A Brief History of Palestine, from Canaan through the Mandate Era

Preface

Apologists for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians, including Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, support their position by relying on ahistorical Zionist propaganda narratives, such as the following:

• The area was first called Palestine by the Roman Empire after destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 BCE and the Bar Kohkba revolt in 132 CE to humiliate the Jews by renaming the province of Judea after the Israelites’ Biblical enemies the Philistines.
• Palestinians are historically recent immigrants to the land.
• The land was uninhabited when the Zionist movement arose.
• There was never a place called Palestine until it was given that name after World War I when the British ruled the area under the League of Nations Mandate.
• The land that the Zionists declared for themselves as the Jewish state of Israel in 1948 legally belonged to the Jews.
• The Zionist leadership had legal authority for their declaration of the existence of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948.
• Palestinians are an invented people.
• There never was a Palestinian national movement until the mid-1960s when the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was established.
• The Arab inhabitants of the land were never even called “Palestinians” until the 1960s.

The primary aim of such preposterous propaganda is to try to legitimize the means by which Israel came into existence, which was through the ethnic cleansing of most of Palestine’s Arab inhabitants from their homes and literally wiping over 500 Arab villages off the map.

The further aim of such ahistorical nonsense is to try to justify the continued systematic violation of Palestinians’ fundamental human rights that have occurred perpetually throughout the 75 years since the Jewish supremacist state came into existence.

The purpose of this article is to set the historical record straight as briefly as reasonably possible by reviewing the history of Palestine from ancient times through the Mandate era.

“The Promised Land”

In the Tanakh, or the Hebrew Bible that Christians refer to as the Old Testament, the Israelites are portrayed as foreigners to the land of Canaan, which Yahweh, the God of the Hebrews, promises to give to them in return for their obedience to His Law (the Torah).

The Hebrew patriarch was Abraham, who fathered Isaac, who fathered Jacob, who wrestled all night with an angel and, remaining undefeated, was given a new name by Yahweh (whose name is typically replaced in English translations of the Bible with “the LORD”). The wrestler was known no longer as Jacob (Ya’akov) but as Israel (Yisra’el), meaning “God contended”.

Jacob had thirteen sons and was the patriarch of the twelve tribes of Israel, among which was the tribe of Judah. All the descendants of Israel were known as Israelites. The people of Judah were known as Judeans, and the English word “Jew” is derived from the name of this tribe.

Note that not all Israelites were Jews, and not all Jews are of Hebraic descent because “Jew” can also refer to any practitioner of Judaism; and people with no ancestral connection to this region of the Middle East can convert to Judaism.

In the Tanakh, Abram is a native of Ur in Mesopotamia who is called by Yahweh to leave his own country and journey to a new land to become the founder of a new nation. Abram obeys and travels to the land of Canaan, an ancient name for the region east of the Mediterranean Sea between the modern states of Egypt and Syria. There, at the age of 99, Yahweh declares that Abram would henceforth be known as Abraham, “father of many nations”. Yahweh further promises to give the land of Canaan to Abraham and his descendants if they kept their promise to obey Him.

Later, one of Jacob’s sons, Joseph, is sold by his jealous brothers into slavery, and he is carried off to Egypt. However, Joseph ends up gaining favor with the Egyptian pharaoh and is made a high court official. This later enables Joseph to save his family when Jacob and his offspring flee to Egypt due to a famine. While at first treated with kindness by the Egyptians, the good pharaoh dies and is replaced by a wicked ruler who feels threatened by the Israelites’ growing population and enslaves them.

After 400 years of slavery, Yahweh sends his prophet Moses to warn the pharaoh to let the Israelites go. After a series of divine punishments for refusal, the pharaoh finally relents only to change his mind and order his forces to go after the fleeing Israelites. Caught between the Egyptian army and the Red Sea, Moses performs the miracle of parting the waters, enabling the Israelites to escape while the waters close back on the pharaoh’s soldiers attempting pursuit.

The Israelites end up wandering in the Sinai desert for forty years. It is during this time that they come to Mount Sinai, which Moses ascends to speak with Yahweh, returning with two stone tablets upon which are inscribed the Ten Commandments. Yahweh establishes a Covenant with the Israelites whereby they would be God’s chosen people, a holy nation, and as a reward for obeying God’s laws, God would keep his promise to Abraham to give them the land of Canaan.

