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The Islamic faith and the Arabic language united all the Semitic peoples except for the Jews. With short intervals of partial domination by the Christian Crusaders and the Mongols in the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries, Palestine had Arab rulers for almost 1,000 years and Islamic governments for 15 centuries.
In 1516, Jerusalem was conquered by the Ottoman Empire which maintained power until the end of World War I. During this conflict, the British promised Shereef Hussein the independence of the Arab lands in exchange for his cooperation in the struggle against the Turks. At the same time, in 1917, British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour promised the Zionist Movement the establishment of a ‘Jewish National Homeland’ in Palestine.
Britain had no power at all over the area, either de facto or de jure, but it soon obtained this right by defeating the Turks, with the help of Arab allies, with a League of Nations mandate in 1922. |
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Massive immigration raised the Jewish population of Palestine from 5,000 at the beginning of the century to 300,000 prior to World War II (see Israel). The Palestinians staged a general strike in April 1936 in protest against this immigration, which they saw as a threat to their rights. The British put forward a plan for the partition of Palestine into three states: Jewish in the north, Arab in the south, and a third section under British administration in the Jerusalem-Jaffa (Tel Aviv) corridor.Plan was rejected and rebellion broke out, lasting until 1939, when London gave up the idea and set limits to immigration. Once World War II was over,the UN General Assembly approved a new partition plan (1947) 749,000 Arabs and 9,250 Jews lived in the territory where the Arab State would be set up, while 597,000 Arabs and 498,000 Jews lived in the part which was to become the Jewish state. http://www.geocities.com/arabtnp/hi |
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