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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 February 2009
The 1937 Peel Commission proposal for the partition of British mandatory Palestine has generally been framed as the precursor to the United Nations partition plan of 1947. This article demonstrates the importance of tracing the roots of the 1937 Peel Commission plan back to conversations taking place in the Colonial Office and government of Palestine as early as 1929. A close analysis of dialogues over territorial division and of preliminary partition plans, particularly those drawn up by L. G. Archer Cust and D. G. Harris, leads to the conclusion that Britain's focus on the ideal of representative government played a primary role in the development of partition proposals. This article argues that inter-ethnic violence played a much smaller role in the development of partition proposals than has previously been thought. Instead, partition was proposed as a solution to the political implications of non-representative government in Palestine, a topic constantly in the spotlight thanks to the League of Nations.
I wish to thank Roger Owen, Susan Pedersen, Robert Travers, the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on drafts of this article. Earlier versions benefited from the suggestions of participants at the Mid-Atlantic Conference on British Studies, the World History Workshop at Cambridge University, the Middle East Workshop at Harvard University, and the International Seminar on Decolonization in the Twentieth Century. I particularly wish to thank Wm Roger Louis, the leaders, and participants in the seminar on decolonization for their time and valuable input. Research for the article was generously supported by the US Department of Education, Harvard University, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
1 Article 2, League of nations: Mandate for Palestine, together with a note by the secretary-general relating to its application to the territory known as Trans-Jordan under the provisions of article 25, Dec. 1922, Command Paper 1785 (London: HMSO, 1923).
2 W. K. Hancock, Survey of British commonwealth affairs (London, 1937), i, p. 473.
3 Article 2, League of Nations mandate for Palestine.
4 Shmuel Dothan, A land in the balance: the struggle for Palestine, 1918–1948 (Tel Aviv, 1993), pp. 104–46, 180–93.
5 Itzhak Galnoor, The partition of Palestine: decision crossroads in the Zionist movement, SUNY series in Israeli studies (Albany, NY, 1995); Yossi Katz, Partner to partition: the Jewish agency's partition plan in the mandate era (London, 1998).
6 Roza El-Eini, Mandated landscape: British imperial rule in Palestine, 1929–1948 (London, 2006), pp. 314–79.
7 Gideon Biger, The boundaries of modern Palestine, 1840–1947 (London, 2004), pp. 190–7. In addition to being brief, Biger's examination of these early plans contains several errors. For example, a Colonial Office minute by A. C. C. Parkinson reporting on a conversation with Ahmed Khalidi is identified as a memorandum by Khalidi himself.
8 Peter Sluglett complains that British imperial historians tend either to ignore the Middle East or ‘subsume it under some generalized notion of “the periphery”’. See Peter Sluglett, ‘Formal and informal empire in the Middle East’, in Robin Winks, ed. Oxford History of the British Empire, v (Oxford, 1999), p. 422.
9 Hancock, Survey of British commonwealth affairs p. 375.
10 Roza El-Eini and Shmuel Dothan are exceptions; El-Eini makes the point that Coupland was open to ideas from various sources and briefly traces the partition idea back to 1935, though not before (El-Eini, Mandated landscape, p. 320). Dothan calls Coupland's primary role ‘a myth’ (Dothan, A land in the balance, p. 196).
11 See, for example, Joe Cleary, Literature, partition and the nation-state: culture and conflict in Ireland, Israel, and Palestine (Cambridge, 2002), p. 24.
12 T. G. Fraser, ‘Sir Reginald Coupland, the round table and the problem of divided societies’, in Andrew Bosco and Alex May, eds., The round table, the empire/commonwealth and British foreign policy (London, 1997), p. 410. Fraser writes of Coupland's mind ‘turning to a more far-reaching course of action’ than cantonization – that is partition – which he then ‘launches’ to Weizmann and the members of the Peel Commission. See also Martin Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold: portrait of a diplomat, 1869–1941 (London, 1973), pp. 415–16; Katz, Partner to partition, pp. 2–3; Galnoor, Partition of Palestine, pp. 70–4. Howard M. Sachar, A history of Israel: from the rise of Zionism to our time (Oxford, 1977), identifies Coupland as ‘[t]he single most influential’ member of the Peel Commission and emphasizes that it was Coupland who first raised the possibility of partition in one of the Commission's secret meetings with Chaim Weizmann (pp. 201–3).