The Tanakh goes on to tell the story of how the Israelites conquered Canaan and established the kingdom of Israel, and how the Israelites repeatedly violated the Covenant with Yahweh despite God’s warnings that if they persisted in their sins, the land would vomit them out and they would perish among nations.

Archaeological evidence, however, does not support the Biblical story. There is no evidence of an Israelite exodus from Egypt or of an Israelite conquest of Canaan, the most obvious explanation for which is that these events never happened.

The Common Ancestry of Jews and Palestinians

While the Tanakh speaks of the Israelites as foreigners who conquered the land of Canaan, including through the genocide of some native tribes, this narrative is not supported by archaeological evidence, which doesn’t show such destruction of Canaanite populations. Far from having been wiped out, the people of Canaan, which corresponds to the historical region of Phoenicia, left a long line of descendants.

Genetic research has found that Jews and Arabs share a common ancestry, and Palestinians are genetically among the most closely related people in the world to Jews, along with the Bedouin and Druze.

Palestinians are indigenous to the area known as Palestine, descended from ancient occupants of the Levant, which refers historically to the region along the eastern Mediterranean Sea between the Sinai Peninsula and modern-day Syria. The area’s inhabitants developed agriculture and permanent settlements around 12,000 years ago, and while the region has always been a melting pot of genetic and cultural diversity, Palestinians today still have remarkably strong genetic similarity to inhabitants of the Levant during the Bronze Age (3500 BCE – 1200 BCE).

In other words, genetic research has indicated that the Palestinians are descended from Canaanites who were living in the area before any kingdom of Israel ever existed.

While it might come as a shock to many, genetic research has also indicated that Jews, too, are descended from Canaanites. While this is contrary to the story told in the Bible of the Israelites as foreigners to Canaan, it explains the strong genetic similarity between most Jewish groups and Palestinians today. Indeed, scholars today distinguish the ancient Israelites from the Canaanites not by genetic dissimilarity but rather by the Israelites’ separate cultural self-identity.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Hebrew is a Canaanite language and, indeed, the only one that has survived to be in use today. The Canaanite languages bear a close relationship to Arabic, and both are classified as Semitic languages.

Contrary to popular usage, the word “Semitic” is not synonymous with “Jewish” but refers to people who speak Semitic languages. The Phoenician language, for which an alphabet writing system was famously invented, was a Semitic language. Both Hebrew and Arabic are Semitic languages. Therefore, while the term “anti-Semitic” is usually used to mean hatred of Jews, to espouse hatred toward Palestinians is also anti-Semitism.

As a final point about DNA analysis, these findings should not be understood to mean that every Jew living in Israel today shares a strong ancestral connection to the Levant. The genetic evidence rather indicates numerous ancestral threads with diverse geographical origins, which is explained by significant conversion to Judaism over time of people with no ancestral connection to historic Palestine.

The Fabled Ancient Kingdom of Israel

Traditional historical accounts largely relying on the Hebrew Bible as a reference point maintain that the ancient kingdom of Israel was established around 1020 BCE and remained united under kings Saul, David, and Solomon. During the latter’s reign, around 957 BCE, the Temple of Solomon was built in the city of Jerusalem. This is also known today as the First Temple.

Around 922 BCE, there was a revolt, and the land was divided into the northern kingdom of Israel, which included the territories of ten of the twelve Hebrew tribes, and the southern kingdom of Judah, which included the territories of the tribes of Benjamin and Judah, the latter of whose land included the city of Jerusalem. The southern kingdom was considered the successor to the kingdom of Solomon, who was a Judean.

The northern kingdom of Israel existed until 721 BCE, when it was conquered by the Neo-Assyrian Empire. The so-called “ten lost tribes of Israel” were gradually assimilated by other peoples and disappeared from history. According to the book of Kings in the Bible, they were removed from Yahweh’s sight and carried away to Assyria as retribution for violating the Covenant.

