(dramatic music)
>>The Palestinian Mandate,
from its beginning,
was a struggle between
the Jewish community,
and the Arab community,
over land and population.
The Zionists understood,
that if they were going
to turn the promise
of a national home,
into an independent state,
they had to get Jews to come
in from around the world,
to Palestine,
and they they also had to get
as much land as they could.
Population was the first
major battleground.
The demographics of Palestine.
If we go back to the 1850s,
before the rise of Jewish
nationalism in Europe,
there were about five percent Jews living
in what is today Palestine.
The rest were Muslim Palestinians,
and about 10 percent were
Christian Palestinians.
The struggle for land began
with the rise of Zionism,
and the attempt to encourage
Jews to move to Palestine.
By World War I, 1914,
about 14 percent of the population
of Palestine was Jewish.
With the Balfour
Declaration, issued in 1917,
and the declaration by the British
of a Jewish national home in Palestine,
immigration began in earnest.
The problem was,
convincing European Jews
to come to Palestine.
Most didn't want to.
It was a land filled
with malaria, with Arabs,
and a hostile climate.
Most European Jews wanted to
come to the United States,
or the Americas.
In many ways, New York was the
Jerusalem of European Jewry.
Between 1880 and the First World War,
about two million Jews left
Europe for the United States.
That began to change with
a bunch of laws passed
in the United States in the 1920s,
that limited migration.
Jews began to look for a
way to go to Palestine,
to get out of Europe,
and many chose going to Palestine.
This particularly happened
with the rise of Hitler.
Without the rise of Hitler in Europe,
and Nazism, and growing anti-Semitism,
which culminated in the Holocaust,
it's very possible that Jews
would've remained there,
and not been attracted
to the Zionist dream.
We can see,
in the growth of Jewish
immigration to Palestine,
the effects of the rise
of Hitler in Europe.
Immigration begins to
really take off in 1933
when Hitler comes to power in Europe.
The Jewish population of Palestine,
which is about 113,000,
in 1931,
jumps up to 650,000,
by 1948,
and that's largely due
to the rise of Hitler.
As Palestinian Arabs began to
experience this rapid growth,
of Jewish migration,
they began to complain bitterly.
Riots broke out, the first in 1919.
But others punctuated the Mandate years.
The Palestinian Revolt of 1936 to 1939
was the most important uprising.
It forced over 100,000 British soldiers
to come to Palestine in
order to suppress it.
It also devastated Palestinian leadership.
But it was a response to
this heavy Jewish immigration
into Palestine caused
by the rise of Hitler.
The British understood
that they were facing a terrible dilemma.
They had promised Jews a
national home in Palestine,
but they had also
promised the Palestinians
that they wouldn't prejudice
their rights in Palestine, too.
In a sense, Britain had promised
two different peoples Palestine,
the Jews and the Palestinians.
The demographic battle for Palestine
was only one,
of the major,
playing fields for competition.
The other was the acquisition of land.
Because, after all,
possession is 9/10 of the law,
and whoever was gonna
own the land, in the end,
would be more likely to get a nation.
The Jewish National Fund was established
by the World Zionist Organization
in order to acquire land,
and wealthy Jews of Europe donated money,
which went to purchase
Arab land in Palestine.
By 1947,
about seven percent of
all the land of Palestine
had been purchased by Jews.
The government owned
much of Israel, as well.
They had inherited that
land from the Ottomans,
when they took over Palestine.
But of the land was owned by Palestinians.
This created a situation.
In 1947, when the U.N. acquired,
the Mandate of Palestine,
and had to come up with a,
solution for the problem
of these two nations,
that were in a sense,
or two peoples that were vying
for a nation of Palestine.
And we arrive at that point
where seven percent of the land
is owned by the Yishuv,
the Jewish community,
and about 1/3 of the population is Jewish.
The U.N.,
decided to give about 54 percent
of the land of Palestine
to the Jewish community.
This created outrage
amongst the Palestinians.
No Palestinian leader was able to accept,
this deal.
If they had, it's very
possible their people
would have turned against them.
After all, from a
Palestinian point of view,
this deal looked terribly one-sided.
54 percent of the land
going to people who owned
only seven percent of it.
And again,
the majority of land going
to 1/3 of the population.
In fact,
if one goes around the different
provinces of Palestine,
the different cities,
there was no major province,
or no major city, in which
there were a majority Jews,
except for Tel-Aviv, a new
city created by the Yishuv.
In most Palestinian cities,
there was an Arab majority.
This presented,
the U.N. with the dilemma,
how do you partition Palestine,
to create a state for both
Palestinians, and Jews,
that would created a Jewish state
that would actually have a
majority of Jewish people?
This meant that the map that the U.N.
ultimately came up with
was rather bizarre.
It included three different
parts of territory
that were glued together by
small, little transit areas.
Most the Sinai Desert,
which only had Palestinian Bedouin in it,
was given to the Jewish community,
in order to keep the land
more closer to 50/50.
But this partition plan also meant
that war was sure to break out.
The borders were not realistic.
The people were aggrieved,
and it was a recipe for ongoing conflict.
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