Editing Palestine (section)

===British Occupation (1918-1948)===

Mouin Rabbani stated: "In the Palestinian case, their opposition to Jewish immigration was to prevent the transformation of their homeland into a Jewish state that would dispossess them, and I think that’s an important distinction to make." 

Palestinian opposition to displacement and dispossession is the basis of anti-Zionism and the assertion of the organic sovereignty of Palestine against the Zionists, the British, and others-- and what population in history does not struggle against invading forces?

=====Sykes-Picot Agreement=====

Throughout WW1 (1914-1918), Jews averaged 11% of the total population of the Palestinian region of the Ottoman province ("Vilayet") of Syria. The British had guaranteed a Jewish state in the holy land as early as 1914, while at the same time telling the Ottoman Syrians that they would have a free nation. Of course, this was before the Ottomans allied with Germany and the Central Powers.

The French assured Faisal I of this and his father (Sharif Husseini) agreed to help the British fight the Ottomans on the premise of freeing the Arab world from invasion and subjugation by foreign powers after the war. Faisal played a leadership role in the Arab Revolution against the Ottomans, along with T.E. Lawrence. After the war, however, the French and British told Faisal they'd lied to him, and that the Sykes-Picot plan was already in place to be ratified by the time Jerusalem fell. Faisal I fled west into Syria, where he was chosen to rule Syria as king by the Syrian National Congress. He ruled from March to July 1920, when the French sent troops to expel him. Instead, Faisal came again under the wing of Britain, who arranged for him to rule as King of Iraq under British administration at the Cairo Conference in March 1921. Faisal's brother Abdullah was given the Kingdom of Jordan. Following Faisal's expulsion, the French claimed Syria and governed it as a French Mandate. Faisal believed in a Syrian state which would take on a universal and civilizational character, but it never came to pass. However, he tried to realize a universal civilization state in Iraq.<blockquote>"There is no meaning for words like Jews, Muslims, and Christians within the concept of nationalism. This is simply a country called Iraq and all are Iraqis." - King Faisal of Iraq</blockquote>In the first world war, the Ottomans were not equipped to fight the British and French. They were poorly trained and their weaponry was not as advanced. As British forces planned to take Istanbul via the Gallipoli peninsula, they were defeated in a rare Ottoman victory in 1915. However, by 1920, the British and French had fought their way into the Ottoman capital and occupied it. Jerusalem surrendered earlier, on December 9th, 1917, and was taken by the British by the end of the month.

The British and French secretly agreed in the middle of the war on how they were going to carve up Ottoman territory following the fall of the empire. France was poised to gain control over northern territory in modern Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, northern Iraq, and northern Israel-Palestine, while the British were to control most of Jordan, Iraq, southern Israel-Palestine (the Negev), Kuwait, and down the coast of the Persian gulf to Bahrain and Qatar. The northern half of the Palestinian region was to be governed by the allies jointly, including Jerusalem, Gaza, and everything north, with Britain controlling ports in Haifa and Acre. Though the Russian Tsardom was in on the Sykes-Picot agreement, the Soviets were excluded following the revolution in 1917. Today, this is the general shape of the Middle Eastern borders, originally carved up by the allies of WW1.

The Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 was implemented by the Treaty of Sévres in 1920, which formally dissolved the Ottoman empire; internationalized Istanbul and its Bosphorus strait; gave pieces of Anatolian territory to the Greeks, Kurds, Armenians, French, British, and Italians; and put the former Ottoman-Syrian territory of Palestine under joint Western control. When Ottoman rebels resisted the foreign powers ferociously, a new agreement was drawn up: the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), which set the modern borders of Turkey.
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[[File:League of nations.jpg|thumb]]
Instrumental in obtaining the Balfour Declaration, advising Sykes of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and negotiating with Britain on financing European Jewish immigration to Palestine was Chaim Weizmann, successor to Theodor Hertzl as leader of the WZC and first President of Israel. Weizmann was in the ears of Lord Balfour, the Rothschild family, Mark Sykes, and others; he was bent on gaining British support for the Jewish state in Palestine, and in 1914 advised the British to wage war against the Ottomans. He was a contemporary of fellow Zionists David Ben-Gurion and Vladimir Jabotinsky.

The League of Nations was formed in 1920 to enforce peace of a unipolar and cosmopolitan nature across the world. The League ratified the Treaty of Sévres in 1922, formally granting Britain internationally-recognized control over what was henceforth the British Mandate of Palestine. This division of the Middle East was a major disaster for Arab-Western relations as it not only subjugated the peoples, but arbitrarily drew borders through communities and lands with deep historical, cultural, religious, and ethnic interconnection. The Treaty of Sévres sparked the beginning of Arab nationalism.

