The Mandate for Palestine

Britain took Palestine by conquest in 1917–18 and governed it under military administration until 1920. At the San Remo conference in April 1920 the Allied powers assigned the mandate for Palestine to Britain; a civil administration was installed under Herbert Samuel; and on 24 July 1922 the Council of the League of Nations approved the text of the Mandate, which came into force on 29 September 1923.

The document has a preamble and twenty-eight articles. The preamble recites the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917 and states that the Mandatory should be responsible for putting into effect the declaration in favour of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing should prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities. That formula — the majority of the country’s inhabitants defined negatively, by what they were not, and guaranteed civil and religious but not political rights — is the Mandate’s governing asymmetry.

The articles gave it machinery. Article 2 made the administration responsible for placing the country under conditions that would secure the establishment of the Jewish national home and the development of self-governing institutions. Article 4 recognised an appropriate “Jewish agency” as a public body entitled to advise and cooperate with the administration. Article 6 required the administration to facilitate Jewish immigration and to encourage close settlement by Jews on the land, including state lands not required for public purposes. Article 22 made English, Arabic and Hebrew the official languages. Nowhere was there a corresponding Arab agency, nor any provision for the representative government the Mandate’s own Article 2 promised in the abstract.

Palestinians rejected the Mandate from the outset — through the Palestine Arab Congresses, delegations to London, boycotts of the proposed legislative council, and eventually the general strike and revolt of 1936–39 — on the ground that a mandate under Article 22 of the League Covenant was supposed to be a trust for the benefit of the people of the territory, and that this one had been written for somebody else. The League never accepted the argument. The Mandate remained the legal basis of British rule until Britain surrendered it in 1948.

Sources

• League of Nations — Mandate for Palestine, 24 July 1922 (full text) — PalQuest
• History of the Question of Palestine — United Nations (UNISPAL)