Mandatory Palestine

Etymology

The name given to the Mandate's territory was "Palestine", in accordance with local Palestinian Arab and Ottoman usage and with European tradition. The Mandate charter stipulated that Mandatory Palestine would have three official languages: English, Arabic and Hebrew.

In 1926, the British authorities formally decided to use the traditional Arabic equivalent to the English name, and its Hebrew transcription i.e. Filasţīn (فلسطين) and Pālēśtīnā (פּלשׂתינה) respectively. The Jewish leadership proposed that the proper Hebrew name should be ʾĒrēts Yiśrāʾel (ארץ ישׂראל, Land of Israel). The final compromise was to append the initials of the Hebrew proposed name, Alef-Yod, within parenthesis (א״י) after Pālēśtīnā whenever the Mandate's name was mentioned in Hebrew in official documents. The Arab leadership saw this compromise as a violation of the mandate terms. Some Arab politicians suggested "Southern Syria" (سوريا الجنوبية, Sūriyā al-Janūbiyya) as the Arabic name instead. The British authorities rejected this proposal; according to the Minutes of the Ninth Session of the League of Nations' Permanent Mandates Commission:

Colonel Symes explained that the country was described as "Palestine" by Europeans and as "Falestin" by the Arabs. The Hebrew name for the country was the designation "Land of Israel", and the Government, to meet Jewish wishes, had agreed that the word "Palestine" in Hebrew characters should be followed in all official documents by the initials which stood for that designation. As a set-off to this, certain of the Arab politicians suggested that the country should be called "Southern Syria" in order to emphasise its close relation with another Arab State.

The adjective "mandatory" indicates that the entity's legal status derived from a League of Nations mandate; it derives from the meaning of "mandate" as "authorization" rather than from "mandatory" in the sense of "compulsory".

History

1920s

Following the arrival of the British, Arab inhabitants established Muslim-Christian Associations in all of the major towns. In 1919 they joined to hold the first Palestine Arab Congress in Jerusalem. It was aimed primarily at representative government and opposition to the Balfour Declaration. Concurrently, the Zionist Commission formed in March 1918 and actively promoted Zionist objectives in Palestine. On 19 April 1920, elections took place for the Assembly of Representatives of the Palestinian Jewish community.

In April 1920, riots in Jerusalem caused the deaths of five Jews and four Arabs.

In July 1920, a British civilian administration headed by a High Commissioner replaced the military administration. The first High Commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel, a Zionist and a recent British cabinet minister, arrived in Palestine on 20 June 1920 to take up his appointment from 1 July. Samuel established his headquarters and official residence in part of the Augusta Victoria Hospital complex on Mount Scopus on what was then the northeastern edge of Jerusalem, a building that had been constructed for the Germans circa 1910. Damaged by an earthquake in 1927, this building served as the headquarters and official residence of the British High Commissioners until 1933. In that year, a new, purpose-built headquarters and official residence for the High Commissioner was completed on what was then the southeastern edge of Jerusalem. Referred to as Armon HaNetziv by the Jewish population, this building, located on the 'Hill of Evil Counsel' on the ridge of Jabel Mukaber, remained in use as the headquarters and official residence of the British High Commissioners until the end of British rule in 1948.

One of the first actions of the newly installed civil administration was to begin granting concessions from the Mandatory government over key economic assets. In 1921 the government granted Pinhas Rutenberg – a Jewish entrepreneur – concessions for the production and distribution of electrical power. Rutenberg soon established an electric company whose shareholders were Zionist organisations, investors, and philanthropists. Palestinian-Arabs saw it as proof that the British intended to favour Zionism. The British administration claimed that electrification would enhance the economic development of the country as a whole, while at the same time securing their commitment to facilitate a Jewish National Home through economic – rather than political – means.

1930s: Arab armed insurgency

In 1930, Sheikh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam arrived in Palestine from Syria, then part of the French-ruled Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon, and organised and established the Black Hand, an anti-Zionist and anti-British militant organisation. He recruited and arranged military training for peasants, and by 1935 he had enlisted between 200 and 800 men. They used bombs and firearms against Zionist settlers and vandalised settlers' orchards and British-built railway lines. In November 1935, two of his men engaged in a firefight with a Palestine Police patrol hunting fruit thieves and a policeman was killed. Following the incident, British colonial police launched a search and surrounded al-Qassam in a cave near Ya'bad. In the ensuing battle, al-Qassam was killed.

