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Afforestation was one of the top priorities of the 1920 British Mandate of Palestine. Among the very first pieces of legislation passed by the incoming civil administration was a 1920 Ordinance for the Regulation of Forest Lands and the Protection of Trees. The first operational provision of the ordinance declared that all forests in Palestine, except those on private property, were under the protection, control, and management of the Mandatory government. The intention here was noble but the performance was poor. This chapter evaluates the forestry policy under the British Mandate and starts with an explanation for this disappointing performance. Most of all, the British forestry adventure was significant because it represented an abrupt departure from the previous two thousand years, It showed that trend need not be destiny.

This chapter investigates the city-planning of Jerusalem under the British Mandate in light of changes of thinking about the urban in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In particular, it explores how Charles Ashbee, the first civic adviser, could enact his Garden City and Arts and Crafts principles, developed twenty-five years earlier, because of the specific conditions of imperial governance. The privileging of the medieval city, in contrast to the contemporary — a principle deeply indebted to artistic ideals of a previous generation — deeply influenced decisions of what to restore, destroy, or preserve. The chapter discusses how religion, empire, and urban planning interlock in a key site of cultural conflict.

Following on from the examination of how British Jews related to the Zionist project in the Middle East in Part II and the Zionist transformation of British Jewry in Part III, Part IV probes how the participation of British Jews in Zionist state- and nation-building related to the fabric of British state and society. The impact of Zionism on the modes of Jewish integration into British state and society will be explored in two case studies: the presentation of the Zionist case in British parliamentary politics and the place of Zionism in the English educational landscape. The interaction of Zionism with British state and society is discussed against the background of specific features of the British constitution and of the British-Jewish condition: a nation-state conditioned by premodern features and the presence of Empire, the specific terms of Jewish emancipation in Britain, and Britain’s assumption of the Mandate for Palestine.

Chapter 4, “The Colonizer in the Computer”, is an examination of how the colonial past and present can affect maps. The Palestinian Authority (PA), the provisional Palestinian government, was founded in the mid-1990s, and they were immediately charged with making their own maps. Their efforts roughly coincided with the second Intifada, or Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation. As such it was part of the broader political practice of sumud, or steadfastness, an effort to further the ongoing presence of Palestinians in the local landscape. Throughout their early years, however, the PA experienced constant challenges to its stability, including military raids on its offices and data infrastructure. These affected its ability to build stasis, which is here defined as the ability to ‘stay put’. Furthermore, the only existing maps they had to work with were from 60 year-old British colonial sources. These two factors, the Israeli raids and the British colonial maps, fundamentally shaped the state maps made by the PA. As a result, their maps were less useful for purposes of daily governance like elections, utilities, and infrastructure. PA cartography therefore illustrates the both the challenges and innovations of establishing material sovereignty over knowledge in colonial and postcolonial landscapes.

Chapter Five addresses the backlash against Britain’s selective approach to colonial development, focusing on Haifa and the Dead Sea as important sites of Arab Palestinian contestation to British rule. In Haifa, the rapid emergence of an Arab proletarian underclass meant that the city became a focal point of unrest in the second half of the mandate years, especially during the national revolt of 1936–39. At the Dead Sea, meanwhile, a similar opposition existed which was expressed at various levels, ranging from an international legal challenge, to Arab nationalist protest, to the efforts of a locally based Arab entrepreneur, Ibrahim Hazboun, to be included in Britain’s Dead Sea development scheme. The final stages of the chapter complete this picture by detailing the violence that erupted at Haifa and the Dead Sea during the dying days of British rule, leaving these once exemplary imperial achievements mired in destruction by 1948—potent symbols of the failures of British development.

Sporadic fighting began in Palestine immediately after the November 29, 1947 partition vote. In February 1948, with Palestine descending into warfare, Clarence Pickett and Rufus Jones met at the Quaker House in New York to draw up a petition calling for a truce. The truce did not hold. Despairing of the prospects for peace in the Holy Land, the AFSC began to raise funds for the proposed refugee relief projects. Palestinians were at a disadvantage. They had been defeated and many of their leaders had been killed in the Great Revolt of 1936–1939. British Mandate authorities had regarded the Palestinian Arabs as natives and peasants who needed no more than an elementary education and accordingly established few secondary schools or institutions of higher learning for them. Most Palestinian Arabs therefore had a limited knowledge of developments outside Palestine and were loyal to local leaders rather than to a unified national authority.