13 Weltsch, Robert, ‘Palestine plans and counter-plans: Zionism face to face with world realities’, Commentary, 2 (1946), p. 305Google Scholar.
14 Alvin Jackson, ‘Ireland, the Union, and the empire, 1800–1960’, in Kevin Kenny, ed., Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford, 2004), p. 144. Citing Cox to Cairncross, 5 June 1972, covering a memorandum by J. S. Bennett on ‘Palestine and Ireland’: The National Archives, London (TNA), CJ.4/236.
15 Arthur Ruppin, a member of the Zionist Executive, proposed in 1907 that Jewish settlement be concentrated on the coastal plains so that Jews could eventually become the majority there and gain regional autonomy. The journalist and Zionist activist, Itamar Ben-Avi, proposed a similar clustering of Jewish settlements in 1918, and advocated the creation of a cantonal system similar to that of Switzerland. For a detailed discussion of the development of territorial separatism in Zionist thought, see Dothan, A land in the balance, pp. 13–38, 72–103.
16 G. K. Chesterton, The new Jerusalem (London, 1920), p. 297. Chesterton was enamoured of this proposal only inasmuch as it gave him the idea of creating Jewish cantons outside of Palestine as well since all the Jews could not possibly fit in Palestine. His vision was that virtually all the world's Jews would be concentrated in a series of cantons around the world, and would have their spiritual centre in one of the Jewish cantons in Palestine. This, he argued, would solve the ‘Jewish problem’.
17 ‘Zionism: a critical phase’, Palestine Weekly, 17 Feb. 1928, p. 146.
18 Murray to Knabenshue, 22 Nov. 1929: National Archives, Washington, DC (NA), RG84.350/26/14/1, Class 840.1.
19 Knabenshue to Murray, 21 Dec. 1929, p. 4: NA, RG84.350/26/14/1, Class 840.1.
20 On Zionist politics over the so-called Abbas Hilmi affair, see the Central Zionist Archives (CZA), S25/2, and CZA Z4/286/13.
21 Jewish Telegraphic Agency Bulletin, 10 Feb. 1932: TNA, CO 733/219/2.
22 Statement of the Executive of the Zionist Revisionist World Union, 4 Feb. 1932: TNA, CO 733/219/2.
23 Translated excerpt from Rassweit, 28 Feb. 1932: TNA, CO 733/219/2.
24 Minute, O. G. R. Williams, 11 Feb. 1932: TNA, CO 733/219/2.
25 Minute, H. F. Downie, 9 Mar. 1932: TNA, CO 733/219/2.
26 A. C. C. Parkinson to A. Wauchope, 14 Dec. 1933: TNA, CO 733/248/20.
27 Ibid.
28 Minute, O. G. R. Williams, 10 Mar. 1932: TNA, CO 733/219/2.
29 This was certainly not the first time that a Zionist leader had suggested partition as a possible solution. The roots of partition in Zionist thought could arguably be traced back to the notion of transferring Arabs out of part or all of Palestine. See for an early example, Theodor Herzl, The complete diaries of Theodor Herzl, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, NY, 1960), i, p. 88; or for one during the British mandate, TNA, CO 733/231/1. See also Tom Segev, One Palestine, complete: Jews and Arabs under the British mandate, trans, Haim Watzman (New York, NY, 2001), pp. 403–8.
30 Minute, O. G. R. Williams, 4 Dec. 1933; letter from Sir Eric Drummond, British ambassador in Rome, 13 Dec. 1933: TNA, CO 733/248/20.
31 A. C. C. Parkinson to A. Wauchope, 14 Dec. 1933: TNA, CO 733/248/20.
32 Ibid.
33 Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Daily News Bulletin, 3 Jan. 1934: TNA, CO 733/248/20.
