urging him to convince the Sultan and his entourage to open Palestine for the immigration of Jews.
At that time, there were estimated to be no more than 3,000 Jews in Ottoman-controlled Palestine.
Over the years Jewish immigration to Palestine increased, helped on by wealthy benefactors.
One of these was the French aristocrat Baron Edmond de Rothschild.
He began visiting Palestine in the 1880's and became one of the Jewish community's leading sponsors.
He spent over 14 million French Francs to establish 30 Jewish settlements.
The most important was Rishon Le Zion, founded in 1882.
Today the remains of Baron Rothschild lie in a mausoleum in northern Israel. It's a popular site for Israeli schoolchildren, learning about the wealthy patron who bankrolled Jewish-settlement-building in Palestine over 100 years ago.
In 1885 the term "Zionism" was first coined by Austrian writer Nathan Birnbaum.
It is derived from the word Zion, one of the biblical names for Jerusalem.
Zionism came to mean the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine but not all Jews supported this.
In 1896, Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian journalist wrote a book called "The Jewish State". It is considered one of the most important texts of early Zionism.
Herzl envisioned the founding of a future independent Jewish state during the 20th century.
His colleague, Max Nordau, sent two rabbis to Palestine to investigate the prospects for a Jewish state there.
Their report concluded: "The bride is beautiful but she is married to another man."
The rabbis understood that Palestine's spouse was the Palestinian society rooted in its soil.
In 1897, Herzl with Birnbaum and Nordau convened the First Zionist Congress in the Swiss city of Basel.
The Congress adopted a program for the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine.
Herzl openly lobbied for this. He contacted the major European powers to persuade them to protect such an entity. Herzl was the father of the Zionist state but he didn't create the Zionist ideology.
In 1907 the British government set up a committee to devise a strategy toward the Muslim-Arab population of the Ottoman empire.
The committee's report submitted to British Prime Minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman in 1907, recommended establishing a so-called 'buffer state' in Palestine.
The report proposed this state be hostile to its neighbours and friendly to Europe. The aim was to divide the region - and so assure Britain's continued imperial dominance.
In 1907, Chaim Weizmann, a chemist who had emerged as a leader among British Zionists, visited Palestine for the first time. He set out to establish a company in Jaffa to develop the land of Palestine, a practical means to pursue the Zionist dream of building a Jewish state. His venture was supported by Baron de Rothschild.
Within three years a major deal was struck. The Jewish National Fund, set up to buy land in Palestine purchased some 10,000 dunums in the Marj Bin Amer region of northern Palestine. The sale to the Jewish National Fund had dire consequences for the thousands of Palestinian farmers living on the land.
From the very early moment the Zionist movement targeted Palestine as the place for Jewish independence and statehood and it was clear that there were Palestinians on the land. Zionists leaders and common people alike got used to the idea that the only way of making Palestine a Jewish state is by causing the Palestinians to leave." AZMI BISHARA POLITICAL ANALYST.
Expelling the farmers accomplished two aims: seizing the land or the 'Judaization' of the land and replacing Arab farmers with Jews from Eastern Europe and Yemen.
A Jewish militia known as "Hashomer" was established to protect the growing number of Jewish settlements.
In 1909 and to 1911 Jews held demonstrations to demand the recognition of Hebrew as an official language under Ottoman rule.
The Arabs and Palestinians were aware of the concept of Zionism from day one. It's a racist movement seeking capital to colonise land and exploit religion to create a homeland for the remaining Jews of the world. This was clear in the writings of Najib Azuri and Najib Nassar.
In 1908, Najib Nassar, a Palestinian pharmacist, began publishing a newspaper called "Al-Karmel."
In it, he warned of Zionism as a movement aimed at displacing the Palestinians.
He wrote: "The Jewish state would be a poisonous dagger in the heart of the Arabs."
The outbreak of World War I in 1914 created new opportunities to reshape the Middle East.
1914 - World War I
During the war the British planned to secure the area of Palestine, which lay close to the Suez Canal especially as the British had a presence in Egypt. They favoured the Zionist Organization as a partner in a strategic colonial order.