This and future agreements underscore the transition into the monopoly-imperialist system from the old colonial-imperialist system in the latter half of the 19th century and early 20th century. The land which was already conquered was being divided up by the European imperialist powers. The old imperialism of colonies, pillaging, and enslavement via direct military domination was waning in the era of finance capital; the new imperialism of monopolism and economic domination was emerging. 

This was the true essence of both World Wars-- they were ''inter-imperialist'' wars, fought by European powers to carve up "spheres of influence" and monopolize the vast resources, including land and labor, of all the nations of Earth. With the unipolar world emerging out of the chaotic non-polarized pre-Mongolian world (i.e. with monopolist states laying claim to the entire world), they warred over which nation was to become the "unipole", or the single pole of power in the world. This sometimes meant ''"allying"'' with their competitor nations to wipe out non-competitors, just as monopoly combines (syndicates, cartels, trusts, etc) did in this period.

We have thus seen, since the Crusades, a joint operation by the Western powers, with their center moved from Constantinople to London and later to Washington D.C., to carve up the Middle East and subjugate the population.

With regards to Arab nationalism, its origins lay in the Other. Arab nationalism was a reaction to the Turkish nationalism of the Young Turks, which was a reaction to Armenian and Slavic nationalism supported by the Romanovs, themselves inspired by Europe. Ultimately this all shows that the larger problem is rooted in nationalism.

In addition to Arab nationalism came a resurgence in struggle for Islamic theocracy, except this time it was in the context of unipolar modernity.

The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) was a Sunni organization in the Arab world, which was founded in 1928 by the scholar and teacher Hassan al-Banna. He believed a universal pan-Islamic authority spanning the Arab world could be attained by promoting Islamic ways of life through civil society and social services; some might say much in the vein of Karl Kautsky, the cosmopolitan bourgeois socialist of the inter-war [[2nd International]]. The MB is reformist first and foremost, idealist and universalist in it's vision-- this mode of politics amounts to political activism and charity, as well as diplomatic and reformist political ends. The MB spread to Palestine in the 1940s in the West Bank. Having a large presence in countries across Northern Africa and Middle East, they only worked with the local militaries. This move was successful in Egypt helping the Free Officers rise to power, but less so in other countries where the Brotherhood was either suppressed or couped.

Prior to their presence in the West Bank, Palestinians politically expressed themselves in secular terms, even as a people of deep faith. After the MB arrived in the West Bank, Islam figured much more prominently in Palestinian politics. The MB was soon discredited in the eyes of Palestinians by its support for King Hussein of Jordan in opposition to Prime Minister Nablus in the mid-1950s. During Jordanian rule the MB was watched closely by Jordanian intelligence and didn't gain widespread popularity until the mid- to late-1970s, especially in the northern West Bank. They were always a highly decentralized organization, which led to some members violently attacking British soldiers and others.

According to CIA documents, "Only in Syria, Sudan, and Jordan, however, did the Brotherhood gain ''political'' significance. The basic goal of the Muslim Brotherhood is the creation of a modern political community based on Islamic precepts. Like the movement led by Ayatollah Khomeini that deposed the Shah of Iran in February 1979, the Brotherhood calls for the elimination of corrupting, Western influences in society."

=====Balfour Declaration=====
The other agreement which spurred on Arab nationalism and Islamic resistance during and after the British Mandate was the Balfour Declaration.

The Balfour Declaration was written in 1917 by British foreign secretary Lord Balfour and addressed to the Zionist leader, banker, and politician Lord Rothschild, member of the Rothschild family. It expressed the Lloyd George cabinet's support for a Jewish state in the Mandated territory of Palestine. 
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The text reads:

"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

Why did Britain support Zionism? Mouin Rabbani said of Britain's reasoning:<blockquote>"...Zionism, I think, would have emerged and disappeared as yet one more utopian political project had it not been for the British, what the preeminent Palestinian historian, Walid Khalidi, has termed the British Shield, because I think without the British sponsorship, we wouldn’t be having this discussion today [on the Israel-Palestine conflict]."

"The British sponsored Zionism for a very simple reason, which is that during World War I, the Ottoman armies attempted to march on the Suez Canal. Suez Canal was the jugular vein of the British Empire between Europe and India, and the British came to the conclusion that they needed to secure the Suez Canal from any threat. And as the British have done so often in so many places, how do you deal with this? Well, you bring in a foreign minority, implant them amongst a hostile population, and establish a protectorate over them. I don’t think a Jewish state in Palestine had been part of British intentions, and the Balfour Declaration very specifically speaks about a Jewish national home in Palestine, in other words, a British protectorate. Things ended up taking a different course, and I think the most important development was World War II, and I think this had maybe less to do with the Holocaust and more to do with the effective bankruptcy of the United Kingdom during that war, and its inability to sustain its global empire.

