During the
interwar period, Arabs and Jews struggled to define the nature of Palestine.
By Howard M. Sachar
Palestine experienced significant changes in the period
between the two World Wars, as the land formerly under Ottoman control came to
be ruled by the British, who promised simultaneously to promote the
modernization of the land and its inhabitants, the establishment of a Jewish
national home, and Arab self-rule. These goals proved contradictory, and thus,
under British rule from 1918-1948, Palestine was characterized by increasingly
tense relationships among the British, Jews, and Arabs, all of whom felt that
they had the right to the same land.
The following article
examines the basic development of the Arab and the Jewish communities in
Palestine during this period. (Other articles on The Balfour Declaration and
The British Mandate explore British policy in Palestine during the interwar
period.) It consists of excerpts reprinted with permission from A
History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Times (Knopf).
The
development of the Yishuv (Jewish settlement) during the interwar period
By the end of the mandate's first decade…more that 162,000
Jews lived… in Palestine, 17 percent of the country's inhabitants. Of these,
37,000 lived on the soil, in 11 agricultural settlements totaling 700,000
dunams [approximately 175,000 acres]; 13 other Zionist agricultural schools and
experimental stations were also functioning. Improved farming techniques were
continually being devised. Citrus crops were growing in size and quality.
The industrial development of the Yishuv showed similar
promise. By 1930, 1,500 Jewish-operated factories and workshops were producing
textiles, clothing, metal goods, lumber, chemicals, stone, and cement, with a
total capital value of about PL 1 million.
The quality of life was improving, as well. The broad Kupat Cholim health network was
partially responsible. So was Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization of
America. Founded in 1912 by an American Jewess, Henrietta Szold, Hadassah's
dedicated mass membership by 1930 had established in Palestine four hospitals;
a nurse's training school; 50 clinics, laboratories, and pharmacies; and an
excellent maternity and child hygiene service in most of the cities and in a
number of the larger villages. The Women's International Zionist Organization
(WIZO) maintained three infant welfare centers in Tel Aviv.
It was as a result, then, of expanding medical care, of
systematic Jewish efforts to drain marshes and swamps, to provide a reasonable
diet and living standard for the Yishuv altogether, that marked reduction was
achieved in the incidence of tuberculosis, malaria, trachoma, and typhoid, the
historic scourges of the region. The Jewish mortality rate fell from 12.6 per
thousand in 1924 to 9.6 per thousand in 1930; Jewish infant mortality dropped
from 105 per thousand in 1924 to 69 per thousand in 1930. Progress in education
was not less impressive. In the early years of the mandate, the Va'ad Le'umi [an executive committee of
36 men and women drawn from the 314-member National Assembly, the elected
Jewish governmental body in the Yishuv] instituted compulsory school attendance
on the elementary level. By 1930, 28,000 children were attending Jewish
schools.
This, in sum, was the measure of the Yishuv's growth. It had
developed its own quasi-government, its own largely autonomous agricultural and
industrial economy, and its own public and social welfare institutions. Its
schools were infusing children with a spirit of Jewish national pride
unprecedented either in western Europe or among the most intensely Zionist
communities in eastern Europe. These qualities of self-sufficiency and national
loyalty ultimately would prove decisive--more crucial even than the expansion
of landholdings, financial resource, and world Jewish support--in protecting
the National Home against the mounting perils of Arab hostility and British
diplomatic equivocation.
The
Arabs of Palestine during the interwar period
As late as 1882, the Arab population of Palestine barely
reached 260,000. Yet by 1914 this number had doubled, and by 1920 it had
reached 600,000. Under the mandate, the figure grew even more dramatically,
climbing to 840,000 by 1931, and representing 81 percent of the country's
inhabitants.
Approximately 75,000 of the Palestine Arabs were Christian,
heavily impacted [that is, tightly packed] in the urban areas, comparatively
literate, and widely employed at the middle and lower echelons of the mandatory
administration. The Moslem Arabs--the majority‑--were [much less
economically and institutionally developed]. Fully 70 percent of them lived on
the soil, mainly in the hilly northern and central regions of the country,
where they raised grains, vegetables, olive oil, and tobacco.
