Europe’s Last Colony: 1918 Palestine’s Arab Majority, Jewish Immigration, and the Justice of Founding Israel Outside Europe
| Published date | 01 March 2012 |
| Date | 01 March 2012 |
| Author | Robert Wintemute |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663911425825 |
| Subject Matter | Review essay |
Review essay
Social & Legal Studies
21(1) 121–134
Europe’s Last Colony:
ª The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission:
1918 Palestine’s
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663911425825
Arab Majority,
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Jewish Immigration, and
the Justice of Founding
Israel Outside Europe
Robert Wintemute
King’s College London School of Law, UK
VICTOR KATTAN, From Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the Origins of the
Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1891–1949. London: Pluto Press, 2009, xl þ 416 pp., ISBN 9780745325781,
£29.95 (pbk).
[I]mportant experiments in colonization have been made, though on the mistaken principle
of a gradual infiltration of Jews . . . [which] continues till the inevitable moment when the
native population feels itself threatened, and forces the Government to stop a further influx
. . . Immigration is consequently futile unless we have the sovereign right to continue such
immigration [p. 95] . . . We should [in Palestine] form a portion of a rampart of Europe
against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism. We should as a neutral
State remain in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence
[p. 96] . . . [T]he emigrants will be welcomed . . . without foolish exultation, for the
Promised Land will not yet have been conquered [p. 116] . . . Some . . . colonists will
. . . have built their houses before becoming permanent settlers [p. 125] . . . By these
means a country can be occupied and a State founded in a manner as yet unknown to history
[p. 143] . . . Have I . . . overlooked important objections? [the native population?] . . .
[T]he Jews, once settled in their own State, would probably have no more enemies [p. 153].
(Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State, 1896/1988)
Corresponding author:
Robert Wintemute, School of Law, King’s College London, The Strand, London, WC2R 2LS, UK
Email: robert.wintemute@kcl.ac.uk
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Social & Legal Studies 21(1)
Introduction
In 1918, the year Britain ended Ottoman rule, Palestine’s estimated Arab or Jewish
population of 747,685 was 92.1 per cent Arab (688,957 Muslims, Christians, Druze and
Shii) and 7.9 per cent Jewish (58,728) (p. 3,1 citing McCarthy, 1990: 26). To put these
figures in perspective, Palestine in 1918 was as Arab as the United Kingdom in 2001 was
‘white’ (the UK’s ethnic minority population in 2001 was 7.9%),2 and the 59,000 Jewish
residents of Palestine represented no more than 0.5 per cent of the world’s Jewish
population at the time. Indeed, Britain had a Jewish population over four times the size
of Palestine’s (p. 17). How is it possible that the Jewish-majority State of Israel was
founded in Palestine only 30 years later, in 1948, and that an Arab-majority State of
Palestine still does not exist in 2012? In his excellent book, From Coexistence to
Conquest, Victor Kattan explains how principles of international law, had they been
respected, should have led to self-determination for 1918 Palestine’s Arab majority,
through the foundation (after British rule ended) of an Arab-majority State of Palestine,
in the whole of British Mandate Palestine.
‘From Coexistence to Conquest’: Kattan’s Thesis and
Arguments
Kattan’s thesis is that in December 1917, when Jerusalem fell to Britain’s ‘Last Crusade’
(Bar-Yosef, 2001), there was no ‘Palestine problem’ and no serious Arab-Jewish
conflict. Instead, there was relatively peaceful coexistence between a large Arab
majority and a small Jewish minority, consisting of the indigenous Jewish population
and post-1880 Jewish immigrants, mainly from Russia and other European countries
(pp. xix, 88, 259). The serious conflict began when Britain gained control of Palestine,
with which came the possibility of implementing the contradictory 2 November 1917
Balfour Declaration ‘of [British] sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations’, that is, ‘the
establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people . . . it being clearly
understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights
of existing non-Jewish [Arab] communities in Palestine’ (p. 42). Britain then opened the
door of Palestine to the immigration of Jewish-Europeans in much larger numbers than
had been possible under Ottoman rule. In 1935 alone, the 61,854 legal immigrants
exceeded the entire Jewish population of 1918 Palestine (pp. 11, 91).
