Palestine, an Early History

For the Palestinian Arab people, the indigenous inhabitants of the land for millennia, the end of the Second World War ushered in not an era of liberation and self-determination, as promised by Allied rhetoric, but a period of intensified existential threat. While the world grappled with the horrific aftermath of the Holocaust in Europe – a crime perpetrated far from Palestinian shores – the political movement of Zionism, with powerful international backing, moved decisively to exploit this tragedy. Their goal was not merely refuge for Jewish survivors, but the culmination of a long-term colonial project: the establishment of an exclusive Jewish state in Palestine, a project predicated on the marginalisation, dispossession, and eventual expulsion of the native Arab population. The years 1945-1946 were crucial, laying the groundwork for the Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948.

The Impact of the Harrison Report

The investigation led by Earl G. Harrison in the summer of 1945 into the conditions of Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs) in Europe became a potent tool in the Zionist arsenal, precisely because it systematically erased the Palestinian context. Harrison, arriving with known sympathies cultivated through pre-war involvement in pro-Zionist charitable work, framed his findings in a way that perfectly aligned with Zionist political objectives. His report, emotionally charged and leveraging understandable post-Holocaust sympathy, depicted the plight of Jewish survivors while remaining wilfully blind to the rights and presence of Palestine's Arabs. His dramatic, though factually flawed (referencing non-existent gas chambers at Belsen), comparisons of Allied DP camps to Nazi treatment served to generate outrage and urgency directed towards Palestine.

The report's true political significance lay in its recommendations. By urging the US to recognise Jewish DPs not just as refugees but as a distinct national entity demanding a national solution, Harrison embedded the Zionist premise into official American discourse. This directly undermined the status of Palestinians as the legitimate population of the country. The call for the "immediate immigration of 100,000 Jews to Palestine" was the report's most devastating element for Palestinians. This number, arbitrary and devoid of any consideration for Palestine’s social fabric, economic limits, or the political rights of its majority Arab inhabitants, was plucked from Zionist demands. It treated Palestine as terra nullius, a blank slate onto which European problems could be projected, or worse, as a territory whose indigenous people were simply an obstacle to be overcome. For Palestinians, who had already endured decades of increasing, politically motivated immigration under British rule, the Harrison Report was a clear signal: their homeland was being offered up by foreign powers, and their voice counted for nothing.

American Power and Palestinian Rights: A Deliberate Neglect

President Truman’s swift endorsement of the Harrison Report, particularly the 100,000 figure, exemplified how American foreign policy could be shaped by domestic political expediency at the direct expense of an entire people's rights. While humanitarian concern for Jewish survivors was a factor, the immense pressure exerted by the well-funded and highly organised American Zionist lobby played a decisive role. Truman's candid acknowledgement that he had Jewish voters to answer to, but not Arab ones, revealed the cynical calculus at play. Palestinian self-determination was simply not a factor in American strategic or political considerations.

The deep hypocrisy of the US position was glaring. While demanding Britain open Palestine to mass Jewish immigration, America maintained its own severely restrictive quotas, which had barred entry to hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing Nazism before and during the war. Post-war, these quotas remained largely intact. The US effectively sought to solve the European Jewish refugee problem, exacerbated by its own restrictive policies, by imposing it upon Palestine. As observers like British MP Richard Crossman noted, supporting Zionism allowed many Americans to feel virtuous about aiding Jews without welcoming them to the US, conveniently overlooking the fact that this "solution" entailed the violation of another people’s homeland. Warnings from within the US State Department about the long-term consequences of alienating the Arab world – warnings often based on American strategic interests rather than Palestinian rights, but acknowledging Arab opposition – were ultimately disregarded. The emergent American superpower was throwing its weight behind a colonial project, dressing it in humanitarian garb while ignoring the fundamental injustice being perpetrated against the Palestinians.

The Anglo-American Committee

The formation of the joint Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in late 1945 provided a stage for Palestinian voices to be heard, but ultimately proved to be another exercise in validating externally imposed solutions. The very premise of the Committee – investigating the linkage between the European DP situation and Palestine – already framed Palestine as the default destination, sidelining Palestinian rights to self-determination and control over immigration.