The death of al-Qassam on 20 November 1935 generated widespread outrage in the Arab community. Huge crowds accompanied Qassam's body to his grave in Haifa. A few months later, in April 1936, the Arab national general strike broke out. The strike lasted until October 1936, instigated by the Arab Higher Committee, headed by Amin al-Husseini. During the summer of that year, thousands of Jewish-farmed acres and orchards were destroyed. Jewish civilians were attacked and killed, and some Jewish communities, such as those in Beisan (Beit She'an) and Acre, fled to safer areas. The violence abated for about a year while the British sent the Peel Commission to investigate.

During the first stages of the Arab Revolt, due to rivalry between the clans of al-Husseini and Nashashibi among the Palestinian Arabs, Raghib Nashashibi was forced to flee to Egypt after several assassination attempts ordered by Amin al-Husseini.

After the Arab rejection of the Peel Commission recommendation, the revolt resumed in autumn 1937. Over the next 18 months, the British lost Nablus and Hebron. British forces, supported by 6,000 armed Jewish auxiliary police, suppressed the widespread riots with overwhelming force. The British officer Charles Orde Wingate (who supported a Zionist revival for religious reasons) organised Special Night Squads of British soldiers and Jewish volunteers such as Yigal Allon; these "scored significant successes against the Arab rebels in the lower Galilee and in the Jezreel valley" by conducting raids on Arab villages. Irgun, a Jewish militia group, used violence also against Arab civilians as "retaliatory acts", attacking marketplaces and buses.

Second World War

On 10 June 1940, during the Second World War, the Kingdom of Italy declared war on the British Empire and sided with Nazi Germany. Within a month, the Italians attacked Palestine from the air, bombing Tel Aviv and Haifa, inflicting multiple casualties.

In 1942, there was a period of great concern for the Yishuv, when the German forces of General Erwin Rommel advanced east across North Africa towards the Suez Canal, raising a fear that they would conquer Palestine. This period was referred to as the "200 days of dread". This event was the direct cause for the founding, with British support, of the Palmach – a highly trained regular unit belonging to Haganah (a paramilitary group composed mostly of reserves).

The Yishuv rallied around the Allied war effort despite anger over British restrictions on Jewish immigration in the White Paper of 1939. David Ben-Gurion, Chairman of the Jewish Agency, declared that "We will fight the White Paper as if there is no war, and fight the war as if there is no White Paper." About 30,000 Jews from Mandatory Palestine served with the British Armed Forces during the war, more than 700 of whom were killed in action.

As in most of the Arab world, there was no unanimity amongst the Palestinian Arabs as to their position regarding the belligerents in the Second World War. A number of leaders and public figures saw an Axis victory as the likely outcome and a way of securing Palestine back from the Zionists and the British. Even though Arabs were not highly regarded by Nazi racial theory, the Nazis encouraged Arab support as a counter to British hegemony. On the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration in 1943, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler and Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop sent telegrams of support for the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammad Amin al-Husseini, to read out for a radio broadcast to a rally of supporters in Berlin. On the other hand, as many as 12,000 Palestinian Arabs, with the endorsement of many prominent figures such as the mayors of Nablus and Gaza and media such as "Radio Palestine" and the prominent Jaffa-based Falastin newspaper, volunteered to join and fight for the British, with many serving in units that also included Jews from Palestine. 120 Palestinian women also served as part of the Auxiliary Territorial Service. However, this history has been less studied, as Israeli sources put more focus in studying the role played by Jewish soldiers. Meanwhile, Palestinian sources "were not eager to glorify the names of those who cooperated with Britain not so many years after the British put down the Arab Revolt of 1936–1939, and thereby indirectly helped the Jews establish a state."

After the Second World War: Insurgency and the Partition Plan

The three main Jewish underground forces later united to form the Jewish Resistance Movement and carry out several attacks and bombings against the British administration. In 1946, the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the southern wing of which was the headquarters of the British administration, killing 92 people. Following the bombing, the British Government began interning illegal Jewish immigrants in Cyprus.

On 12 November 1947, two weeks before the United Nations voted on partitioning, British soldiers attacked a house in Ra'anana where a Lehi training course for young people was being held. Four trainees aged 16–18 and their 19-year-old instructor were murdered as a calculated retribution against Lehi during the attack known as Murder of Youths in Ra'anana by British Soldiers. In 2001 over 5,000 documents that were declassified by the Israeli State Archives revealed deaths and killing of Jews at the hands of British soldiers, which were covered up by claiming self defense acts or accidents. This included the shooting of the 5 teenagers in Raanana.

