League of Nations mandate for Palestine

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The Mandate Territory of Palestine in the borders from 1920 to 1923 (including Transjordan)
Sea flag of the Mandate Palestine
Seal of the British Governor (High Commissioner) of the Mandate Palestine
Surrender of the Ottoman city government of Jerusalem to the British, December 9, 1917

The League of Nations Mandate for Palestine ( Arabic الانتداب البريطاني على فلسطين; Hebrew המנדט הבריטי מטעם חבר הלאומים על פלשתינה (א"י)) was a Class A mandate of the League of Nations , which was given to the United Kingdom after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I at the Sanremo Conference in 1920 . Today's Israel and Jordan , the Gaza Strip and the West Bank later emerged in the Mandate area . The emirate of Transjordan was separated as early as 1923 , which became an independent kingdom in 1946. In fact, until 1948 the mandate area only extended between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.

General

Behalf of the mandate on July 24, 1922 ratified was (Text see links ) , was the help for "establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine." This on the condition "that nothing is to be done that would impair the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine [...]".

The mandate calls in Articles 4, 6 and 7 concrete measures such as recognition and collaboration with Jewish representatives ( Jewish Agency ) , promoting a closed Jewish settlement (see Yishuv ) through provision of state and fallow lands as well as the facilitation of immigration (see Alija ) and the acquisition of Palestinian citizenship by Jews. Articles 13 to 15 provided for the free practice of religion, regulated free access to the holy places and the maintenance of existing cultural and religious self-government.

Article 25 allowed Great Britain to provisionally exempt the mandate areas “between the Jordan and the definitive eastern border of Palestine” from the implementation of essential mandate provisions, such as those for the establishment of a Jewish national homeland. This created the prerequisites for the establishment of the semi-autonomous emirate of Transjordan (the forerunner of today's state of Jordan ) by the British in 1923 , so that the space for the establishment of a national home in Palestine was limited to the area west of the Jordan ( Cisjordan ).

The mandate lasted from the beginning of the 1920s to May 14, 1948 at midnight (midnight). The Israeli declaration of independence thus took place during the mandate period; Due to the requirement to rest on Shabbat, the declaration of independence could not be made immediately after the end of the mandate. The UN partition plan for Palestine of 1947, which provided for the division of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state as well as international control over Jerusalem as a corpus separatum , was not implemented.

Taken together, the mandate issued in 1922 represented the international legal basis for the states of Israel and Jordan that emerged on the mandate territory , even though a planned referendum was not carried out by Great Britain after the end of the mandate, or without establishing self-government (according to Art. 22 of the League of Nations). A state of Palestine would also claim the right to succeed the League of Nations mandate.

Numerous achievements dating back to the British mandate have been adopted in the State of Israel, which was founded in 1948. This includes the expansion of the road and rail network as well as the government and legal system, which is closely based on the British model. Many officers of the later Israeli army first gained experience in the British Army (see also Jewish Brigade ). After all, Jerusalem in particular developed to an outstanding degree (establishment of the Hebrew University , construction of the King David Hotel , etc.), and the provisions on the cityscape of that time have remained in force until today. Sir Ronald Storrs , the first British governor of Jerusalem, passed a law according to which the houses of the capital of the Mandate area could only be built from Jerusalem stone . In addition, the settlement of heavy industry in Jerusalem was prohibited.

Historical development

Col. TE Lawrence , Emir Abdullah , Air Marshal Sir Geoffrey Salmond , HBM high commissioner Sir Herbert Samuel , Sir Wyndham Deedes and others in Palestine, 1920/25
Anglican, Coptic, Syrian Orthodox, Armenian and Orthodox Church leaders together with British officers in Jerusalem in 1922

Before the end of World War I , Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire . The British under General Edmund Allenby defeated the Ottoman, German and Austro-Hungarian troops operating in Palestine in 1917 and occupied Palestine and Iraq. They then set up a military administration, the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration (OETA), but Ottoman civil law still applied until the San Remo Conference.

According to the Sykes-Picot Agreement concluded between Great Britain and France in 1916 , Great Britain received the British mandate Mesopotamia on the territory of what is now Iraq and the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, which included the southern part of the Ottoman province of Syria (Syria, Palestine and Jordan), while France controlled the rest of Ottoman Syria (modern Syria , Lebanon and Hatay ) with the League of Nations mandate for Syria and Lebanon .

