Why did the British oppose Jewish immigration to Palestine?
Background and History
Early Zionist immigration to Palestine began in the 19th century, while the territorywas still under the rule of the Ottoman Turks. After World War I, Britain was awarded the Mandate for Palestine by the League of Nations at the San Remo Conference in 1920, and its terms went into effect by 1923. The terms of the Mandate echoed the Balfour Declaration and Britain was to be responsible for its implementation until the subject region could become a self-governing sovereign country.
The Mandate language included the provision that Britain:
- … shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in co-operation with the [Jewish Agency], close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes
The Mandate also recognized the “historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine”.
This open-ended commitment to the Zionist cause was modified by the British almost from the beginning. In 1922, the Churchill White Paper confirmed the right of Jewish immigration but stipulated that this should not exceed the economic absorptive capacity of the country. Then, in the greatest act of treachery against the Palestine Mandate, the British split the Mandate with all land east of the Jordan River going into an entity called Transjordan, constituting almost 80 percent of the original Mandate. Jewish immigration and Jewish land ownership were forbidden in Transjordan. But that didn’t satisfy the Palestinian Arabs and the Arabist British. Even with the unbalanced division in their favor, the Arabs were uneasy with the Mandate’s recognition of the Balfour Declaration — they were adamantly opposed to any Jewish homeland in Palestine.
After Arab rioting in 1929, the Shaw Commission called for a re-examination of immigration policy and the establishment of a scientific inquiry into land usage and potential, the Hope-Simpson Commission. In 1936, the Arabs again staged a revolt in Palestine with stoppage of Jewish immigration as one of their principal demands. In response to the Arab unrest, the British Peel Commission recommended freezing immigration at 12,000 per year for five years and, now viewing Jewish-Arab cooperation as unworkable, also recommended partition. More Arab violence led to the White Paper of 1939 that made concessions to the Arabs on a wide range of issues. The British not only introduced severe restrictions on Jewish immigration (a total of 75,000 to be allowed over the next five years), and forbade land sales to Jews in most areas, but also put pressure on the German, Greek, Yugoslav, Bulgarian and Turkish Governments not to allow “illegal” immigrants into Palestine.
In the late 1930′s, when the Jews of Germany and Austria were in great danger, Palestine was closed to them. But under the British rule, it was not closed to thousands of illegal Arab immigrants who continued to pour into Palestine from other parts of the Middle East, attracted by the superior economic conditions created by the Zionists. No wonder Churchill could point out in 1939:
- Far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied until their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up (increase) the Jewish population.
The immigration restrictions were tantamount to a death sentence for countless European Jews. Even after the Holocaust became well-known, Britain’s restrictive policy remained in effect in Palestine, and the British administration in Palestine attempted to enforce it, continuing until the end of the Mandate period in 1948.
Implications of the Immigration Restrictions
In the early days of the Mandate, the immigration restrictions were an indication of bad faith by the British with respect to the intent of the Mandate. But immigration did continue and the Jewish population of Palestine continued to increase, both in absolute numbers and as a percentage. The Zionist organizations proceeded to build the infrastructure of a nation through their own hard work and the use of capital provided by Jewish donors from other parts of the world. During the Third Aliya (1919-1923) new immigrants built roads and towns, and projects such as the draining of marshes in the Jezreel Valley and the Hefer Plain were undertaken. The General Federation of Labor (Histadrut) was established, representative institutions for the yishuv were founded (the Elected Assembly and the National Council), and the Haganah (the clandestine Jewish defense organization) was formed. Agricultural settlement expanded, and the first industrial enterprises were established.
In the mid-1920s, Jewish immigration to Palestine increased primarily because of anti-Jewish economic legislation in Poland and Washington?s imposition of restrictive quotas on immigration to the United States. The Fourth Aliya (1924-1929) immigrants were middle class and brought modest sums of capital with which they established small businesses and workshops. Tel Aviv grew. Notwithstanding the yishuv’s economic woes, with an economic crisis in 1926 – 1928, the Fourth Aliya did much to strengthen the towns, further industrial development and reinstate Jewish labor in the villages. The British restrictions on immigration slowed but did not halt the process.
By the 1930s, however, the situation began to change. The rise of the Nazi government in Germany in 1933 and the later military conquests by Germany gave Hitler’s antisemitic government control over most of the populations of Europe. As the realization grew that the Nazi’s were intent on the extermination of Europe’s Jews, there was an urgent requirement to emigrate. But most countries closed their doors to immigration, particularly in large numbers.Only Palestine held out the hope of new settlement where Jews would be welcome. Or rather, that would be the case if it were not for the British.
The British resistence to immigration after 1939 was dramatically illustrated in 1941 by the loss of the ship named Struma with 760 Jewish passengers, a tragedy that wasentirely caused by British authorities’ unmitigated enforcement of their policy against the “illegal” Jewish immigrants fleeing from Hitler’s war against them.
After World War II, the impact of British opposition was devestating to Displaced Persons (refugees), recently saved from Hitler’s ovens but now in limbo created by international unwillingness to accept them as refugees. The one destination they preferred above all others was Palestine, but entry there was blocked by the British policy. Between August 1945 and the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, 65 “illegal” immigrant ships, carrying 69,878 people, arrived from European shores. In August 1946, however, the British began to intern those they caught in camps in Cyprus. Approximately 50,000 people were detained in the camps, 28,000 of whom were still imprisoned when Israel declared independence.