In 1948, the Lehi assassinated Count Bernadotte, the UN mediator, in Jerusalem. Yitzak Shamir, a future Prime Minister of Israel, was one of the conspirators.

The negative publicity resulting from the situation in Palestine caused the Mandate to become widely unpopular in Britain itself and caused the United States Congress to delay granting the British vital loans for reconstruction. The British Labour Party had promised before its election in 1945 to allow mass Jewish migration into Palestine but reneged on this promise once in office. Anti-British Jewish militancy increased, and the situation required the presence of over 100,000 British troops in the country. Following the Acre Prison Break and the retaliatory hanging of British sergeants by the Irgun, the British announced their desire to terminate the mandate and to withdraw by no later than the beginning of August 1948.

The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in 1946 was a joint attempt by Britain and the United States to agree on a policy regarding the admission of Jews to Palestine. In April, the Committee reported that its members had arrived at a unanimous decision. The Committee approved the American recommendation of the immediate acceptance of 100,000 Jewish refugees from Europe into Palestine. It also recommended that there be no Arab or Jewish state. The Committee stated that "in order to dispose, once and for all, of the exclusive claims of Jews and Arabs to Palestine, we regard it as essential that a clear statement of principle should be made that Jew shall not dominate Arab and Arab shall not dominate Jew in Palestine". U.S. President Harry S. Truman angered the British Government by issuing a statement supporting the 100,000 refugees but refusing to acknowledge the rest of the committee's findings. Britain had asked for U.S. assistance in implementing the recommendations. The US War Department had said earlier that to assist Britain in maintaining order against an Arab revolt, an open-ended US commitment of 300,000 troops would be necessary. The immediate admission of 100,000 new Jewish immigrants would almost certainly have provoked an Arab uprising.

Termination of the mandate

When the United Kingdom announced the independence of the Emirate of Transjordan as the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan in 1946, the final Assembly of the League of Nations and the General Assembly both adopted resolutions welcoming the news. The Jewish Agency objected, claiming that Transjordan was an integral part of Palestine, and that according to Article 80 of the UN Charter, the Jewish people had a secured interest in its territory.

During the General Assembly deliberations on Palestine, there were suggestions that it would be desirable to incorporate part of Transjordan's territory into the proposed Jewish state. A few days before the adoption of Resolution 181 (II) on 29 November 1947, US Secretary of State Marshall noted frequent references had been made by the Ad Hoc Committee regarding the desirability of the Jewish State having both the Negev and an "outlet to the Red Sea and the Port of Aqaba". According to John Snetsinger, Chaim Weizmann visited President Truman on 19 November 1947 and said it was imperative that the Negev and Port of Aqaba be within the Jewish state. Truman telephoned the US delegation to the UN and told them he supported Weizmann's position. However, the Trans-Jordan memorandum excluded territories of the Emirate of Transjordan from any Jewish settlement.

Immediately after the UN resolution, civil war broke out between the Arab and Jewish communities, and British authority began to break down. On 16 December 1947, the Palestine Police Force withdrew from the Tel Aviv area, home to more than half the Jewish population, and turned over responsibility for the maintenance of law and order to Jewish police. As the civil war raged on, British military forces gradually withdrew from Palestine, although they occasionally intervened in favour of either side. Many of these areas became war zones. The British maintained strong presences in Jerusalem and Haifa, even as Jerusalem came under siege by Arab forces and became the scene of fierce fighting, though the British occasionally intervened in the fighting, largely to secure their evacuation routes, including by proclaiming martial law and enforcing truces. The Palestine Police Force was largely inoperative, and government services such as social welfare, water supplies, and postal services were withdrawn. In March 1948, all British judges in Palestine were sent back to Britain. In April 1948, the British withdrew from most of Haifa but retained an enclave in the port area to be used in the evacuation of British forces, and retained RAF Ramat David, an airbase close to Haifa, to cover their retreat, leaving behind a volunteer police force to maintain order. The city was quickly captured by the Haganah in the Battle of Haifa. After the victory, British forces in Jerusalem announced that they had no intention of overseeing any local administration but also that they would not permit actions that would hamper the safe and orderly withdrawal of their forces; military courts would try anybody who interfered. By this time British authority in most of Palestine had broken down, with most of the country in the hands of Jews or Arabs, but the British air and sea blockade of Palestine remained in place. Although Arab volunteers were able to cross the borders between Palestine and the surrounding Arab states to join the fighting, the British did not allow the regular armies of the surrounding Arab states to cross into Palestine.

