If I were in your place I would be a Zionist, and if you were in my place you would be an Arab nationalist like me.
– Aouni Abd-al Hadi to David Ben-Gurion
One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate, by Tom Segev
A man was riding on his donkey and saw another man walking. He invited the man to ride with him. Mounting the donkey, the stranger said, “How fast your donkey is!” The two rode on for a while. When the stranger then said, “How fast our donkey is!” the animal’s owner ordered the man to get off. “Why?” the stranger asked. “I’m afraid,” said the owner, “that you’ll soon be saying, ‘How fast my donkey is!’”
– Khalil al-Sakakini, a Christian Arab, to Dr. Judah Leib Magnes, president of the Hebrew University
In the aftermath of World War One, with the formerly Ottoman Middle East carved primarily between British and French interests, the British held the mandate for Palestine. Given the contradictory wartime promises made by the British to the Arabs who populated the land and the Jews who hoped to populate it, it seems just that Britain was stuck with this mess of its making.
Talks between the Arabs and Jews were fruitless – each wanting something the other was unwilling to give. Push came to shove (you will not get a more complex analysis than this from me); from 1936 to 1939 the Arabs revolted, marked traditionally as beginning in Jaffa on April 19, 1936.
Initially, Arab terrorism was primarily aimed at the British; it was the British that held the authority, it was the British allowing the immigration.
Inevitably, Jews were on both the receiving and giving end of the violence; like the Arabs,…