"It [The United Kingdom] ended up giving up India, ended up giving up Palestine, and it’s in that context, I think, that we need to see the emergence of a Jewish state in Palestine-- and again, a Jewish state means a state in which the Jewish community enjoys not only a demographic majority, but an uncontestable demographic majority, an uncontestable territorial hegemony, and uncontestable political supremacy. And that is also why after 1948, the nascent Israeli state confiscated, I believe, up to 90% of lands that had been previously owned by Palestinians who became citizens of Israel."</blockquote>The main interest of the British was securing their shipping routes through the Suez Canal during the Empire's decline and the transition to an American-led unipole, completed after World War II. After a meeting with Chaim Weizmann, former Prime Minister Lloyd George said that the European Jews would serve Britain better than Arabs as protectors of the Suez canal. The interests of the Zionists in doing so were formal recognition and material support for their future artificial sovereignty; in other words, full support in their endeavors to build a Jewish nation-state. Thus, Zionism is, at root, not only a ''false'' (Mendelssohnian) theocratic-nationalist movement of European Jewry; but also an ''expansionist'' movement as an extension of the imperialist system. The Nazis called such expansionism Lebensraum, or "living room", when they annexed Czechoslovakia for Germans to settle in. 

This connection is made evident by the olive branch extended by the Lehi to the Nazis during World War II; as well as the Haganah's armed defense of Israeli settlers in the lead up to the 1947 UN Partition Plan and subsequent expulsion of the pre-existing population (called "transfer" by some Zionists and their supporters; called "Nakba" or "catastrophe" by the refugees who were expelled and anti-Zionists). However, the immediate connections between Zionism and Nazism, between the Zionists in Palestine and Nazi Germany, are not only ideological, but economic and political as well.

The Jewish Agency for Palestine's (JA) Anglo-Palestine Bank negotiated with the Zionist Federation of Germany and Nazi Germany, signing an agreement for the migration ("transfer") of German Jews to the British Mandate on August 25th, 1933. About 60,000 Jews emigrated due to the Haavara agreement between 1933 and 1941; it was a win for the Zionists as well as the Nazis. 

Zionist organizations, however, didn't care about German Jews as they claimed: they were the first to normalize trade and relations with Nazi Germany, pocketed most of the money from the agreement, and turned away German Jews who were denied entry to Cuba and the US in May 1939. They distributed Nazi goods across the Middle East and North Africa, disallowed Zionist projects anywhere outside the British Mandate, continued Haavara even after Kristallnacht pogroms and the Nuremberg Race Laws, hosted Adolf Eichmann (SS officer and co-organizer of the Holocaust) in 1937, and lobbied against offers by the UK and Dominican Republic. Zionists denounced all emigration of Jews to anywhere besides the British Mandate, endorsed Nazi bans on mixed-marriages and the creation of Jewish ghettos in Germany. Israeli PM Ben-Gurion even banned anti-Nazi protest when he was in power, and discouraged organized boycotts against Germany.

Thus, with the explicit formal and informal support for a Jewish state from the League of Nations and Britain respectively, we find the British Mandate of Palestine to be a creation of the unipolar imperialist world order, led by Britain-- that is, until another inter-imperialist war broke out in 1938 due to British actions meant to subvert and destroy the Soviet Union, the emerging second pole of a nascent dipolar world. Britain became its own gravedigger, and the United States took the reigns of the Western unipole.
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Albert Einstein said on April 18th, 1938, speaking against the partition of British Palestine in New York, "We are no longer the Jews of the Maccabean period. A return to a nation in the political sense of the word [(viz. as a nation-state)] would be the equivalent of turning away from the spiritualization of our community, which we owe to the genius of our prophets. If external necessity should, after all, compel us to assume this burden, let us bear it in the knowledge that ''it will be in contrast to our nature''." (ital. S.J.)