The kingdom of Judah persisted around the area of Jerusalem until 587 BCE, at which time the area was conquered by the Babylonian Empire. The Temple of Solomon was destroyed, and many Judeans were exiled to Babylon. According to the book of Jeremiah in the Bible, this, too, was retribution for the treacherous people of Judah having failed to learn the lesson from the certificate of divorce Yahweh had given to the ten northern tribes.

However, there is debate among scholars about whether the united kingdom of David and Solomon ever really existed because of the lack of archaeological evidence to support the Biblical narrative. Indeed, archaeological evidence contradicts key Biblical narratives. For example, it’s not just that there is a lack of evidence for the Israelite conquest of Canaan, but Palestine was under Egyptian rule until the middle of the 12th century BCE—a fact of which the authors of the later-written Biblical account were evidently unaware.

According to Ze’ev Herzog, an Israeli archaeologist and professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University, the united monarchy of David and Solomon, if it existed, was at best a small tribal kingdom and not a regional power.

Israel Finkelstein, a preeminent Israeli archaeologist and professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University, has similarly argued that Jerusalem at the time of David was little more than a village. Finkelstein has proposed that the Biblical account of the kingdom of David and Solomon, written by Judean scribes at least 300 years after the supposed reign of David, was a mythologization of the kingdom of Jeroboam II, who really did rule Israel from about 788 BCE to 747 BCE.

Palestine Under Persian and Greek Rule

In 539 BCE, the Persian Empire was founded by Cyrus the Great, who soon conquered the land of the former kingdom of Israel and liberated the Jews from exile, allowing them to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple that had been destroyed by the Babylonians. In the Bible, Cyrus is described as a messiah, or “anointed one”, for liberating the Jews and facilitating the construction of the Second Temple on what is known to Jews as the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

In addition to Jews, the region was populated by peoples described generally as “Syrians”, “Phoenicians”, and “Arabs”, the latter of which was generally applied to various Bedouin tribes, including the Nabataeans, who later established a kingdom and developed an alphabet from which most scholars believe the Arabic script was derived.

In the 330s BCE, the Persian Empire was conquered by Alexander the Great, and most of Palestine came under the rule of the Macedonian Empire. After Alexander’s death in 323 BCE, his empire was divided, and much of Palestine came under the rule of the Ptolemaic Kingdom, which included Egypt, while areas of northern Palestine came under the rule of the Seleucid Empire. By 200 BCE, however, most of Palestine had come under the control of the Seleucid Empire.

While both Hellenistic empires had tended to respect Jewish culture, this status quo changed dramatically after King Antiochus IV came to rule the Seleucid Empire in 175 BCE. At the time, the Jewish community was divided between those who were content with Hellenization and more traditional practitioners of Judaism. In response to what he viewed as a civil war between these two Jewish groups, Antiochus began a campaign of persecuting Jews that included outlawing Jewish religious rites, and his offensive and prejudicial actions included sacrificing a pig on an altar to Zeus in the Second Temple.

In 167 BCE, the Jewish priest Mattathias Maccabeus together with his five sons led a revolt that was continued after his death under the leadership of his son Judas, who was also a priest. Those who followed them in their revolt against both Hellenized Jews and King Antiochus became known as the Maccabees.

In 164 BCE, the Maccabees captured Jerusalem, removed the statues depicting Greek gods and goddesses from the Second Temple, and cleansed the temple with ritual purification. Religious Jews today commemorate this feat with the annual eight-day festival of Hanukkah.

While Judas was killed in battle in 160 BCE, the revolt against Seleucid rule continued, and with the Roman Republic having now expressed its support for the uprising, in 141 BCE, the Maccabees succeeded in expelling Greek forces from their fortified citadel in Jerusalem, and the Hasmonean dynasty was established under the leadership of Simon Maccabeus.

The dynasty was recognized in 139 BCE by the Roman Senate despite the Seleucid Empire’s continued claim of rulership over the area, and as Rome increased in power, the dynasty exercised autonomy and expanded the area under its control. Under John Hyrcanus, starting in 110 BCE, the Hasmonean kingdom began a series of military conquests of surrounding territories, expanding east of the Jordan River (Transjordan), Samaria (between Galilee and Judea), and Idumea, also known as Edom (south of the Dead Sea).

