ABSTRACT
The worldwide political efforts to secure a Jewish homeland in the ‘near Middle East’ took place alongside first the continuing existence of the Ottoman Empire, with its own internal administrative structures including regional divisions, and then alongside the disposal of the region by the victors of World War I following the collapse of that empire. The Western European powers took responsibility for different sections of the region, most notably so far as Palestine was concerned by the British under a League of Nations Mandate. Various proposals were entertained within British Government circles in the inter-war period for territorial settlements comprising the demarcation of a proto-Israel. For example one proposal comprised a coastal strip comparable in size to present day
Gaza, that is to say a geographical area very much smaller than either the area proposed under subsequent UN leadership, or the larger again area claimed by Israel’s founding Government at UDI in 1948. Immigration of Jewish people from Europe and beyond into the region was to some extent regulated by the occupying powers in the inter-war period and even minimal immigration, of anyone and from anywhere, inevitably raised questions concerning the developing political structure of the region. It seems undeniable that the emergence of Israel as an independent political entity was associated with large-scale depopulation of the claimed territory in relation to the previous, Palestinian inhabitants (according to Jacqueline Rose, at least 700,000; Rose 2007: 43). As with many other situations of mass relocation and polarization based on ethnicity or religion, it is difficult to quantify the roles played by voluntary if reluctant relocation and of coerced relocation going to what is now called, at best, ethnic cleansing. Matthew Lister has emphasized that large-scale involuntary population movements routinely accompany the process of self-determination. What might be called the dark side of self-determination thus contributes to the global phenomenon of displaced populations and people in flight (see Lister 2012).