In 1915, a secret memorandum was presented to the British cabinet under the title, "The Future of Palestine." It was drafted by Herbert Samuel, a British politician and Zionist committed to Palestine becoming a home for the Jewish people.
In the document, Samuel advised the time was 'not ripe' for the establishment of an autonomous Jewish state in Palestine.
He recommended instead that Palestine be annexed to the British empire, describing this as the 'most welcome' solution to the supporters of the Zionist movement.
He expressed the hope that under British rule, and over time, more Jews would settle in the land and grow into a majority, among what he called the 'Mahammedans of Arab race.'
In 1916 Samuel's recommendations were taken into account in the secret British-French agreement, formulated by British politician Sir Mark Sykes and French diplomat Francois Georges-Picot.
The Sykes-Picot agreement opened the way for the establishment of a Jewish state.
In 1917, the British cabinet, headed by Prime Minister David Lloyd George, pledged to establish a homeland for the Jews in Palestine.
The pledge came in the form of a letter from the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, to the influential British Zionist Lord Walter Rothschild.
Balfour represented the British government. When he wrote his letter to Lord Rothschild, it was on behalf of the British government.
Rothschild played the role of lobbyist to encourage the British government to take a stance regarding the Jews in Palestine.
Behind all this stood Chaim Weizmann heading the World Zionist Organisation.
Britain had no moral or political or legal right to promise the land that belongs to the Arabs to another people. So the Balfour Declaration was both immoral and illegal.
A month after Balfour's pledge, a meeting took place in London to celebrate the declaration. Speakers included Lord Rothschild, Herbert Samuel, Mark Sykes and Chaim Weizmann.
Just several days later, on December 11th 1917, the British army commanded by General Edmund Allenby captured Jerusalem.
Entering the holy city alongside Allenby was a Jewish military unit, established under British auspices.
One member of this unit was David Ben-Gurion, who would later be Israel's first prime minister.
The unit also included Ze'ev Jabotinsky, a future Zionist leader as well as Nehemiah Rabin, soon-to-be father of young boy, Yitzhak Rabin.
In 1918 Within a month General Allenby welcomed Chaim Weizmann in Jerusalem.
There were approximately 50,000 Jews in Palestine at this time, ten per cent of the population among half a million Arabs.
The Great War ended in 1918 and preparations were made for a peace conference in Paris.
President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, commissioned an investigation into the non-Turkish areas of the former Ottoman empire.
The commission was headed by the academic Dr. Henry King and the politician Charles Crane.
When it was eventually published, the Crane-King Report proved to be political dynamite. The report stated that the 'NON-JEWISH POPULATION OF PALESTINE - NEARLY NINE TENTHS OF THE WHOLE - WAS EMPHATICALLY AGAINST' the Zionist program.
The report went on to warn that: 'anti-Zionist feeling in Palestine and Syria was intense and not lightly to be flouted.' It divulged conversations with British officers who suggested a force of 'not less than 50,000 soldiers would be required to initiate the Zionist program'.
The authors judged all this as 'evidence'... of what they described as a strong sense of the injustice of the Zionist program. The report concluded: 'Jewish immigration should be definitely limited and the project for making Palestine distinctly a Jewish commonwealth should be given up.'
The KingCrane report fell on deaf ears.
At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Britain was represented by Prime Minister David Lloyd George and Arthur Balfour.
A delegation from the Zionist Organisation attended, headed by Chaim Weizmann.
They presented a map seen here - proposing the area to be allocated for a Jewish homeland.
The map included both Palestine and the east bank of the Jordan River, as well as parts of what are today southern Lebanon and Syria.
Parallel to the conference, the leader of the Arab delegation, Prince Faisal Bin Hussein, signed with the Zionist delegation's leader what became known as the FaisalWeizmann agreement.
It outlined Faisal's approval for a Jewish homeland in Palestine and an Arab nation in the larger Middle East.
The agreement was mediated by Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence known as 'Lawrence of Arabia.'
Faisal signed adding in his own hand writing that the agreement be dependent on the Arabs gaining their independence.