Politics

The administration of the Mandate was officially under British Government Service however, the Peel Commission noted that it was unreliable, understaffed, and over-centralised and that racial antagonism between Jews and Arabs had begun affecting the whole Administration. The Jewish Agency and the Arab Higher Committee representing the Jews and the Arabs respectively, had grown to be parallel governments themselves, a case of imperium in imperio.

Palestinian Arab community

The resolution of the San Remo Conference contained a safeguarding clause for the existing rights of the non-Jewish communities. The conference accepted the terms of the Mandate with reference to Palestine, on the understanding that there was inserted in the memorandum a legal undertaking by the Mandatory Power that it would not involve the surrender of the rights hitherto enjoyed by the non-Jewish communities in Palestine. The draft mandates for Mesopotamia and Palestine, and all of the post-war peace treaties, contained clauses for the protection of religious groups and minorities. The mandates invoked the compulsory jurisdiction of the Permanent Court of International Justice in the event of any disputes.

Article 62 (LXII) of the Treaty of Berlin, signed on 13 July 1878, dealt with religious freedom and civil and political rights in all parts of the Ottoman Empire. The guarantees have frequently been referred to as "religious rights" or "minority rights". However, the guarantees included a prohibition against discrimination in civil and political matters. Difference of religion could not be alleged against any person as a ground for exclusion or incapacity in matters relating to the enjoyment of civil or political rights, admission to public employments, functions, and honours, or the exercise of the various professions and industries, "in any locality whatsoever".

A legal analysis performed by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) noted that the Covenant of the League of Nations had provisionally recognised the communities of Palestine as independent nations. The mandate simply marked a transitory period, with the aim and object of leading the mandated territory to become an independent self-governing State. Judge Higgins explained that the Palestinian people are entitled to their territory, to exercise self-determination, and to have their own State." The Court said that specific guarantees regarding freedom of movement and access to the Holy Sites contained in the Treaty of Berlin (1878) had been preserved under the terms of the Palestine Mandate and a chapter of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine.

According to historian Rashid Khalidi, the mandate ignored the political rights of the Arabs. The Arab leadership repeatedly pressed the British to grant them national and political rights, such as representative government, over Jewish national and political rights in the remaining 23% of the Mandate of Palestine which the British had set aside for a Jewish homeland. The Arabs reminded the British of President Wilson's Fourteen Points and British promises during the First World War. The British, however, made acceptance of the terms of the mandate a precondition for any change in the constitutional position of the Arabs. A legislative council was proposed in the Palestine Order in Council of 1922, which implemented the terms of the mandate. It stated that: "No Ordinance shall be passed which shall be in any way repugnant to or inconsistent with the provisions of the Mandate." For the Arabs, this decree was unacceptable, akin to "self murder". As a result, the Arabs boycotted the elections to the Council held in 1923, which were subsequently annulled. During the interwar period, the British rejected the principle of majority rule or any other measure that would give Arabs control of the government.

Jewish community

The conquest of Ottoman Syria by British forces in 1917 found a mixed community in the region, with Palestine, the southern part of Ottoman Syria, containing a mixed population of Muslims, Christians, Jews and Druze. In this period, the Jewish community (Yishuv) in Palestine was composed of traditional Jewish communities in cities (the Old Yishuv), which had existed for centuries, and the newly established agricultural Zionist communities (the New Yishuv), established since the 1870s. With the establishment of the Mandate, the Jewish community in Palestine formed the Zionist Commission to represent its interests.

In 1929, the Jewish Agency for Palestine took over from the Zionist Commission its representative functions and administration of the Jewish community. During the Mandate period, the Jewish Agency was a quasi-governmental organisation that served the administrative needs of the Jewish community. Its leadership was elected by Jews from all over the world by proportional representation. The Jewish Agency was charged with facilitating Jewish immigration to Palestine, land purchase and planning the general policies of the Zionist leadership. It ran schools and hospitals and formed the Haganah. The British authorities offered to create a similar Arab Agency but this offer was rejected by Arab leaders.

In response to numerous Arab attacks on Jewish communities, the Haganah, a Jewish paramilitary organisation, was formed on 15 June 1920 to defend Jewish residents. Tensions led to widespread violent disturbances on several occasions, notably in 1921 (see Jaffa riots), 1929 (primarily violent attacks by Arabs on Jews – see 1929 Hebron massacre) and 1936–1939. Beginning in 1936, Jewish groups such as Etzel (Irgun) and Lehi (Stern Gang) conducted campaigns of violence against British military and Arab targets.