34 Minute, A. C. C. Parkinson, 5 Dec. 1933: TNA, CO 733/248/20.
35 Examples include Itamar Ben-Avi, ‘Pilpelaot’, Doar Ha-Yom, 30 July 1929, and Paltiel Dieckstien, Ha-Olam, 11–18 Feb. 1930. See Dothan, A land in the balance, pp. 107–12.
36 By 1936 when the Peel Commission was gathering evidence, less than 10 per cent of senior British officials in the Palestine government knew Hebrew. See Command Paper 5479, Palestine Royal Commission Report [Peel report] (London: HMSO, 1937), p. 164.
37 Beatrice Erskine, Palestine of the Arabs (London, 1935), pp. 226–9.
38 Cust was also well connected, though this did not appear to aid his efforts for cantonization. His cousin was Sir Ronald Storrs, first British governor of Jerusalem, and his father was a close confidante of King George V.
39 L. G. Archer Cust, ‘The future of Palestine’, 18 Jan. 1935, p. 16: TNA, CO 733/283/12.
40 The movement of ideas between non-official and official spheres was quite common and it is not clear whether in 1935 the cantonization concept jumped from the Arab source cited in Erskine's book to the ‘British ex-official’ (presumably Cust) via Erskine, or vice versa. It is also possible that there was no direct line of transmission since cantonization was simply ‘in the air’.
41 Cust, ‘The future of Palestine’, p. 4.
42 Ibid., p. 12.
43 Minute, H. F. Downie, 9 Feb. 1935: TNA, CO 733/283/12.
44 Minute, O. G. R. Williams, 11 Feb. 1935: TNA, CO 733/283/12.
45 Minute, A. C. C. Parkinson, 14 Feb. 1935: TNA, CO 733/283/12.
46 L. G. Archer Cust, ‘Whither Palestine’, The Near East and India, 19 Sept. 1935: TNA, CO 733/283/12.
47 A. Wauchope to A. C. C. Parkinson, 23 Nov. 1935: TNA, CO 733/283/12.
48 Cust, L. G. Archer, ‘Cantonization: a plan for Palestine’, Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society, 23 (1936), p. 211CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
49 Ibid., p. 201. Italics mine.
50 Ibid., p. 206.
51 C. Weizmann to L. G. A. Cust, 30 June 1936: TNA, CO 733/302/9.
52 Report of an interview between High Commissioner Wauchope and Moshe Shertok and David Ben Gurion, 9 July 1936: TNA, CO 733/302/9.
53 Confidential note by C. Weizmann, 19 June 1936, covering a conversation on 16 June 1936: CZA, A185/134.
54 This plan was never sent to the Colonial Office and does not survive in the remnants of the Palestine government files in Israel. However, later memoranda and maps sent to the Colonial Office clearly indicate the shape of this proposal.
55 I. N. Camp, ‘Statistical memorandum on Arab population in the two proposed Jewish cantons’, 22 Sept. 1936: TNA, CO 733/316/9.
56 Edward Keith-Roach, ‘Recommendation on future policy’, 30 Sept. 1936: TNA, CO 733/316/9.
57 D. G. Harris, ‘Cantonisation in Palestine’, 4 Oct. 1936: TNA, CO 733/302/9, p. 1.
58 Ibid., p. 7.
59 Ibid., p. 12.
60 Ibid., p. 13.
61 Ibid., p. 17.
62 Note, J. Hall to A. Wauchope, 24 Aug. 1936: CZA, S25/22723.
63 Peel report, p. 358.
64 Ibid., p. 106.
65 Ibid., p. 368.
66 CM 46(37)5, 8 Dec. 1937: TNA, CAB 23/90.
67 Command Paper 5854, Palestine Partition Commission report (London: HMSO, 1938).
68 For more on the latter see Klieman, Aaron S., ‘In the public domain: the controversy over partition for Palestine’, Jewish Social Studies, 43 (1980), pp. 147–64Google Scholar.