From 1919 onward, the Zionist movement understood that focusing on foreign policy wasn't enough.
And In 1919 the Zionist movement established an intelligence centre here.
Relations had been good between Jews and Arabs in many areas.
There was a second generation of Jews whose parents came here in 1884 or 1886 and they were born here. They spoke Arabic, rode horses and had Arab friends. They started gathering information, mainly political. Opinions. Would the Arabs agree to the Zionist programme? Where was the empty land? Who was ready to sell land to Jews?
And if there was a plan to attack Jews in a particular area, then someone would tip off his Jewish friends, warning them that there would be attacks on Jewish settlements.
In 1920 the first British High Commissioner for Palestine was appointed.
Controversially London selected Herbert Samuel for the post. Samuel was a committed Zionist. Many suspected he would set out to implement what he had proposed five years earlier by favouring Jewish immigration to transform Palestine into a Jewish homeland.
In 1922, the League of Nations formalised British rule in Palestine The second clause of the British Mandate document approved by the League of Nations stipulated: "The British Mandatory shall be responsible for placing the country under political, administrative and economic conditions that will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home."
British High Commissioner Herbert Samuel decreed Hebrew as an official language of Palestine alongside Arabic and English.
The letters E and Y were added to the word 'Palestine' in Hebrew as an abbreviation of the words "Eretz Yisrael", meaning "Land of Israel."
Herbert Samuel was responsible for the legal creation of Israel under the British Mandate.
He enacted at least a hundred separate legislative items to ensure that Arab lands would pass into Jewish hands and permitted the establishment of a separate Jewish educational system. But the crucial British accomplishment was allowing the Jews to have their own army.The British mandate took all unclaimed properties, neglected or owned by
the government, and gave them to the Zionist movement to build
settlements.
The British authority granted land to the Jews to build Kibbutzim.
The British protected the Jewish Agency, which worked as a semi-government, giving it all the help they could and assisting it to conceal its activities It was Zionist skill, British conspiracy and, I'm sorry to say, Arab and Palestinian folly. Palestinians viewed the British mandatory authority and British troops on the ground as siding with the Jews.
More and more Palestinian farmers expelled from farmlands began to join newly-formed revolutionary groups.
In 1921, Palestinians organized large demonstrations against Jewish immigration. At that time, the Palestinian leadership was in effect hereditary, within one family.
The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, inherited his position at the age of 25, following the death of his brother, who had in turn succeeded their father. The leadership sent successive delegations to London to discuss the Palestinian question.
The Palestinian national movement was trying to maintain friendly relations with Britain along with hostility toward the Zionist movement. This was impossible.
A select Palestinian elite found itself facing the elites of empires who were the Jewish elite.
At that time whenever Palestinian organizations met the Christian-Islamic Committee or the Supreme Islamic Council, a report would be delivered within hours to the Jews. The reports detailed their discussions, the various opinions of the speakers, those who were seen as enemies, those who could be bought and so forth. These reports still exist in the Zionist archive.
The changes on the ground in Palestine can be noted in the British government's report to the Council of the League of Nations in 1925.
The document reported the immigration of more than 33,000 Jews, who were granted Palestinian nationality.
This was three times the figure of the previous year. Thirteen new settlements were built, according to the report.
A Jewish labor union, called the Histadrut had been set up under the direction of David Ben-Gurion and the Jewish town of Tel Aviv was accorded municipal autonomy.
In addition, the Hebrew University was officially opened in 1925 at a ceremony attended by British High Commissioner Herbert Samuel, the former British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, and the head of the Zionist Organization Chaim Weizmann.
As Weizmann's guest, Balfour visited a number of Jewish settlements.
In Jerusalem, he met with Samuel and Allenby, the two men who had helped implement the policy he himself had laid out 8 years earlier in the famous Balfour Declaration.
The Palestinians went on strike to protest against Balfour's visit. They raised black flags to signal their opposition to the policies Balfour had set in train.
Weizmann congratulated Samuel for his work towards the establishment of a national Jewish homeland.
The Zionist movement was active in its propaganda.