Palestinian representatives, like the eloquent historian George Antonius, made powerful arguments before the Committee. Antonius passionately articulated the moral absurdity of the situation: "We all sympathise with the Jews and are shocked at the way Christian nations persecute them. But do you expect the Muslims of Palestine to be more 'Christian', more humanitarian than the followers of Christ? After what happened in Germany, Poland, Romania, etc., have we to suffer in order to make good what you committed? ... The treatment meted out to Jews in Germany... is a disgrace... But the cure for the eviction of Jews from Germany is not to be sought in the eviction of Arabs from Palestine." His words captured the profound sense of injustice felt by Palestinians – being forced to pay the price for European crimes.

Despite such testimony, the Committee's conclusions, heavily influenced by co-chair Harrison and the prevailing pro-Zionist political winds in Washington, were predictable. The final report in April 1946 recommended the immediate admission of the 100,000 Jewish immigrants and outlined steps towards partition. Partition, presented as a compromise, was fundamentally an assault on Palestinian territorial integrity and national rights, proposing to carve up their homeland to create a state for recent colonisers. The Attlee government's rejection of the report stemmed not from a defence of Palestinian rights, but from pragmatic British imperial calculations about stability in the wider Middle East and concerns over antagonising Arab states vital for British interests (oil, communication routes). While this rejection delayed the immediate influx demanded by the US and Zionists, it offered no fundamental protection for Palestinian rights and merely hardened Zionist resolve to achieve their aims through force and clandestine operations, further intensifying the pressure on the Palestinian community.

Zionist Strategy: Demography as a Weapon, Land as the Prize

The Zionist leadership, with David Ben-Gurion solidifying his control over the pragmatic, activist wing, operated with a clear strategic vision in this period. The suffering of Jewish DPs in Europe was not just a humanitarian crisis to be alleviated, but a potent political resource to be mobilised. Ben-Gurion's strategy, explicitly stated in tours of DP camps and internal discussions, was to use the DPs as a lever. By encouraging their concentration in the American zone of Germany and fostering their desire for Palestine above all other destinations (actively discouraging options elsewhere), he aimed to create an "intolerable" situation for the Americans, forcing them to compel British acquiescence to mass immigration. "They... had to operate as a political factor," he insisted, viewing the "disaster" of the Holocaust as potential "strength if channelled to a productive course" – the course leading directly to a Jewish state.

This instrumental approach was coupled with the ongoing, systematic acquisition of Palestinian land. While representing only a fraction of Palestine's total area by 1946 (around 6-7%), Zionist land purchases, facilitated by organisations like the Jewish National Fund (JNF), were strategically focused on fertile coastal plains and valleys. The JNF charter explicitly forbade leasing land back to Arabs, ensuring permanent alienation from the indigenous population. Though some land was purchased from absentee landlords living outside Palestine, a painful reality was that sales also occurred involving local Arabs, sometimes including notables, often under duress, economic hardship exacerbated by the Mandate system, or through complex intermediaries. Regardless of the seller, the result was the steady displacement of Palestinian tenant farmers and the fragmentation of Arab communities, creating contiguous blocks of Jewish-owned land intended as the territorial basis for the future state. Immigration and land acquisition were the twin pillars of the Zionist colonial strategy, designed to create irreversible demographic and geographic facts on the ground.

The Palestinian Experience

For Palestinian Arabs, these years were marked by a growing sense of being besieged in their own homeland. Decades of British Mandate rule had already systematically disadvantaged them. Unlike the Zionist movement, which was allowed, even encouraged, to build quasi-state institutions (the Jewish Agency, the Histadrut labour federation, armed groups like the Haganah), Palestinian Arab political aspirations were consistently suppressed. Education, healthcare, and economic opportunities lagged significantly behind those available in the Jewish sector. The Mandate authorities actively facilitated Zionist immigration and land purchase while offering little protection to Arab farmers facing displacement.

Leadership within the Palestinian community faced immense challenges. While figures like Haj Amin al-Husseini made strategic blunders, including wartime collaboration with the Axis powers (which Zionist propaganda eagerly exploited), the context was one of operating under colonial rule with severely limited autonomy and facing a highly organised, internationally backed opponent. Internal divisions, often exacerbated by traditional family rivalries or British divide-and-rule tactics, hampered unified action. Yet, resistance continued. The memory of the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt – a popular uprising against British rule and Zionist colonisation, brutally crushed by the British military (involving collective punishment, village demolitions, mass arrests, and executions) – remained potent. Post-war, Palestinians engaged in political protest, strikes, and continued appeals to international bodies, desperately trying to make their case heard against the rising tide of Zionist influence and great power indifference. They experienced the influx of immigrants not as enrichment, but as the arrival of groups explicitly aiming to supplant them. They saw the land changing hands, village by village, and understood the existential threat it represented.