During the First World War, the British had promised both Jews and Arabs territories in the Middle East. In the Hussein-McMahon correspondence , the British had promised the Hashimites - in return for their support in the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire - rule over most of the land in the region, which was to include almost the entire Arab Middle East . In the Balfour Declaration , Great Britain had promised the Jews for the first time a national home in Eretz Israel . The Faisal-Weizmann Agreement determined the mutual establishment of state borders for the Arab kingdom sought by Faisal and the Jewish state sought by Chaim Weizmann according to the Balfour Declaration, but never came into force.

After the victory of the Allies over the Central Powers and the conclusion of the Treaty of Versailles , the World War II Allies represented at the San Remo Conference in Italy in April 1920 gave Palestine to the United Kingdom . The League of Nations legitimized the Allied Convention of San Remo by giving Britain the mandate for Palestine in 1922 . The exact definition of the mandate followed on this occasion.

Accordingly, Palestine comprised all those areas from which the State of Israel later emerged, as well as the Gaza Strip , the West Bank , parts of the Golan Heights and the Kingdom of (Trans) Jordan. According to the assessment of the first modern census from October 1922, the population of Palestine (excluding the British garrisons and the Bedouins of the southern district) consisted of 757,182 people, of whom 590,890 were Muslims, 83,794 Jews, 73,024 Christians and 7,028 Druze . Herbert Louis Samuel , a former post and home secretary in the British cabinet, has been appointed the first high commissioner in Palestine.

The Turkey , the legal successor of the Ottoman Empire, finally legalized mandate for Britain by the Treaty of Lausanne , signed on 24 July 1923 and entered into force after the ratification on 5 August 1925th

The occupation administration (OETA), which was initially set up with the conquest, confiscated all property of non-Ottoman, hostile nationals. As part of the regular British civil administration set up after San Remo on July 1, 1920, Edward Keith-Roach took over the management of the confiscated property as Public Custodian of Enemy Property and rented it to third parties until restitution to the previous owners after the Treaty of Lausanne came into force in 1925 .

In southern Palestine, most men of non-Ottoman, hostile citizenship were classified as hostile foreigners - including Palestinian Germans, e.g. B. many Templars - interned, in Wilhelma . The internees were taken to a camp south of Gaza in early 1918 , while enemy nationals who were not interned were placed under strict police supervision. In August 1918 the British administration took the internees out of the country to Sidi Bishr and Helwan near Alexandria . With the Treaty of Versailles , which came into force on January 10, 1920, the Egyptian camps were dissolved and most of the internees returned to the Holy Land, with the exception of those who were blacklisted by the British armed forces as undesirable.

The mandate area was multi-ethnic, Arabic was the main language, and Islam was the predominant religion . Land ownership changed only insignificantly between 1918 and 1948 (1918: 2.5% of the land was Jewish, 1948: 5.67%), although the population situation shifted more strongly, primarily due to Jewish immigration (1948: 33% Jewish residents). From 1918 onwards, the area was administratively divided into 13 districts, the number of which was reduced to ten in 1919, seven in 1920, four in 1923 and finally three in 1924.

Increasing immigration and violence

Breakthrough of the blockade of Palestine by Jewish immigrants near Nahariya , 1948

During the 1920s, 100,000 Jewish and also 6,000 non-Jewish immigrants immigrated to Palestine. The immigration of 35,000 Russian Jews from 1919 to 1923 in particular shaped the country for a long time. Land bought from Jewish agencies was only leased to Jews, and only on the condition that it was cultivated exclusively by Jewish workers.

Initially, Jewish immigration to Palestine met with little resistance from the Arabs. Since the “Third Aliyah” (1919–1923), however, the steadily growing immigration of mainly European Jews led to cultural and political tensions, which the British Mandate Government sought to counter by means of immigration controlled by immigration certificates. Parts of the Zionist and Arab leadership, both of which saw themselves as a national independence movement, faced each other irreconcilably early on . After riots in April 1920 and the first massacres against Jews in 1921, the Hebron massacre took place in 1929 , followed by the Arab uprising from 1936 to 1939 . Mohammed Amin al-Husseini , Mufti of Jerusalem and President of the Supreme Islamic Council, took over the leadership of the Arab uprising in 1936 and organized anti-British and anti-Jewish actions. Religious aspects were increasingly politicized and stereotyped and prejudiced, which were particularly rampant in Europe at the time. Another increasingly significant point of contention was the conflict between Jewish immigrants and Arab farmers. In some cases the sale of land by the large Arab landowners, often living abroad, led to the expulsion of their former Palestinian tenants ( felachians ); in place of the old places z. T. Kibbutzim , which at the beginning were often built as tower-and-palisade settlements .