During the Mandate, the Yishuv grew from one-sixth to almost one-third of the population. According to official records, 367,845 Jews and 33,304 non-Jews immigrated legally between 1920 and 1945. It was estimated that another 50,000–60,000 Jews and a marginal number of Arabs, the latter mostly on a seasonal basis, immigrated illegally during this period. Immigration accounted for most of the increase of Jewish population, while the non-Jewish population increase was largely natural. Of the Jewish immigrants, in 1939 most had come from Germany and Czechoslovakia, but in 1940–1944 most came from Romania and Poland, with an additional 3,530 immigrants arriving from Yemen during the same period.

Land ownership

After transition to the British rule, much of the agricultural land in Palestine (about one third of the whole territory) was still owned by the same landowners as under Ottoman rule, mostly powerful Arab clans and local Muslim sheikhs. Other lands had been held by foreign Christian organisations (most notably the Greek Orthodox Church), as well as Jewish private and Zionist organisations, and to lesser degree by small minorities of Baháʼís, Samaritans and Circassians.

As of 1931, the territory of the British Mandate of Palestine was 26,625,600 dunams (26,625.6 km2), of which 8,252,900 dunams (8,252.9 km2) or 33% were arable. Official statistics show that Jews privately and collectively owned 1,393,531 dunams (1,393.53 km2), or 5.23% of Palestine's total in 1945. The Jewish owned agricultural land was largely located in the Galilee and along the coastal plain. Estimates of the total volume of land that Jews had purchased by 15 May 1948 are complicated by illegal and unregistered land transfers, as well as by the lack of data on land concessions from the Palestine administration after 31 March 1936. According to Avneri, Jews held 1,850,000 dunams (1,850 km2) of land in 1947, or 6.94% of the total. Stein gives the estimate of 2,000,000 dunams (2,000 km2) as of May 1948, or 7.51% of the total. According to Fischbach, by 1948, Jews and Jewish companies owned 20% percent of all cultivable land in the country.

According to Clifford A. Wright, by the end of the British Mandate period in 1948, Jewish farmers cultivated 425,450 dunams of land, while Palestinian farmers had 5,484,700 dunams of land under cultivation. The 1945 UN estimate shows that Arab ownership of arable land was on average 68% of a district, ranging from 15% ownership in the Beer-Sheba district to 99% ownership in the Ramallah district. These data cannot be fully understood without comparing them to those of neighbouring countries: in Iraq, for instance, still in 1951 only 0.3 per cent of registered land (or 50 per cent of the total amount) was categorised as 'private property'.

The following table shows the 1945 land ownership of Mandatory Palestine by district:

The table below shows the land ownership of Palestine by large Jewish Corporations (in square kilometres) on 31 December 1945.

Demographics

British censuses and estimations

In 1920, the majority of the approximately 750,000 people in this multi-ethnic region were Arabic-speaking Muslims, including a Bedouin population (estimated at 103,331 at the time of the 1922 census and concentrated in the Beersheba area and the region south and east of it), as well as Jews (who accounted for some 11% of the total) and smaller groups of Druze, Syrians, Sudanese, Somalis, Circassians, Egyptians, Copts, Greeks, and Hejazi Arabs:

The first census of 1922 showed a population of 757,182, of whom 78% were Muslim, 11% Jewish and 10% Christian.

The second census, of 1931, gave a total population of 1,035,154 of whom 73.4% were Muslim, 16.9% Jewish and 8.6% Christian.

A discrepancy between the two censuses and records of births, deaths and immigration, led the authors of the second census to postulate the illegal immigration of about 9,000 Jews and 4,000 Arabs during the intervening years.

There were no further censuses but statistics were maintained by counting births, deaths and migration. By the end of 1936 the total population was approximately 1,300,000, the Jews being estimated at 384,000. The Arabs had also increased their numbers rapidly, mainly as a result of the cessation of the military conscription imposed on the country by the Ottoman Empire, the campaign against malaria and a general improvement in health services. In absolute figures their increase exceeded that of the Jewish population, but proportionally, the latter had risen from 13 per cent of the total population at the census of 1922 to nearly 30 per cent at the end of 1936.