British Policy: Imperial Interests and the Facilitation of Colonisation

Britain’s role as the Mandatory power remained central, and deeply culpable from a Palestinian perspective. The Mandate itself, granted by the League of Nations after World War I, incorporated the contradictory Balfour Declaration, effectively tasking Britain with facilitating the establishment of a Jewish "national home" in a land already inhabited by an Arab majority who were explicitly denied the right to self-determination granted to neighbouring Arab countries. Throughout the Mandate period, British policy, while sometimes appearing to vacillate (like the 1939 White Paper restricting immigration, introduced primarily to secure Arab quiescence on the eve of WWII), fundamentally enabled the Zionist project. British security forces protected Zionist settlements and institutions while suppressing Arab nationalism. British law facilitated land transfers.

The post-war Labour government under Attlee and Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin continued this pattern, albeit with different justifications. Labour’s pre-election promises supporting Zionism were quickly abandoned in favour of perceived imperial necessities. Bevin’s resistance to the 100,000 immigrants stemmed from concerns about regional stability, the safety of British troops caught between escalating Zionist violence and potential Arab unrest, and the desire to maintain influence in oil-rich Arab states. His expressed belief that Jews should rebuild Europe, while perhaps sincere, ignored the reality of post-Holocaust trauma and persistent anti-Semitism, and conveniently disregarded Palestinian rights to control who entered their country. Britain was not acting as a neutral arbiter, but as a colonial power trying to manage a crisis largely of its own making, prioritising its own declining imperial interests over the rights of the indigenous population it was ostensibly obligated to protect. Their administration created the conditions within which Zionist power could grow while Palestinian capacity for self-governance was deliberately stifled.

Escalating Violence and the Road to Nakba

The rejection of the Anglo-American Committee's recommendations and Britain's attempts to curb Zionist-organised "illegal" immigration created a pretext for escalating violence by Zionist paramilitary groups. While the Haganah focused on smuggling immigrants (the Bricha) and sabotage aimed at infrastructure facilitating British control, extremist groups like Menachem Begin's Irgun and the Lehi (Stern Gang) engaged in overt terrorism, targeting British soldiers, police, and Arab civilians. These attacks were not random acts but part of a deliberate strategy to make British rule untenable and terrorise the Palestinian population. Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Agency leadership maintained a complex relationship with these groups, publicly condemning some actions while privately coordinating or tolerating others when deemed useful for the overall struggle.

British responses, such as the large-scale arrests and searches during Operation Agatha ("Black Sabbath") in June 1946, were acts of colonial policing aimed at suppressing resistance to policies Palestinians viewed as fundamentally unjust. This cycle of Zionist paramilitary action and British repression further destabilised the country, but the ultimate victims of this dynamic were the Palestinian Arabs, caught between a colonial power unwilling to grant them independence and a settler movement determined to establish its state on their land.

Conclusion: Premeditated Dispossession

The period of 1945-1946 was therefore not merely a prelude to conflict, but a critical phase in the systematic dispossession of the Palestinian people. It witnessed the marshalling of international political power, particularly by the United States, behind the Zionist project, leveraging the genuine tragedy of the Holocaust to override the fundamental rights of Palestine's indigenous Arab population. It saw the British Mandate authority, driven by its own imperial calculations, fail utterly to protect the people under its charge, instead continuing policies that facilitated their eventual displacement. It confirmed the Zionist movement's strategic commitment to demographic transformation through mass immigration and land acquisition, regardless of the human cost to Palestinians.

While immigration can, and usually is, be a source of cultural and economic vitality, its implementation in Mandate Palestine was fundamentally different. It was a politically driven, state-building project aimed at demographic conquest, consciously undertaken against the will and at the expense of the native inhabitants. For Palestinians, these years solidified their understanding that their claims to self-determination, justice, and their ancestral homeland were being deliberately sacrificed on the altar of great power politics and Zionist ambition. The storm clouds gathering over Palestine in 1946 carried the unmistakable precursors of the Nakba, the catastrophe that would soon violently dispossess the majority of the Palestinian Arab people from their homes and lands.