Forced to convert to Judaism, the Edomites gradually integrated into Judean society, and some became high-ranking officials. An Edomite named Antipas was appointed governor of Edom. Disputes over successorship of the Hasmonean kingdom resulted in a civil war. The Romans militarily intervened and in 63 BCE, under the Roman general Pompey, took control of Judea.

Antipater, the son of Antipas, had become the chief adviser to the Hasmonean ruler Hyrcanus II, and after the Roman takeover developed good relations with the Romans. In 47 BCE, Antipater was appointed as procurator of Judea. He was assassinated in 43 BCE, and in 40 BCE, Judea was invaded by the Parthian Empire.

Antipater’s son Herod fled to Rome and, gaining support there, returned with Roman military support to reconquer Jerusalem, which was accomplished by 37 BCE. Herod, whose mother was an Arab, ruled as king of Judea until his death in 4 BCE, after which Judea remained a province of the Roman Empire.

From 66 CE – 74 CE, there was a great Jewish revolt, and in 70 CE, the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the Second Temple. The Romans later built a temple to Jupiter on the Temple Mount, which was one of the triggers for another major Jewish uprising from 132 CE – 136 CE, which is known as the Bar Kokhba Revolt. This uprising, too, the Romans violently suppressed, culminating in the mass depopulation of Jews in Judea, either through extermination or flight. However, there remained Jewish populations in Galilee and Samaria.

The Origin of the Name “Palestine”

According to popular myth, the name “Palestine” first came into use when the Romans renamed Judea after the Philistines as an act of humiliating retribution for the Bar Kohkba revolt that started in 132 CE, which was preceded by the Jewish revolt of 66–74 CE.

In fact, the modern name “Palestine” is derived from the common name for the region since the end of the Bronze Age (3300–1200 BCE). Ancient Egyptian inscriptions from the 12th century BCE referred to “Peleset”, and ancient Assyrian texts referred to “Palashtu”or “Pilistu”.

The area was also called Palestine by the Greeks long before the Romans. The Greeks had called the whole region “Palestina” or some variant for centuries. In the 5th century BCE, the Greek historian Herodotus used the word “Palaistine” to refer to the region. He traveled to Palestine, and his writings speak of the land’s Arab inhabitants but not of Judea or Jews.

Some scholars believe the word “Palestine” to be derived from the Hebrew word “Peleshet” and the Greek word “Palaistês”, which can mean “wrestler”. This is interesting since in the Tanakh Jacob’s new name of “Israel” was given to him by Yahweh after wrestling with an angel.

The word Peleshet appears more than 250 times in the Hebrew Bible and is transliterated as “Philistia”. It was used to describe a confederation of city-states in Canaan that included Gaza and encompassed the area known today as the Gaza Strip. Philistia, by traditional accounts, existed alongside the kingdoms of Israel and Judah until it was incorporated into the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 604 BCE, at which time the “Philistines”, like the “lost tribes” of Israel, also disappeared from the historic record as a distinct group.

The Philistines are traditionally thought to have been a seafaring people from the Aegean Islands who mixed with indigenous Semitic tribes in Canaan while preserving their own culture. However, the argument has been made that the Philistines were not a “sea people” but had migrated south from the northern Levant.

The Romans had also called the broader region “Syria Palaestina” prior to the Jewish revolts in the province of Judea, which was always seen as a component of this greater area of Palestine. The Roman Empire after the Bar Kohkba revolt incorporated Judea into a widened district of Palestine.

In sum, contrary to popular belief, the name “Palestine” did not originate with the Romans after it crushed the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132 CE – 136 CE. On the contrary, it is the cognate of a common name for the region predating the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judea.

The Muslim Arab Conquest of Palestine

After the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine I to Christianity in the early 4th century, Palestine, or the province of Palaestina, came heavily under the influence of Christian culture. It was during Constantine’s reign that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was constructed in the northwest quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem on the traditional site of the crucifixion of Yeshua, whose name has been popularly transliterated from Greek as “Jesus” but is the same as “Joshua” in the Old Testament.