Conflicts arose in particular because the tenants often did not own the land, but did own the trees (especially olive trees) that grew on this land. The problem situation was often not understood or accepted by the European Jews who were not familiar with this type of property right. In addition, there was hardly any communication between the new and the old owners due to linguistic, but above all cultural differences.

The equally strong increase in Arab immigration intensified the conflicts. According to an official Arab report from 1934, the number of Arabs who immigrated illegally from spring to summer 1934 was higher than the Jewish immigration authorized by the Mandate Administration, which was set at 42,359.

The paramilitary Hagana , founded in 1920 and significantly expanded after 1929, became the forerunner of the Israeli armed forces . Since 1939 the British mandate has restricted Jewish immigration and, in the 1939 White Paper, set an immigration quota of 75,000 Jews for a five-year period, which was criticized by both Jews and Arabs under various circumstances. As a reaction to the great uprising, terrorist Jewish groups formed with the Irgun and the Lechi in 1936, which attacked British and Arab targets in the course of the Second World War.

Economic development

The British mandate authorities set up a functioning civil administration and enforced the state's monopoly on the use of force. Only around ten percent of administrative employees were British citizens. The rest was made up of locals, both Jews and Arabs. Achievements of British politics, financed by local tax revenue, were a court system based on the European model with low corruption in the police and judiciary, as well as roads, electrification and cultural institutions.

British withdrawal and the start of the War of Independence

Already during the Second World War , the British government debated dividing the country and withdrawing its own troops. The main reason for the withdrawal was the cost of £ 40 million to maintain the 100,000 soldiers and police officers. This does not correspond to the insignificant strategic position of the mandate area in the age of decolonization . Great Britain also sought to align itself with the USA, which considered the mandate to have failed and a war to be inevitable.

In 1947 Great Britain turned the question of Palestine over to the UN . A special committee should work out a new division proposal. This proposal was supported by the United States and the Soviet Union, in favor of Britain's withdrawal from Palestine, and was approved by the UN General Assembly in November 1947. The Arab members of the UN rejected him, as did the Palestinians. Britain saw that no solution had been found that would be accepted by both Arab and Jewish sides. It has now announced that it will withdraw from Palestine on May 14, 1948. In the remaining time until the withdrawal, the neighboring Arab states decided to intervene, which led to a number of local conflicts.

At the end of the British mandate for Palestine on May 14, 1948, a Friday at midnight, the Jewish National Council met in the home of former Mayor Dizengoff in Tel Aviv at 4 p.m., Erew Sabbat . In the Israeli declaration of independence, David Ben Gurion proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel “by virtue of the natural and historical right of the Jewish people and based on the resolution of the UN General Assembly” . The anniversary of the founding of the state, Yom HaAtzma'ut, is the 5th Ijjar (according to the Jewish calendar ).

The Soviet Union and the United States immediately recognized the State of Israel diplomatically. The armed forces of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon advanced into those parts of the British mandate that were predominantly Arab. There were no fixed borders or areas with clear majority populations. Israel's new army also occupied parts of the mandate area. The war of Palestine developed , the war Israel waged for independence.

High Commissioners for Palestine

A high commissioner was appointed to manage the mandate administration in Palestine. This was subordinate to the British Colonial Ministry.

See also

literature

  • Abigail Jacobson, Moshe Naor: Oriental Neighbors: Middle Eastern Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine. Dartmouth College Press, Hanover 2017, ISBN 978-1-5126-0006-3 .
  • Gudrun Krämer : History of Palestine. From the Ottoman conquest to the establishment of the State of Israel. 5th edition. Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-406-47601-5 .
  • Tom Segev : Once upon a time there was a Palestine. Jews and Arabs before the founding of the state of Israel. (Original title: One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate. Translated by Doris Gerstner). Siedler, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-88680-805-X .
  • Helmut Mejcher (Ed.): The Palestine Question 1917–1948. Historical origins and international dimensions of a Middle East conflict. 2nd Edition. Schöningh, Paderborn et al. 1993, ISBN 3-506-77488-3 . (with person and subject index as well as a detailed bibliography)
  • Richard Meinertzhagen : Middle East Diary 1917–1956 . Yoseloff, London 1959.
  • Georg Schwarzenberger : The League of Nations Mandate for Palestine . Enke, Stuttgart 1929.
  • Ernst Marcus : Palestine - a state in the making. International and constitutional study on the legal structure of the mandate country Palestine with special consideration of the law of the national homestead for the Jewish people. (= Frankfurt treatises on modern international law. Issue 16). Noske, Leipzig 1929, OCLC 1004890081 .
  • Harry Charles Luke : The Handbook of Palestine . London 1922.

