ABSTRACT

This chapter analyses the impact on Palestine and the Palestinians of the process, under British auspices, of the creation of a European Jewish collectivity in the country, its achievement of sovereignty, and its conquest of the land, which together resulted in al-Nakbah. Consequently, the military administration of Palestine quickly clashed with Zionist efforts to change the conditions and privilege the immigrant-settler Jews in Palestine. The Palestinian leadership again turned down the proposal because they believed that an analogy was unfair, given the demographic and historical conditions. The Zionist policy of land acquisition had a political logic: The Zionists looked for quantity and quality, location, and contiguity. As in the development of exclusively Jewish institutions, economy, and land base, the British colonial government of Palestine contributed to the creation, protection, and unemployment relief of exclusively Jewish labor; that is, the British did not extend this policy to the Palestinian Arab labor force.