In 324, Constanine relocated the imperial capital to Byzantium, which was renamed Constantinople. While the western part of the empire fell into decay and civilizational collapse, the Roman legacy continued in the east under the Byzantine Empire.

Under the rule of the Eastern Roman Empire, the area of Palaestina was expanded and divided into the provinces of Palaestina Prima (in the center of the country between the Dead Sea and the Mediterranean Sea), Palaestina Secunda (to the north in the area of the Sea of Galilee), and Palaestina Tertia (to south in the area of the Negev Desert and part of the Sinai Peninsula).

Greater Palestine flourished and grew in population to over one million. Most inhabitants spoke Greek or Aramaic, but Jews and Arabs, including Christian Arabs, both continued to live there as minorities.

Sometime around the year 570, Muhammad was born in Arabia, or what is now Saudi Arabia, and he went on to establish the religion of Islam. Practitioners of Islam are known as Muslims, who believe that Muhammad was a prophet of Allah, which is their name for the same God worshipped by Jews and Christians. The Islamic holy book the Quran accepts as scripture both the Hebrew Tanakh and the Christian New Testament, and it refers to both Jews and Christians as “People of the Book”. While Muslims do not believe in Yeshua’s divinity, the Quran describes him as both a prophet and the Messiah. In this sense, Christianity has more in common with Islam than with Judaism, which belief system maintains that Yeshua was not the Messiah. This is why Orthodox Jews still await the coming of the Messiah prophesized in the Tanakh.

After Muhammad’s death in 632, his successors, known as caliphs, set out on a campaign of territorial conquest and defeated Byzantine forces in 636, which brought Palestine and Syria under Arab Muslim control. The Muslim Arabs adopted many names from the Byzantine administration, including the name for Palestine, which became “Falastin” or “Filastin”.

Under the caliph Umar, Palestine was divided into two administrative districts, “Jund al-Urdunn”, or the military district of Jordan, which essentially replaced Palaestina Secunad, and “Jund al-Filastin”, the military district of Palestine, which encompassed most of Palaestina Prima and Palaestina Tertia.

The population of Palestine during the 7th century CE remained mostly Aramaic-speaking Christians, and tolerance was also shown toward Palestinian Jews. Jerusalem came again to have a small but permanent Jewish population.

Under the Umayyad Caliphate, a dynasty established in 661 CE, the Al-Aqsa Mosque was constructed on what Jews call the Temple Mount, which became known to Muslims as “Al-Haram al-Sharif”, or The Noble Sanctuary. It is also known today as the Al-Aqsa Mosque Compound. In 691 CE, the Dome of the Rock was also constructed on the Temple Mount in the location where it is believed the Temple of Solomon once stood, which is also where Muslims traditionally believe the Prophet Muhammad ascended into heaven and met other prophets, including Abraham and Yeshua.

The Umayyad dynasty was followed by the Abbasid and Fatimid dynasties, the latter of which relinquished Jerusalem to the Crusaders of western Europe in 1099, three years after the launch of the First Crusade. In 1187, the founder of the Ayyubid dynasty, the sultan Saladin, defeated the Crusaders and captured Jerusalem, bringing Palestine back under Arab Muslim control.

In 1250, the Ayyubid dynasty in Egypt was overthrown, and a military caste of freed slaves who fought as soldiers, called mamluks, established the Mamluk Sultanate. In 1260, the army of the Mongol Empire reached Palestine but was confronted and defeated by the Mamluk Sultanate. While the European Crusaders were meanwhile still attempting to conquer the area, their efforts were mostly ineffective, and the Christian forces were ultimately defeated at the siege of Acre 1291.

Palestine Under the Ottoman Empire

In 1453, Constantinople was conquered by the Ottoman Turks, and the city was made the capital of the Ottoman Empire. (The city was officially renamed Istanbul in 1930 and is in the modern state of Turkey, the capital of which is Ankara.) In 1486, hostilities broke out between the Mamluks and the Ottoman Turks, and in 1516, the Ottomans swiftly conquered Palestine.

Under Ottoman rule, Palestine was divided into five provincial districts, or “sanjaks”: Safad, Nablus, Jerusalem, Lajjun, and Gaza, which were administratively linked to Damascus under the larger province, or “eyalet”, of Syria.