The study of Palestinian history during the British Mandate generally focuses on the national movement led by the mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini. Arabs who opposed al-Husseini or collaborated with the Zionists are treated as marginal. This chapter argues that this is a prejudiced view. It ignores the fact that cooperation and collaboration were prevalent, in a variety of forms, throughout the period and among all classes and sectors. Collaboration was not only common but a central feature of Palestinian society and politics. The actions of many so-called collaborators were not inconsistent with Arab nationalism, yet collaboration was regarded by the mainstream as treason. Zionist institutions shared interests with the Arab rural leadership, with part of the urban elite, and with some members of the public at large. These common concerns and the cooperation that resulted were factors in the defeat of the mainstream nationalists.

Shaiel Ben-Ephraim’s and Or Honig’s chapter focuses on the lynching and mob violence between Jews and Arabs in the area known as mandatory Palestine, and later as the State of Israel and the occupied territories. Ben-Ephraim and Honig seek to answer two questions: when and why has lynching and mob violence occurred, and how has it affected the development of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict. The chapter focuses on two periods of intercommunal conflict in which lynching and mob violence took place: the British Mandate period (1920-1948), and the period following the eruption of the first Palestinian Uprising “Intifada” (1987) until today. Ben-Ephraim and Honig find that the main variable determining the use of lynching attacks was the level of institutionalization of national political movements. When there are organized institutions and society is more organized, organized forms of violence such as uprisings or terrorism tend to be more prevalent since society or elements of it can be mobilized to act in a more systematic fashion. Lynching and mob violence reflect a lack of political institutionalization because the leadership possesses the ability to incite, yet lacks the tools to restrain or guide, the violence it inspires. By contrast, when the national movements are well institutionalized, Ben-Ephraim and Honig argue, more spontaneous acts of violence tend instead to take the form of sporadic acts of vengeance.

This chapter introduces the composite-actor approach to explain violence in civil conflicts and identifies three categories of actors — elites, aspirants, and masses — which shape politics in movements. It analyzes the Palestinian national movement during the British Mandate (1920–1948) using the above approach and presents the twin assumptions of unitary actors and collective rational action. In the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the British government favored the establishment of a national home for Jewish people in Palestine, but the majority population was Muslim and Christian Arab, who formed an Arab Executive Committee (AEC). The violent and nonviolent collective action of the Arab Rebellion is the product of a combination of top-down and bottom-up dynamics. The 1939 White Paper granted Palestinian Arabs much of what they had been fighting for.

By the third decade of the twentieth century secular Labor Zionism dominated the Zionist Movement and actively engaged in redefining Jewish identity in non-religious, secular nationalist terms. At the very same time, an independent thinker and charismatic rabbi named Abraham Isaac Kook became the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of British Mandate Palestine. Kook was not typical of any of the camps, whether pro- or anti-Zionist, but attracted a following of idealistic and mystical Orthodox Jews to his atypical approach to living in and settling the Land of Israel. His obscure and mystical writings became virtually sacred texts among some, and exerted a profound influence on a small cadre of talented religious Zionists. Among his innovative ideas was a modern mystical view that war has a progressive role in the divine scheme. Kook was the first prominent thinker to discuss divinely authorized war outside of the parameters of the traditional rabbinic worldview.

Chapter Three focuses on Haifa as the focal point of British development in Palestine and the wider ‘Middle East’ during the mandate period. The chapter begins with an examination of Haifa’s status as an exit point for the region’s raw materials (particularly Iraqi oil and Dead Sea minerals), and the resultant expansion of infrastructure in and around the city: the construction of a new harbour, the installation of oil facilities and the completion of multiple networks of transportation are all described. At the same time, the chapter tells the stories of some of the local people who participated in Haifa’s expansion at ground level. Discussed in particular detail are two types of workers: the Jewish stevedores from Salonika recruited by Zionist leaders in collaboration with the British authorities, and the many thousands of Arab workers drawn to Haifa by the prospect of employment in British development projects.

