For the Palestinian Arabs, the end of the Second World War was a period of intensified existential threat. While Allied rhetoric promised self-determination for the victims of fascism, the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine found their homeland offered up as a solution to European crimes. The political movement of Zionism, supported by international powers, moved to exploit the aftermath of the Holocaust. Their objective was to complete a colonial project: the establishment of an exclusive Jewish state on land already inhabited for millennia by an Arab majority. The years 1945 and 1946 were the critical period where the infrastructure for the Nakba was finalised.
The Erasure of the Palestinian Context
Earl G. Harrison's summer 1945 investigation into Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs) in Europe was a political weapon. Harrison arrived with established pro-Zionist sympathies and framed his findings to suit a specific nationalistic agenda. His report used emotionally charged language to depict the suffering of survivors while ignoring the existence of the Palestinian people. His dramatic comparisons of Allied DP camps to Nazi treatment were particularly cynical, especially given his inclusion of factually incorrect claims regarding gas chambers at Belsen. The inaccuracies generated a sense of moral urgency that directed all Jewish migration toward Palestine.
The report’s most significant move was its recommendation that the US recognise Jewish DPs as a distinct national entity. This embedded the Zionist premise into official American discourse and stripped Palestinians of their status as the legitimate population. Harrison's call for the "immediate immigration of 100,000 Jews" was the most destructive element of the document. The figure was arbitrary, ignoring the social fabric and the political rights of the Arab majority. It treated Palestine as terra nullius (a blank slate) where European powers could project their problems. For Palestinians, who had already endured decades of forced immigration under British rule, the Harrison Report proved that their voices carried no weight in the new world order.
American Expediency and Hypocrisy
President Truman’s swift endorsement of the Harrison Report showed how American foreign policy was dictated by domestic political needs. While humanitarian concern was the public justification, the pressure of the American Zionist lobby was the actual driver. Truman famously admitted that he had to answer to hundreds of thousands of Jewish voters, whereas he had no Arab constituency. This cynical calculus meant that Palestinian self-determination was never a factor in Washington’s strategic planning.
The hypocrisy of the American position was total. While Truman demanded that Britain open Palestine to mass migration, the United States maintained its own restrictive quotas. These laws had barred entry to hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing Nazism before the war and remained largely intact after 1945. The US sought to solve a refugee crisis (one exacerbated by its own closed borders) by imposing it upon a territory it did not own. British MP Richard Crossman noted that supporting Zionism allowed Americans to feel virtuous about aiding Jews without having to welcome them into the US. The emerging superpower threw its weight behind a colonial project while dressing it in the borrowed robes of humanitarianism.
The Failure of Inquiry
The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in late 1945 was a stage-managed attempt to validate externally imposed solutions. The Committee’s premise linked the European DP situation directly to Palestine, which framed the country as the default destination and sidelined Palestinian rights.
Palestinian representatives, including the historian George Antonius, presented a moral argument that the Committee chose to ignore. Antonius argued that it was a moral absurdity to expect the Muslims of Palestine to be more "Christian" or humanitarian than the Western nations that had actually persecuted the Jews. He stated that the cure for the eviction of Jews from Germany was not the eviction of Arabs from Palestine. His testimony captured the injustice of a people being forced to pay for crimes they did not commit.
The Committee’s final report in April 1946 recommended the admission of 100,000 immigrants and outlined steps toward partition. Partition was a direct assault on Palestinian territorial integrity. It proposed to carve up a homeland to create a state for recent colonisers. The British government rejected the report, not to defend Arab rights, but because of pragmatic concerns about imperial stability. The rejection delayed the influx, offered no fundamental protection for Palestinians, and only hardened Zionist resolve to achieve their aims through force.
Demography and Land Acquisition
Zionist leadership under David Ben-Gurion viewed the suffering of survivors in Europe as a political resource. Ben-Gurion’s strategy was to use DPs as a lever to force American and British acquiescence. He encouraged the concentration of refugees in the American zone of Germany and discouraged migration to any destination other than Palestine. He intended to create an "intolerable" situation for the Allies, explicitly stating that the disaster of the Holocaust could be converted into political strength if channelled correctly.
This instrumental use of human suffering came alongside the systematic acquisition of land. By 1946, Zionist land purchases represented around seven per cent of Palestine, but these holdings were strategically focused on the most fertile coastal plains and valleys. The Jewish National Fund (JNF) charter explicitly forbade leasing land back to Arabs. This ensured that any land purchased was permanently alienated from the indigenous population. This created contiguous blocks of Jewish-owned land designed to serve as the territorial basis for a future state. Immigration and land acquisition were the twin pillars of a strategy intended to create irreversible demographic facts.
The Besieged Population
Palestinian Arabs spent these years feeling besieged in their own homes. Decades of British Mandate rule had systematically disadvantaged them. The British allowed the Zionist movement to build quasi-state institutions like the Jewish Agency and the Haganah, while they suppressed Palestinian political structures. Education and healthcare in the Arab sector were neglected because the Mandate authorities prioritised the "national home" for the Jewish minority.
Palestinian leadership struggled under the weight of colonial rule and international indifference. While Haj Amin al-Husseini made catastrophic strategic blunders, the context was one of a people facing a highly organised, internationally backed opponent. Resistance was informed by the memory of the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt, which the British military had crushed through collective punishment and mass executions. Post-war, Palestinians engaged in strikes and appeals to international bodies, but they were ignored. They saw the land changing hands and understood that the immigrants arriving were not seeking integration, but supplantation.
British Culpability
Britain’s role as the Mandatory power was one of facilitation. The Mandate itself, granted after the First World War, incorporated the Balfour Declaration. This tasked Britain with establishing a Jewish "national home" in a land with an Arab majority. It denied Palestinians the self-determination granted to neighbouring countries. Throughout the period, British security forces protected Zionist settlements while suppressing Arab nationalism.
The post-war Labour government under Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin continued this pattern of managing a crisis they had created. Bevin’s resistance to mass immigration was rooted in imperial necessity, specifically the need for oil and communication routes in Arab states, rather than a genuine concern for Palestinian rights. Britain was a colonial power that enabled Zionist power to grow until it was too late to stop.
Precursors to the Nakba
The rejection of the Anglo-American Committee’s findings gave Zionist paramilitary groups the pretext for escalating violence. The Haganah sabotaged infrastructure, while the Irgun and the Lehi engaged in terrorism against British soldiers and Arab civilians. The violence was deliberate, a strategy to make British rule untenable and to terrorise the Arab population into submission. Ben-Gurion publicly condemned these groups while privately coordinating their actions when they served the broader goal.
British responses like the mass arrests during Operation Agatha in 1946 were acts of colonial policing that failed to address the root injustice. The cycle of violence further destabilised the country, and the Palestinian Arabs were the primary victims. They were caught between a colonial power and a settler movement determined to seize their land. 1945 and 1946 were a phase of premeditated dispossession. The international community used the tragedy of the Holocaust to override the rights of an indigenous people, and every element of the catastrophe that followed was already present in those years.