In 1872, the territory was reorganized into the locally administered sanjaks of Acre, Beirut, and Nablus, while the area from Jaffa southward became part of the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem, which was under Istanbul’s direct control.

An administrative reorganization in 1887 resulted in Palestine being divided into the districts of Nablus and Acre, which were administered from Beirut, and the district of Jerusalem, which continued to deal directly with Istanbul.

Most of Palestine’s inhabitants were Muslim or Christian Arabs, with a Jewish minority. Starting in the 1840s, there was a considerable influx of Jewish immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe. The population in 1850 is estimated to have been around 350,000, with about 85% Muslim Arabs, 11% Christian Arabs, and 4% Jews. By the early 1870s, the Jewish population had grown to about 25,000.

Palestinian Arabs and Palestinian Jews had peaceful relations. Practitioners of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam co-existed in what is often described as the Holy Land. This would change, however, after the rise of the Zionist movement.

In 1896, an Austrian Jew named Theodor Herzl wrote a pamphlet titled Der Judenstaat, or The Jewish State, in which he proposed that the Jewish people escape European persecution by establishing a state of their own in either Argentina or Palestine. His preference was the latter since, as he wrote, “Palestine is our ever-memorable home. The very name of Palestine would attract our people with a force of marvelous potency.”

The movement that Herzl spearheaded was known as Zionism, named for the word “Zion”, which in the Bible refers to either the easternmost of the two hills atop which Jerusalem was built (Mount Zion) or to the city itself. While “Zionism” can have different meanings, Herzl is known as the father of modern political Zionism, and this is the sense in which the word is being used here.

Zionism was rejected by many Jews who had assimilated into other European cultures, and many Orthodox Jews opposed it because they viewed the secular political movement as heretical, an attempt by men to reestablish Israel in defiance of God, without awaiting the Messiah whom they believed would end their exile from the Land of Israel (Eretz Israel), which was God’s punishment for having violated His Covenant with them.

To this day, there are Orthodox Jews who are anti-Zionist and stand in solidarity with Palestinians in their struggle for freedom from Israeli oppression.

By 1907, due mainly to immigration that was at the time only partly driven by political Zionism, the Jewish population of Palestine had grown to about 80,000, most of whom lived in Jerusalem, where there was a Jewish majority.

While no longer its official name under the Ottomans, the area continued to be popularly known as “Palestine” both within the country and in Europe. Here are several illustrative examples:

• William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) refers to “Palestine” in his plays “Othello” and “The Life and Death of King John”.
• In 1865, the “Palestine Exploration Fund” was established in Great Britain.
• In 1911, the Arabic-language newspaper Falastin was established and went on to become the most prominent newspaper in Palestine through the 1920s.
• In a letter to Falastin, the governor of the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem called himself “governor of Palestine”.
• In 1932, The Palestine Post was founded, the name of which was changed in 1950 to The Jerusalem Post, now an Israeli newspaper.
• At the outset of World War I in 1914, the Ottoman government issued a military handbook titled Filastin Risalesi, which provided a demographic and geographic survey of Palestine, a territory identified as including the districts of Acre, Nablus, and Jerusalem.
• In 1915, British naval intelligence issued The Handbook of Syria and Palestine.

The fact that the region was known as “Palestine” under Ottoman rule is, of course, attested to in the language of the infamous 1917 “Balfour Declaration” itself, which was a promise from the British government to support the Zionists’ settler-colonial movement to establish a “national home” for the Jewish people “in Palestine”.

The Zionists likewise adopted the common name for the territory of “Palestine”. In 1929, during the later Mandate era, the World Zionist Organization established the “Jewish Agency for Palestine”, the name of which was not changed to the “Jewish Agency for Israel” until after the Zionists’ unilateral declaration of the existence of the state of Israel in May 1948.

Palestine Under the League of Nations Mandate

After the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, with the Ottoman Empire allied with Germany, to gain support for its war effort, Great Britain promised the Arabs of the Middle East that it would support their independence from Ottoman rule.

Britain made an inherently contradictory promise to the Zionist movement, however, to also gain Jewish support for its war effort. On November 2, 1917, Great Britain issued what is known as “the Balfour Declaration”, which came in the form of a private letter from British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, a Jewish banker from the famous banking family.