Ruth Gruber, an American journalist with close ties to the refugee situation was witness to the incident that became world-famous from Leon Uris’ book Exodus
- While in Jerusalem, [Gruber] learned that a former American pleasure boat, renamed the Exodus 1947, had attempted to deliver 4,500 Jewish refugees ? including 600 children, mostly orphans ? but was attacked by five British destroyers and a
cruiser. Gruber left immediately for Haifa and witnessed the Exodus entering the harbor, looking, as Gruber wrote, “like a matchbox splintered by a nutcracker.” - During the “battle,” the British rammed the Exodus and stormed it with guns, tear gas and truncheons. Gruber noted that the crew, mostly Jews from America and Palestine, fought back with potatoes, sticks and cans of kosher meat. The Exodus?s second officer, Bill Bernstein of San Francisco, was clubbed to death trying to prevent a British soldier from entering the wheelhouse. Two orphans were killed, one shot in the face point blank after he tossed an orange at a soldier.
- When she learned that the prisoners from the Exodus were being transferred to Cyprus, she flew there overnight. While she waited for the Exodus detainees, she photographed earlier Jewish prisoners living behind barbed wire in steaming hot tents with almost no water or sanitary facilities. “You had to smell Cyprus to believe it,” she cabled the New York Herald.
- The British changed plans and sent the Exodus prisoners to Port de Bouc in southern France, where they had first embarked. Gruber rushed there from Cyprus. When the prison ships arrived, the prisoners refused to disembark. After 18 days in which the refugees endured the blistering heat, the British decided to ship the Jews back to Germany. World press reaction reflected outrage. While hundreds of journalists descended on Port de Bouc, only Gruber was allowed by the British to accompany the DP?s back to Germany.
- Aboard the prison ship Runnymeade Park, Gruber photographed the refugees defiantly raising a Union Jack on which they had painted a swastika. Her photo became Life Magazine?s “Picture of the Week.” Crushed together on the sweltering ship, making their way back to Germany, the refugees sang “Hatikvah,” the Hebrew song of hope, soon to become Israel’s National Anthem.
Gruber?s book Exodus 1947 about the DP?s endurance would later provide Leon Uris with material for his book and screenplay, Exodus, which helped turn American public opinion in favor of Israel.
Why?
With all of the above facts established, the question still “Why did the British act this way?” The English have in the main been friendly to Jews, were the authors of the Balfour Declaration, and even admitted many Jewish refugees during the war years to England itself. So why did they become so ruthlessly hardnosed over the issue of immigration to Palestine in the face of the obvious appalling need?
Herbert Samuel, a British Jew who served as the first High Commissioner of Palestine, placed restrictions on Jewish immigration “in the ‘interests of the present population’ and the ‘absorptive capacity’ of the country.” The influx of Jewish settlers was said to be forcing the Arab fellahin (native peasants) from their land. This was at a time when less than a million people lived in an area that now supports more than six million.
But throughout the Mandatory period, Arab immigration was unrestricted. In 1930, the Hope-Simpson Commission, sent from London to investigate the 1929 Arab riots, said the British practice of ignoring the uncontrolled illegal Arab immigration from Egypt, Transjordan. Syria and North Africa had the effect of displacing the prospective Jewish immigrants. At the same time that the British slammed the gates on Jews, they permitted or ignored massive illegal immigration into Western Palestine from Arab countries. As noted above, in 1939 Winston Churchill observed, “… far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied …” How could the British claim that the Zionist settlers were the problem when Arab immigration continued unchecked?
The answer can only be that the British administration was far more sensitive to the Arab’s claims than to those of the Jews. In 1939, as World War II opened in Europe, the British needed to coax the Arabs into submissiveness so that the Suez Canal could be maintained in relative tranquility.
During the Struma incident, the British did not want to allow the refugees into Palestine because they were afraid that many more such shiploads of refugees would follow. Also, some British government officials used the often cited excuse against refugees and emigrants: there could be an enemy spy among the refugees.
Then there was oil. Palestine had no oil, but neighboring Arab states were the world’s newest and lowest cost suppliers. Oil was first discovered in Iran, and by 1911 a British concern, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC), was producing oil from there. The British found oil in Iraq after World War I. In 1932 Standard Oil Company of California (Socal) discovered oil in commercial quantities in Bahrain. Socal then obtained a concession in Saudi Arabia in 1933 and discovered oil in commercial quantities in 1938.
A flurry of oil exploration activity occurred in the gulf in the 1930s with the United States and Britain competing with one another for oil concessions. One reason for the increased activity was that in 1932 the new Iranian government of Reza Shah Pahlavi revoked APOC’s concession. Although the Shah and the British later agreed on new terms, the threat of losing Iranian oil convinced the British in particular that they must find other sources. The small states of the Persian Gulf were a natural place to look. Geological conditions were similar to those in Iran, and, because of treaties signed between 1820 and 1920, the British had substantial influence and could restrict foreign access.
Since the British relied on the Arab (or Arab-supporting) regimes of the Middle East, a pro-Arab policy in Palestine served them best to protect rights to Arab oil, the Suez canal, and British interests in India and beyond.
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To anyone who believes in the Bible they believe that God promised the two sons of Abraham, Isaac and Ismail that they would he the start of two great nations Israel and Arabia…The Arabs he blessed with a lot of land and oil….and the Jews the promised land…That land is being divided up ..Canaan…Samaria…Judea…whatever way they twist it…And God is angry..remember it is not what is in the minds of men but what is in the mind of GOD…I sometimes wonder with those British soldiers brought up with a judeo christian belief how they dealt with their consciences…and their governments orders..if you notice Britain has been in decline ever since 1948…