The British Mandate for Palestine (1920–1948) was the decisive colonial framework that made the dispossession of the Palestinian people possible. Backed by the Balfour Declaration and League of Nations instruments, Britain facilitated the growth of a Zionist national home while the indigenous Arab majority was steadily marginalized. The Mandate period is the immediate prehistory of the Nakba.
The Balfour Declaration and Colonial Double-Speak
In 1917 the British government promised to support “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” while claiming that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.” Those “non-Jewish communities” constituted approximately 90 percent of the population. The declaration treated the majority as an afterthought and the minority as the primary subject of policy. It remains one of the clearest examples of colonial disregard for the rights of an indigenous people.
Parallel Institutions and Land Transfer
Zionist organizations built a sophisticated infrastructure: the Jewish Agency, the Haganah military force, the Histadrut labor federation, and the Jewish National Fund. Land was purchased, often from absentee landlords, and then closed to Arab labor and tenancy under the principle of “Hebrew labor.” Palestinian peasants found themselves displaced even before 1948. British policy oscillated between limited restrictions on immigration and continued facilitation of Jewish settlement and institutional growth. By the 1940s a parallel state structure existed, ready to assume power the moment the Mandate ended.
Palestinian Resistance and British Repression
Palestinians organized politically through the Arab Higher Committee and other bodies. The great revolt of 1936–1939 was a sustained uprising against both British rule and Zionist colonization. It involved general strikes, armed bands in the countryside, and widespread popular participation. Britain responded with collective punishment, demolition of homes, mass arrests, deportations, and military force. By the end of the revolt, the Palestinian leadership was fragmented, many cadres were killed or exiled, and society was weakened — just as World War II and the Holocaust transformed international attitudes toward Jewish statehood.
By 1947 the demographic and military balance had shifted dramatically. The stage was set for the catastrophe that Palestinians call the Nakba. The Mandate did not merely fail to protect the rights of the majority; it actively enabled the conditions for their dispossession.