ABSTRACT
The Arab Revolt began in 1936 and would last the next three years. Shortly after the 1936 outbreak, the British Government appointed a Royal Commission to investigate the irreconcilable conflict between the Arabs and Jews of Palestine. Although the Royal Commission did not allow outside lawyers, the parties used many of the same legal arguments they had tested before the Shaw and Lofgren Commissions. Thus, the Royal Commission conducted the third trial between the Arabs and Jews of Palestine. The hearings featured public and secret testimony from the leading British, Arab, and Zionist figures of the day, including Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, and Haj Amin al-Husseini. The parties realized this would be the most important of the three trials between them since 1929. The Shaw and Lofgren Commissions both represented major milestones, but the Royal Commission, with its very broad Terms of Reference, its prestige and its resources, promised to become a landmark in the early legal history of the conflict. Ultimately, the Royal Commission issued a comprehensive Report recommending Palestine be partitioned into separate Jewish and Arab states, the original version of the two-state solution.
