Why Did Palestinian Arabs Fail

One of the main reasons that the rights of the Palestinian Arabs failed during this time was the indecisiveness of the British, who held power in the Middle East for 30 years. The British were given control of the land by mandate from the League of Nations. The land that was to be given to the Jewish, was home to an Arab Majority people for over 1,200 years. The outsiders (British) were going to give away a very small piece of land to the international Jewish community, and at the same time essentially take away the homes of the Palestinians (Cleveland 222). The issue of the Jewish people returning to the Holy Land has been kept alive since the first century, however did not gain much traction until the 19th century. Across Eastern Europe in
The first Zionist Congress convened in 1897, and adopted the platform that advocated for Jewish people to have a legally recognized home in Palestine. The Zionist cause strengthened greatly during World War One, as the British support for a Jewish state increased (Cleveland 225). The British aimed to strengthen wartime alliances with countries such as the United States and Russia, and the support of a Jewish state in Palestine did this. The British captured Jerusalem in 1917, and this allowed them to allocate the land to the Jewish. In the Balfour Declaration (which gave support for a Jewish state in Palestine) the British pledged to uphold the rights of the non-existent Jewish communities in Palestine. According to Cleveland,this was extremely dismissive to the Arab population, who accounted for about 85 percent of the population in Palestine (Cleveland 228). An interesting point that was presented is that High Commissioner Samuel of the UK believed that there needed to be Arab participation and acceptance of the Jewish population emigrating to Palestine for it to be
This was a massive threat to the Palestinian Arabs, and they tried to negotiate with the British to stop the immigration/land transfer. Mass migration to Palestine occured between the 1920s-1940s, where hundreds of thousands of Jewish people immigrated to Palestine. Clearly, World War II greatly contributed to the conflict between the two groups. The persecution of Jews in Europe before and during the war was one of the main reasons for the mass migration. The Jewish people clearly wanted a home to themselves, and they believed they would be able to make that claim in Palestine. The video states that Palestine has always been as single country, however this changed due to interference from the United Nations. According to the video, when the region was split between the Jewish and Palestinians, the land was split relatively equal between the two groups. This changed after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, when only about 22 percent of the land remained under Palestinian rule. The situation even worsened during the 6 day war in 1967, where the Israelis occupied both