A 1922 census revealed that a third of the Arab farmers were
fellahin-‑tenant sharecroppers‑-whose
average plot rarely exceeded 100 dunams (25 acres). Endlessly indebted to their
landlords, to whom they paid a rent of from 33 to 50 percent of their crops,
they lived with their families of five or more children in mud‑brick
huts, possessed virtually no sanitary facilities, and suffered chronically from
amoebic dysentery and bilharziasis.
Submarginal as these conditions were, they were immeasurably
better than those of Moslem Arabs elsewhere in the Middle East. The statistics
of Arab population growth were revealing: in Palestine, the increase between 1922
and 1946 was 118 percent, a rate of almost 5 percent annually, and the highest
in the Arab world except for Egypt. It was not all natural increase. During
those 24 years, approximately 100,000 Arabs entered the country from
neighboring lands. The influx could be traced in some measure to the orderly
government provided by the British, but far more, certainly, to theeconomic opportunities made possible
by Jewish settlement.
The rise of the Yishuv benefited Arab life indirectly, by
disproportionate Jewish contributions to government revenues, and thereby to
increased mandatory expenditures in the Arab sector; and directly, by new
markets for Arab produce and (until the civil war of 1936) employment
opportunities for Arab labor. It was significant, for example, that the
movement of Arabs within Palestine itself was largely to regions of Jewish
concentration. Thus, Arab population increase during the 1930s was 87 percent
in Haifa, 61percent in Jaffa, 37
percent in Jerusalem. A similar growth was registered in Arab towns located
near Jewish agricultural villages. The 25 percent rise of Arab participation in
industry could be traced exclusively to the needs of the large Jewish
immigration.
Under the Turks, Arab political life had been rudimentary
and had consisted largely of maneuvers for civil office among rival effendi families ["effendi" is
a Turkish title of respect, used most commonly for government officials or
members of the aristocracy]. No organized nationalist movement whatever came
into being until after the Armistice, when Moslem‑Christian Associations
were founded in various Arab towns to protest the impending Jewish National
Home. This opposition, too, was at first essentially a projection of Syrian
nationalism. It followed the lead of Arab politicians in Damascus during the
unsuccessful 1919‑1920 effort to establish an independent Syrian kingdom.
Accordingly, the collapse of Feisal's regime in the summer
of 1920 and the transfer of nationalist headquarters from Damascus to Jerusalem
played a critical role in the development of an authentic Palestine Arab
nationalism. It did not escape the Arab leadership, especially those who
formerly had devoted their energies to the Hashemite cause in Syria, that the
Zionists, as a minority settlement, were surely more vulnerable to concerted
resistance than were the French or British.
In December 1920, therefore, the Moslem‑Christian
Associations sponsored a convention in Haifa, a gathering that subsequently
transformed itself into a Palestine Arab Congress. Here at last the demand was
expressly submitted that Britain institute a national‑--that is, Arab-‑government
in Palestine. The Congress afterward proceeded to elect an Arab Executive, a
body that from 1921 on implacably opposed the British mandate and the Jewish
National Home.
While the Executive's hostility to Zionism was rooted at
least partly in suspicion of Jewish free labor and collective agriculture, and
the ideas these innovations might plant in the minds of the fellahin, it
reflected more basically a fear of the political consequences of Jewish
immigration. Centuries of exile in Europe clearly had westernized Jews and
enabled them to far exceed the Arab community in their intellectual and
technological accomplishments. The Arab leaders were genuinely alarmed by the
influx of these "overbearing and truculent" newcomers, and warned
that the European Jews, with apparently limitless energy and financial backing,
would someday engulf the whole of Palestine.
Howard M. Sachar is a
Professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University
in Washington DC.
ã
1976, 1996 by Howard M. Sachar