Some components such as illegal immigration could only be estimated approximately. The White Paper of 1939, which placed immigration restrictions on Jews, stated that the Jewish population "has risen to some 450,000" and was "approaching a third of the entire population of the country". In 1945, a demographic study showed that the population had grown to 1,764,520, comprising 1,061,270 Muslims, 553,600 Jews, 135,550 Christians and 14,100 people of other groups.

By district

The following table gives the religious demography of each of the 16 districts of the Mandate in 1945.

Urban areas

The table below shows the population of the municipal areas of Palestine in 1922, at the start of the mandate period, per the 1922 census of Palestine.

Government and institutions

Under the terms of the August 1922 Palestine Order in Council, the Mandate territory was divided into administrative regions known as districts and were administered by the office of the British High Commissioner for Palestine.

Britain continued the millet system of the Ottoman Empire whereby all matters of a religious nature and personal status were within the jurisdiction of Muslim courts and the courts of other recognised religions, called confessional communities. The High Commissioner established the Orthodox Rabbinate and retained a modified millet system which only recognised eleven religious communities: Muslims, Jews and nine Christian denominations (none of which were Christian Protestant churches). All those who were not members of these recognised communities were excluded from the millet arrangement. As a result, there was no possibility, for example, of marriages between confessional communities, and there were no civil marriages. Personal contacts between communities were nominal.

Apart from the Religious Courts, the judicial system was modelled on the British one, having a High Court with appellate jurisdiction and the power of review over the Central Court and the Central Criminal Court.

The five consecutive Chief Justices were:

Sir Thomas Haycraft (1921–1927)

Sir Michael McDonnell (1927–1936)

Sir Harry Trusted (1936–1941; knighted in 1938) (afterwards Chief Justice of the Federated Malay States, 1941)

Frederic Gordon Smith (1941–1944)

Sir William Fitzgerald (1944–1948)

The local newspaper The Palestine Post was founded in 1932 by Gershon Agron. In 1950, its name was changed to The Jerusalem Post. In 1923, Pinhas Rutenberg founded the Palestine Electric Company (to become the Israel Electric Corporation in 1961).

Economy

Palestine's economy during the British Mandate period was primarily agricultural, with most of the population living in the countryside.

Between 1922 and 1947, the annual growth rate of the Jewish sector of the economy was 13.2%, mainly due to immigration and foreign capital, while that of the Arab was 6.5%. Per capita, these figures were 4.8% and 3.6% respectively. By 1936, Jews earned 2.6 times as much as Arabs. Compared to Arabs in other countries, Palestinian Arabs earned slightly more.

The Jaffa Electric Company was founded in 1923 by Pinhas Rutenberg, and was later absorbed into a newly created Palestine Electric Corporation; the First Jordan Hydro-Electric Power House was opened in 1933. Palestine Airways was founded in 1934, Angel Bakeries in 1927, and the Tnuva dairy in 1926. Electric current mainly flowed to Jewish industry, following it to its nestled locations in Tel Aviv and Haifa. Although Tel Aviv had by far more workshops and factories, the demand for electric power for industry was roughly the same for both cities by the early 1930s.

The country's largest industrial zone was in Haifa, where many housing projects were built for employees.

On the scale of the UN Human Development Index determined for around 1939, of 36 countries, Palestinian Jews were placed 15th, Palestinian Arabs 30th, Egypt 33rd and Turkey 35th. The Jews in Palestine were mainly urban, 76.2% in 1942, while the Arabs were mainly rural, 68.3% in 1942. Overall, Khalidi concludes that Palestinian Arab society, while overmatched by the Yishuv, was as advanced as any other Arab society in the region and considerably more than several.

Education

Under the British Mandate, the country developed economically and culturally. In 1919, the Jewish community founded a centralised Hebrew school system, and the following year established the Assembly of Representatives, the Jewish National Council and the Histadrut labour federation. The Technion university was founded in 1924, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1925.

There were several attempts by the Arab Palestinians to establish an Arab higher education institution, starting from the 1920s, but it did not materialise. Israeli historian Ilan Pappé attributed this to "Zionist pressure, British anti-Arab racism, and lack of resources." He added that "the colonial mentality of the British authorities who deemed the Palestinians yet another colonized people who had to be oppressed, while regarding the Zionist settlers as fellow colonialists, feared that such a university would enhance the Palestinian national movement."

Literacy rates in 1932 were 86% for the Jews compared to 22% for the Palestinian Arabs, but Arab literacy rates steadily increased thereafter. By comparison, Palestinian Arab literacy rates were higher than those of Egypt and Turkey, but lower than in Lebanon.