In the original draft, written by Rothschild himself, the promise would be for British support the idea “that Palestine should be reconstituted as the national home of the Jewish people.” The phrase “national home of the Jewish people” was euphemistically substituted for “Jewish state” out of respect for Britain’s need not to offend the Arab populations of the Middle East. But the wording was still politically problematic for Britain for the obvious reason, and after several back-and-forth revisions, the British agreed in the final draft to support the Zionist goal of establishing a Jewish national home “in Palestine”.

In addition to the aim of securing Jewish support for the war effort, the British were allured by the idea of bringing Palestine into its sphere of influence. A third reason for European support for the Zionist movement was anti-Semitism. In 1946, in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, for example, the report of a joint British-American committee commented on how European countries were barring entry to Jewish refugees, but in Palestine Jews might “receive a welcome denied them elsewhere.”

Indeed, until the Zionist movement, Palestine had been a refuge for Jews relative to the rampant anti-Semitism in Europe.

When British forces captured Jerusalem in December 1917, they were aided by Arab forces seeking to secure their independence from Ottoman rule. The nationalistic hopes of the Palestinian Arabs, however, would be dashed as Britain proceeded to enforce a belligerent occupation of Palestine specifically aimed at preventing the Palestinians from exercising their right to self-determination.

The facilitation of the Zionist project to reconstitute Palestine into a demographically Jewish state through British force of arms was endorsed by the newly formed League of Nations despite this being a direct violation of the League’s own Covenant, which stated that the ostensible purpose of its “Mandate” system for territories no longer under Ottoman control was to “tutor” the peoples of those territories in the exercise of their independence.

As acknowledged in the British Peel Commission Report of 1937, like the Balfour Declaration, the Palestine Mandate of 1920 was drafted by Zionists themselves for the purpose of advancing their goal of territorial conquest. The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry similarly acknowledged that “the Mandate was framed primarily in the Jewish interest.” As Lord Balfour himself admitted, the “contradiction between the letters of the Covenant and the policy of the Allies” was “flagrant” in the case of Palestine, where “we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country”.

As acknowledged in a July 1921 report from the British high commissioner for Palestine, Herbert Samuel, from the outset of the Mandate, Arabs expressed their unease about the implications of British policy and their fear that the logical implication of that policy was that Arabs were ultimately meant to be expelled from their homeland. Whereas Arabs “had all previously lived on excellent terms with the Jewish population”, this growing unrest among the Arabs had evoked bitter feelings against Zionist Jews.

In 1920, 1921, and in Hebron in 1929, there were outbreaks of violence in which Arab rioters attacked and killed Jews. The British established committees of inquiry to investigate the underlying causes of this violence and determined in each case that there was no inherent anti-Semitism among Arabs and that the violence rather stemmed from the increasing fear among Arabs that the Zionists were aiming to expel them from their lands.

At first, the Zionists aimed to purchase land in Palestine for Jewish colonization. To that end, they exploited feudalistic Ottoman land laws that deprived the local Arab inhabitants of their property rights, purchasing tracts of land from absentee landlords. In some cases, this resulted in expulsions.

At the time of the Balfour Declaration, the population of Palestine was about 750,000, of whom roughly 80% were Muslim Arabs, 10% Christian Arabs, and 7% Jews. By 1947, the population had grown to about 1.9 million, of whom about 61% were Muslim Arabs, 8% Christian Arabs, and 31% Jews. Most of the increase in the Arab population was due to natural growth, whereas the Jewish increase was mostly due to immigration.

However, the Zionists did not get very far in taking over the land by means of purchase. Arabs remained in possession of most of the fertile land. By the expiration of the Mandate in May 1948, Jews owned only about 7% of the land in Palestine, and Arabs owned more land than Jews in every single district of Palestine. By 1937, it had become clear to the Zionist leadership that they would need to establish their Jewish state by other means. Specifically, it would require force of arms.

The British government effectively endorsed the Zionists’ aim of forcibly expelling Arabs in the Peel Commission Report of 1937, which proposed partitioning Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states, which because of demographic and land-ownership realities would require a “compulsory transfer” of hundreds of thousands of Arabs out of the area proposed for the Jewish state.