This film, in French, showed the map of Palestine with areas highlighted as land the Zionists claimed to have acquired as of 1925.
[ 1925: 177,000 dunums The achievement of 25 years! The task over the next 25 years: 1 million dunums for the Jewish National Fund.]
The film also shows the areas Zionists planned to acquire within the next 25 years.
In the summer of 1929, ardent Zionist groups organized a gathering at the Wailing Wall known to the Palestinians as Al Bouraq in Jerusalem.
The incident ignited violent demonstrations called the "Bouraq Revolt," led by a Palestinian farmer named Farhan al Saadi.
More than 100 Arabs and Jews were killed on both sides. 1929, Sir John Chancellor, the new British High Commissioner in Palestine, issued a strongly-worded memorandum calling for all those who took part in the revolt to be severely punished.
Three Palestinians were arrested and accused of participating in the revolt. They were Fuad Hassan Hijazi from the village of Safad, Atta Ahmed al Zeir from Hebron and Mohammad Khalil Jamjoum, whose picture could not be found.
Acre Prison - The three men were jailed here at Acre prison.
The British sentenced them to death.
Arab delegations pleaded for their sentences to be commuted.
But on June 17th, 1930, the British authorities had the three men executed.
A cemetery in Acre still contains the graves of the three men.
In a final statement, before their execution,they had written: "At the end of our lives we say to the Arab leaders, and Muslims all over the world: Do not trust the foreigners. We lived and died for the Arab cause."
Such sentiments of anti-colonialism and pan-Arabism would become increasingly common in subsequent decades.
During the first ten years of the British mandate, the number of Jews in Palestine more than doubled to reach 175,000. Zionists all over the world were proud of their achievement.
1931 - STEPHEN WISE AMERICAN ZIONIST.
I am here today to ask you, my fellow Zionists, which attitude shall we take, which of the possible attitudes that we face should be our own. I would say to England that I am not only an American Jew, I am also an old time reverence, admirer of Great Britain. I would say to England if I could: an Arab Palestine is a threat to Great Britain and a menace to the world. A Jewish Palestine is an asset to Great Britain and a blessing to the world.
DAVID LLOYD GEORGE FORMER BRITISH PRIME MINISTER.
It is as your chairman reminded you, it is nearly sixteen years since he recruited me to the Zionist movement. In Palestine, barren malarial swamps have been converted into happy settlements. The soil has given a harvest, with water which had been running wild and waste since the early days of creation."
Without vegetation and without life. Empty desolation; that is Palestine.
British news bulletins of the time described Palestine as akin to a desert. The reality was very different.
British politicians of the early 20th century had a distorted view of Palestinian society, frequently labeling it as "Mohammedan". Despite the population including over 100,000 Palestinian Christians.
The presence of Eastern Orthodox Christians in the Middle East causes a dilemma to the colonialists They rely on their Christian ideology to justify their support of Zionism.
By 1933, protests against Jewish immigration were becoming ever more frequent in Palestine. Women took part side by side with men. The British authorities cracked down on demonstrations and arrested thousands. Many were killed and wounded.
Musa Kazim al Husayni, the 80 year-old former mayor of Jerusalem, was beaten by British soldiers during a demonstration in Jaffa. He later died of his injuries.
1933 - The British authorities became ever more heavy-handed.
This letter was written by a Palestinian policeman condemning the behavior of his British senior officer John Faraday.
A number of other complaints were filed against Faraday. The officer was never charged.
Four years later, Faraday was awarded the King's Police Medal for his 'valuable services' in Palestine.
Britain wasn't willing to respond to the national demands of the Palestinians and refused to recognize them as a national people deserving rights.
They regarded them merely as a group of sects while treating the Jewish Agency as the representative of a national movement.
All this led to the deterioration of the situation and inevitable clashes with Britain.
Only still images of the Palestinian demonstrations are available in the archives, movie cameras did capture Jewish life in Palestine.
This footage shows the Star of David flag over the Tel Aviv municipality building.
This is footage of work in the diamond factories of Tel Aviv and this footage shows the flow of new immigrants and the building of new settlements.