Web links

Commons : League of Nations Mandate for Palestine  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The British Mandate in Jerusalem
  2. ↑ Tom Segev: Once upon a time there was a Palestine. 2005, p. 43 ff.
  3. ↑ Tom Segev: Once upon a time there was a Palestine. 2005, p. 70 ff.
  4. ^ Report on Palestine Administration, 1922. ( Memento December 10, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) League of Nations, December 31, 1922.
  5. ↑ Tom Segev: Once upon a time there was a Palestine. 2005, p. 162 ff.
  6. ↑ Roland Löffler: The congregations of the Jerusalem Association in Palestine in the context of current ecclesiastical and political events during the mandate. In: See, we are going up to Jerusalem! Festschrift for the 150th anniversary of Talitha Kumi and the Jerusalem Association. Almut Nothnagle (ed.) On behalf of the Jerusalemsverein im Berliner Missionswerk, Leipzig: Evangelische Verlags-Anstalt, 2001, ISBN 3-374-01863-7 , p. 189; Frank Foerster: Mission in the Holy Land: The Jerusalem Association in Berlin 1852-1945. (= Missiological research. N, p. 25). Mohn, Gütersloh 1991, ISBN 3-579-00245-7 , p. 150.
  7. ^ Frank Foerster: Mission in the Holy Land: The Jerusalem Association in Berlin 1852-1945. (= Missiological research. N, p. 25). Mohn, Gütersloh 1991, pp. 138 and 143.
  8. ^ Frank Foerster: Mission in the Holy Land: The Jerusalem Association in Berlin 1852-1945. (= Missiological research. N, p. 25). Mohn, Gütersloh 1991, pp. 134 and 136.
  9. ^ Frank Foerster: Mission in the Holy Land: The Jerusalem Association in Berlin 1852-1945. (= Missiological research. N, p. 25). Mohn, Gütersloh 1991, p. 137.
  10. ↑ Roland Löffler: The congregations of the Jerusalem Association in Palestine in the context of current ecclesiastical and political events during the mandate. In: See, we are going up to Jerusalem! Festschrift for the 150th anniversary of Talitha Kumi and the Jerusalem Association. Almut Nothnagle (Ed.) On behalf of the Jerusalem Association in the Berliner Missionswerk, Leipzig 2001, p. 193; Frank Foerster: Mission in the Holy Land: The Jerusalem Association in Berlin 1852-1945. (= Missiological research. N, p. 25). Mohn, Gütersloh 1991, p. 137.
  11. ^ Frank Foerster: Mission in the Holy Land: The Jerusalem Association in Berlin 1852-1945. (= Missiological research. N, p. 25). Mohn, Gütersloh 1991, p. 143; Roland Löffler: The congregations of the Jerusalem Association in Palestine in the context of current ecclesiastical and political events during the mandate. In: See, we are going up to Jerusalem! Festschrift for the 150th anniversary of Talitha Kumi and the Jerusalem Association. Almut Nothnagle (Ed.) On behalf of the Jerusalem Association in the Berliner Missionswerk, Leipzig 2001, p. 196.
  12. ↑ Tom Segev: Once upon a time there was a Palestine. 2005, p. 323 ff.
  13. ↑ Erich Topf : The formation of states in the Arab parts of Turkey since the World War by origin, importance and viability (= Hamburg University. Treatises from the field of foreign studies . Volume 31, series A. Law and political sciences. Volume 3). Friedrichsen, de Gruyter & Co, Hamburg 1929, p. 66.
  14. ^ Rudolf Pfisterer: Israel or Palestine . R. Brockhaus, Wuppertal / Zurich 1992, ISBN 3-417-24124-3 , p. 147 .
  15. ↑ Tom Segev: Once upon a time there was a Palestine. 2005, pp. 180 f., 189 f., 566.
  16. ↑ Tom Segev: Once upon a time there was a Palestine. 2005, pp. 543-550; Piers Brendon: The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781–1997. London 2008, pp. 476-480.
  17. ↑ Albert Hourani : The History of the Arab Peoples. From the beginnings of Islam to the Middle East conflict of our day. 5th edition. Frankfurt 2006, ISBN 3-596-15085-X , p. 437.