This chapter takes a detailed look at the creation of a major mineral extraction industry at the Dead Sea during the interwar years that exported potash and bromine all over the world and particularly to British Empire countries. Previously overlooked in the historiography of the British Mandate, here was Palestine’s most lucrative natural asset, construed in imperialist circles as an exciting addition to Britain’s list of ‘colonial estates’. The chapter charts the process by which a concession was granted to Moshe Novomeysky, a Jewish mining engineer from Siberia who embodied British perceptions of Zionist scientific and industrial progress in Palestine. At the same time, the older colonial foundations upon which Dead Sea development was based are also considered. For this reason the analysis jumps back into the nineteenth century and the creation of what is termed a ‘canon of western expertise’, compiled by successive generations of explorers, scientists and colonialists.

This chapter begins the task of challenging the geographical components of the DND, by providing a thorough account of the historical geography of the Negev, drawing on various historical accounts of European travelers and Zionists. Relying on these accounts, it challenges the hegemonic history and narrative that depict the Negev as an uncultivated and unsettled desert used by nomadic Bedouins. The chapter demonstrates that the human geography of the northern Negev was characterized, at least from the 19th century, by widespread agriculture, in parallel to traditional pastoralism. There is ample evidence that Bedouin agricultural settlement in general had existed for centuries, including among the al-‘Uqbi tribe in the ‘Araqib area. The chapter shows organized local habitation and economic activities, based on a customary and well developed land system.

This chapter explores how the environment in Palestine has been a site of struggle for control between settler colonisers and Palestinians for over 100 years. It argues that the Zionist settler colonisation of Palestine may be understood as an ecological distribution conflict since the action of colonisers – from the British Mandate through the establishment of the state of Israel through to the military occupation of the remainder of the Palestinian territory – has been predicated on the expropriation of resources and the expulsion of the Palestinian population. Community development has been a component of the Palestinian popular struggle against settler colonisation. By exploring examples of community development, the chapter will analyse the context in which this has become integral to the popular struggle as well as threats that community development, especially in relation to environmental issues, has been used to normalise and legitimise the Zionist occupation.

This chapter continues the challenging of the Dead Negev Doctrine and its various components by addressing the issue of Bedouin settlement. The DND and official Israeli narrative represents the Bedouins as nomads who had no permanent settlements in the Negev, whereas the chapter argues that although some maps from the Ottoman period do not demarcate Bedouin localities, they did exist. These localities or “dira” (Bedouin settlement and cultivation areas) were usually marked on the maps according to the names of confederations and tribes. Bedouins were not nomadic and their settlements were interlinked with cultivation and the establishment of sedentarized geography that began to appear in maps during the 1890s. Tens of thousands of Bedouins lived in villages that developed gradually over generations, before the British mandate was established.

Shaiel Ben-Ephraim’s and Or Honig’s chapter focuses on the lynching and mob violence between Jews and Arabs in the area known as mandatory Palestine, and later as the State of Israel and the occupied territories. Ben-Ephraim and Honig seek to answer two questions: when and why has lynching and mob violence occurred, and how has it affected the development of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict. The chapter focuses on two periods of intercommunal conflict in which lynching and mob violence took place: the British Mandate period (1920-1948), and the period following the eruption of the first Palestinian Uprising “Intifada” (1987) until today. Ben-Ephraim and Honig find that the main variable determining the use of lynching attacks was the level of institutionalization of national political movements. When there are organized institutions and society is more organized, organized forms of violence such as uprisings or terrorism tend to be more prevalent since society or elements of it can be mobilized to act in a more systematic fashion. Lynching and mob violence reflect a lack of political institutionalization because the leadership possesses the ability to incite, yet lacks the tools to restrain or guide, the violence it inspires. By contrast, when the national movements are well institutionalized, Ben-Ephraim and Honig argue, more spontaneous acts of violence tend instead to take the form of sporadic acts of vengeance.