Footage of Palestinian life in the early 20th century proved more difficult to find.
Most of the Palestinians: intellectuals, leaders, journalists were still unaware of how determined the Zionist movement is in dispossessing them from Palestine.
In the 1930's the number of Jews immigrating to Palestine began to increase significantly.
From 4,000 in 1931, the figure jumped to 9,500 the following year.
In 1933, the number rose to 30,000.
In 1934, 42,000 and in 1935, a further jump to 62,000.
That same year, Palestinian poet Abdul Rahim Mahmud wrote a poem, which he read aloud to Prince Saud Bin Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia who was visiting Jerusalem.
He asked: "Did you come to visit the Holy Aqsa mosque, or to bid it farewell before it is lost!"
These lands were gradually lost. The Balfour Declaration was being implemented while the British turned a blind eye. They were extremely harsh and oppressive towards the Arabs.
Brutal repression, arbitrary arrests and forced exile of Palestinians. In this situation, Izz Ad-Din Al-Qassam appeared.
Al-Qassam wrote to the Palestinian leadership in Jerusalem proposing revolution. They replied the time was not right and the people weren't ready They told him they still believed they could win Palestinian rights through negotiation.
Sheikh Izz Ad-Din Al-Qassam established a revolutionary group to strike at Zionist and British targets.
In 1935, in the hills near Jenin, he and a small band of men were surrounded by British forces, making a defiant stand, Al- Qassam and those with him were killed.
The Al-Qassam movement didn't attract the attention of historians because Sheikh Qassam was very keen to maintain the secrecy of his operations only disclosing his plans to a few of his followers.
The spirit of Izz Ad-Din Al-Qassam spread widely and inspired many Palestinians. A spirit of rebellion against British imperialism grew amongst the Palestinians.
The Palestinian political leadership came under pressure to halt negotiations with the British.
Palestinian poet Ibrahim Touqan addressed a poem to the leadership in 1935. A poem dripping with irony.
"Oh, you sincere patriots. You who carry the heavy burden of the cause. Only a fragment of the country remains for us. So please step down before the remaining parts fly away."
On April the 19th 1936, Palestinian anger boiled over.
Protests erupted in the city of Jaffa, in coordination with a general strike.
The wave of anger spread throughout Palestine.
The reasons for the protests were proclaimed by a spokesman for the Palestinian leadership.
1936 - Spokesman for the Arab Higher Committee in Palestine.
The main case of the Arabs is against British government policy in Palestine: a policy which if continues will surely have as a result the replacement of the Arabs by the Jews. Against all principles, the British Government imposed the Balfour Declaration which is abhorred by all Arabs in the Near East. And in favoring the establishment of a national home for Jews forgot intentionally to safeguard the civil rights of the non-Jewish population.
The Arabs have decided on a general and a complete strike until the total and immediate stoppage of Jewish immigration is brought about and until the government introduces an essential change in its present policy.
The 1936 strike is one of the greatest strikes in history. The whole of Palestine went on strike. It was the climax of a long struggle against the Mandate and the British administration's bias towards the Jews.
The 1936 revolt shocked the British mandatory authorities who carried out harsh punitive actions. Anyone suspected of links with the revolutionaries was arrested their homes destroyed.
In Jaffa alone, more than two hundred houses were demolished as a collective punishment. Demolitions in other villages and cities followed. The British insisted that destroying Palestinian houses was justified as a means to end the revolt.
If you read the diaries of Ben-Gurion during the Arab revolt in 1936, he challenged Musa Al-Alami, the Arab negotiator, when they met under the mediation of the British High Commissioner Sir Arthur Wauchope. Ben-Gurion said: 'We have a strong presence on the ground, and the British cannot say no to us.'
During the Arab revolt, David Ben-Gurion, then a prominent leader of the Zionist movement, reportedly made a startling suggestion to the British High Commissioner Arthur Wauchope.
Ben-Gurion is said to have suggested all Palestinians expelled from their land by Jewish settlement-building should be resettled in neighbouring Transjordan.
The British High Commissioner is reported to have replied, that this was, in his words, a 'good idea.'
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