ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the creation and development of national identity for Jews and Palestinians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the conflict that arose over the expression of this national identity in Palestine prior to the declaration of the State of Israel in 1948. The commitments reflected British war interests as well as British-French competition in the Middle East and domestic politics rather than concern for the inhabitants of Palestine. For example, the Christian Greek Orthodox patriarch in Jerusalem was responsible for maintaining and protecting the Christian religious sites. The First Zionist Congress was tremendously important for the establishment of modern Jewish nationalism. In the post-World War II concern for European Jewry, many aspects of the commission's report, such as the plan for a unified binational state in Palestine, were simply ignored. In 1936 the Peel Commission was sent to Palestine to assess the options available to the British to deal with this increasingly intractable situation.