From that point forward, the Zionist leaders were united in their now openly stated aim of ethnically cleansing Palestine of its Arab inhabitants.

As a result of the rejection of their right to self-determination by the Zionists and the British occupiers, from 1936 until 1939, there was a major Arab revolt. Having been promised independence by the British, they instead found themselves under arguably even greater oppression under the British than they had experienced under Ottoman rule, exercising even less self-governance and local autonomy.

The revolt was ultimately quashed by Britain, which disarmed the Arab population while the Zionists were meanwhile arming themselves for the now expressly stated aim of effecting the “compulsory transfer” of Arabs. In addition to the Zionists’ main paramilitary organization the Haganah, the Zionist terrorist organizations Irgun and Lehi were also formed. Both Irgun and Lehi groups were responsible for attacks not only against Arabs but also against the British, whose forces the Jewish extremists had come to view as a deterrence to getting on with the job of establishing the Jewish state through violence.

In 1947, to extract itself from the increasingly hostile conflict situation that it had helped to create in Palestine, the British government requested the newly formed United Nations, which superseded the League of Nations and took over responsibility for the Mandate, to make recommendations about Palestine’s future governance.

To that end, the UN General Assembly established the UN Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), which again proposed that Palestine be partitioned into separate Jewish and Arab states. The partition plan was wholly inequitable, recommending that Jews get 55% of the total land area for their state despite constituting only about a third of the population and owning only about 7% of the land. Even within the area of the proposed Jewish state, the UNSCOP report acknowledged, Arabs were still a majority and still owned more land.

The UNSCOP report explicitly acknowledged that its recommendation was premised on a rejection of the Arab Palestinians’ right to self-determination despite this being an expressly recognized right inherent to all peoples under the UN Charter. The principle of self-determination, the report noted, “was not applied to Palestine, obviously because of the intention to make possible the creation of the Jewish National Home there.”

On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 181, which endorsed the partition plan and recommended that it be considered by the Security Council, which was done, and that is where the plan died because, as the US representative Warren Austin rightly observed, the UN had no authority to partition Palestine against the will of the majority of its inhabitants.

Just as they had done with the British endorsement of the idea of “compulsory transfer”, the Zionist leadership took Resolution 181 as an international endorsement of their aims, and ethnic cleansing operations got underway. By the expiration of the Mandate on May 14, 1948, a quarter of a million Arabs had already been ethnically cleansed.

The same day, the Zionists unilaterally declared the existence of the state of Israel without defining any borders for the ostensible new state. While citing UN Resolution 181 for legal authority, contrary to popular myth, the General Assembly resolution neither legally partitioned Palestine nor conferred any legal authority to the Zionists for their unilateral declaration.

Upon the declaration of a “Jewish state” in the place of Palestine, neighboring Arab states militarily intervened to stop the ethnic cleansing, with very limited success. Jordan managed to hold on to the territory known today as the West Bank, and Egypt managed to hold onto the Gaza Strip. By the time armistice agreements were reached in 1949, the Zionists controlled 78% of Palestine, which was considerably more territory than was proposed for the Jewish state under the UN partition plan, which was already grossly inequitable and prejudicial toward Palestinians’ rights. About 750,000 Palestinians had been ethnically cleansed and never allowed to return. Over 500 Arab villages were literally wiped off the map to make way for Jewish settlements.

Contrary to the Zionist propaganda narrative most Americans are familiar with, this is the historical reality about how the “Jewish state” of Israel came into existence. And the fundamental cause of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians that persists to this day remains the rejection of the Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

The international community bears great responsibility for having created this conflict, and Great Britain and the United States in particular have been complicit in perpetrating this grave injustice against the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine. The international community therefore bears responsibility for ending it by remedying that injustice. Unfortunately, the US government persists in using its power, including its veto power in the UN Security Council, to block the international community from holding Israel accountable for its systematic violation of the fundamental human rights of the Palestinian people.

The horrific consequences of the US enabling Israel to go on perpetrating crimes against the Palestinians with impunity are unfolding before our eyes today with Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.