This immigration took place without the consent of Palestine’s Arab majority, and
despite their frequent objections, expressed both peacefully and violently. By the end
of 1946, it had increased the size of the Jewish minority from 8 per cent to 31 per cent
of Palestine’s population, including Bedouins (McCarthy, 1990: 36–37). The creation of
a substantial Jewish minority, horror at the recently revealed extent of the Holocaust, and
sympathy for Holocaust survivors in Europe (for whom Palestine was a possible destina-
tion) combined to generate sufficient political support for the United Nations General
Assembly’s resolution of 29 November 1947 recommending a partition plan. The plan
was never implemented (pp. 159, 162–163). Instead, the State of Israel unilaterally
declared its independence on 14 May 1948 (describing the Assembly’s recommendation
as ‘irrevocable’), expanded its proposed partition-plan borders through military action,
Wintemute
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encouraged the flight of over 700,000 Arab-Palestinians, and refused to allow them
to return to their homes (Pappe, 2006). What began with coexistence in an
Arab-majority territory in 1918, ended with conquest and the establishment of a
Jewish-majority state in 1948.
In this short review article, it is impossible to do justice to the many questions of
international law that Kattan carefully analyses, and the wealth of archival material
he cites. However, I can briefly highlight six of his main arguments. First, there was
no basis in international law for a collective Jewish ‘right of return’ to Palestine,
after an absence of nearly 1800 years (pp. 2, 50–52, 114, 118). Neither the
Jewish-European immigrants’ historical and emotional attachment to Palestine, nor
their understandable desire to escape worsening persecution by Christian-Europeans,
distinguished the Zionist project in Palestine from other European colonial projects
(pp. 3–5, 118, 125). Kattan quotes from Theodor Herzl’s 1900 draft charter for a
proposed Jewish-Ottoman Land Company, modelled on the British and Dutch East
India Companies, and notes the deletion from the 1917 Balfour Declaration of a
reference, in the Zionist Organisation’s draft, to ‘a Jewish National Colonizing
Corporation’ (pp. 24–25, 60–61).
Second, the distinctive feature of the Zionist colonial project was that most
colonists would not come from Britain, the project’s European sponsor,3 but from Rus-
sia, Poland, Germany and other countries where Jewish minorities faced persecution.
One of Britain’s main motives for supporting the project was thus tainted by anti-
Jewish prejudice, because Balfour saw it as ‘an opportunity to divert Jewish immigration
away from Britain and into Palestine’, just as Herzl had proposed in his 1902 speech to
the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration (pp. 6–7, 20, 29, 250). The growth of
Britain’s Jewish population, from around 60,000 in 1880 to 300,000 in 1920, had
caused resentment. In 1916, an East London newspaper described Jewish-Russian
immigrants as ‘uninvited ‘‘guests’’ who have long outstayed their welcome’ (pp.
17, 65). Kattan demonstrates the unfortunate agreement of Zionist and anti-Jewish
groups that Europe’s Jewish minorities should leave for Palestine (pp. 10–12, 15),
and the consequent opposition of Edwin Montagu (the Cabinet’s only Jewish mem-
ber) to the 1917 Balfour Declaration (pp. 20, 71–74, 248).
Third, the Arab majority in Palestine saw what was coming, and made their objections
clear from the beginning. As early as 1891, a telegram asked ‘the Grand Vizier [in
Istanbul] to prohibit Russian Jews from entering Palestine and acquiring land there’
(p. 79). A British intelligence report (probably on the first Palestinian National Congress
in Jerusalem in 1919) described participants as dumbfounded that the World War I Allies
could talk about self-determination but
hand over Palestine to an alien people, now in a minority, who would eventually dispossess
them of their lands and undoubtedly tyrannise over them . . . [M]any . . . will forcibly resist
any attempt to set up in this land a Jewish State . . . (pp. 43–44)
In 1935, five Arab political parties demanded ‘the immediate cessation of Jewish immi-
gration’ (p. 93). Kattan observes ‘that Zionism was to provoke a violent reaction from the
Palestinian Arabs, who saw it as an attempt by a group of foreign immigrants to take their
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Social & Legal Studies 21(1)
country away from them’, before discussing the riots of 1920, 1921 and 1928–29, and the
Great Arab Revolt of 1936–39 (pp. 77, 83–97).
Fourth, the 1917 Balfour Declaration and its incorporation into the 1922 British
Mandate (e.g. Article 6: ‘The Administration of Palestine, while ensuring that the rights
and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced, shall facilitate Jewish
immigration . . . and shall encourage . . . close settlement by Jews on the land’)
contradicted the principle of self-determination in...
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