The Nakba truly began with the import of European Jews between 1882 and 1948, and Mizrahi (Arab) Jews roughly between 1920 and 1950, the "New Yishuv". In addition to import was its opposite-- export of Palestinian Arabs. The Nakba in a strict sense refers to the violence and dispossession of land by Israel in 1948 and 1967, but in a general sense it was the whole systematic expulsion of the native population as well as displacement borne by the children and grandchildren of these refugees. The incomplete "official" number of Palestinian refugees in 1950 was only 750,000, according to the UN. Since neighboring countries took in the displaced population after 1948 and again after the 1967 war, there are ''now'' 6 million Palestinian refugees: 2.4 million in Jordan, almost 600,000 in Syria, another half-million in Lebanon, and an estimated ~80,000 in Egypt. This figure includes the 2.5 million refugees (in 2024) still living in Palestinian occupied territory, most of whom are in the Gaza Strip.
[[File:Maxbisrael2.jpg|thumb|Map of villages depopulated by Zionist forces during the Nakba c. 2013 (Blumenthal)]]

=====Zionist and Arab collaboration with Nazi Germany=====
Yitzhak Shamir, the seventh Prime Minister of Israel, was a leader in the Zionist militant group Lehi (AKA "Stern Gang") during the British Mandate era. He and the other leaders of the Lehi (1940-48) proposed an alliance between Zionism and Nazism-- between themselves and Hitler. They were declined by the Nazis due to Germany's former support for the Mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husseini. 

Hajj Amin al-Husseini was the leader of Palestine beginning in 1923, when he was installed by Britain to leadership of the British Mandate of Palestine. At this time, and until Palestinian public opinion shifted around 1936 to a majority anti-Britain sentiment, al-Husseini lauded Britain and was staunchly on their side.

Hitler eventually supported the Mufti because they shared an anti-British sentiment-- Hitler, who rose to power surfing a tidal wave of British finance capital, was initially an ally of the City of London, as well as a political ally of Churchill and MI6. Their motive for bolstering Hitler was simple-- Germany could be used as a bulwark against the Soviet Union, which for 30 years prior to the second World War the combined ruling class of Anglo-Saxon Europe (Britain, Germany, France) and America tried to prevent and then destroy. This is much like how Ukraine is being used today as a bulwark against modern Russia, and, generally speaking, for the same reason-- the prevention of a multipolar world. 

However, the Nazis also then turned on their financiers; they severed the Anglo-Nazi alliance (although Churchill praised the Nazis as late as 1938), and with this Hitler found support in Arab states who had been subjected to British imperialism for centuries. 

The basic, ''organic'' anti-British position of the Arab people ''as a civilization'' was founded on the fear of dispossession of their land, which evidentially did happen in the aftermath of World War II. They were willing to go to war to defend their sovereignty and self-determination (i.e. the right to rule over themselves rather than a foreign power ruling them, to choose their own path of development). This popular sentiment led to the Arab revolts against British political-economic rule over Palestine and other Arab territories starting in 1936 and lasting until 1939. However, the ''inorganic'' resistance channeled this sentiment of the average Arab of Palestine, Iraq, Syria, and so forth into dead-end scenarios and destructive activity. 

Zachary Lockman wrote on the matter regarding the violent side of the Arab Revolt: 

"On April 15, 1936, members of the guerrilla band founded by Shaykh ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam held up cars and buses near Nablus, killing two Jewish passengers. Two days later a right-wing Jewish paramilitary group retaliated by killing two Arabs. Arab protests soon erupted throughout the country, gradually taking on the character of a broad-based anticolonial and anti-Zionist popular uprising. To contain the violence and channel the upsurge from below, Arab nationalist activists quickly called for a countrywide general strike. The strike spread rapidly, as did new “national committees” which sprang up to lead the struggle in all the major towns. Taken by surprise, the elite politicians tried to catch up with and ride the wave of popular energy by endorsing the strike call and forming a new Arab Higher Committee (AHC) on which all the major parties were represented, with Amin al-Husayni as its president."

The Mufti, who first was appointed to power and thereby funded by British intelligence, rejected British rule in the wake of the 1936 Palestinian-Arab revolts in order to harness the energy of the mass movement. He hoped to become a Western agent embedded in Arab leadership, as evidenced by the AHC proposal. What began as peaceful protests against British rule were harnessed by al-Husseini and his forces, turned into violent action against the British and Jews in Palestine and Iraq. 

However, the revolt was not entirely violent. In fact, it was mostly peaceful.

The resistance began long before the 1930s. In 1922, a year before Amin al-Husseini was appointed by the British, and in response to Zionists calling for a boycott of Arab produce and labor, the exclusion of Arabs from Jewish communities, and forbidding of Arabs purchasing land from Jews, the fifth Arab Congress called for a boycott of Jewish goods. From the time of the British Mandate until today, the Palestinians have called upon international organizations such as the UN for diplomatic intervention. Palestinians held a general strike in 1936 against Zionism and British rule. Urban workers and rural workers shut down transportation, harbors, and other sectors for six months-- the longest general strike in history.

These actions both demonstrate Palestinian peaceful resistance at the time, and continue to undermine the narrative painting Arabs (Palestinians particularly) as always choosing violent resistance first.

From Lockman: 

"The general strike would continue for six months, until October 1936, making it one of the longest general strikes in history. It constituted the first stage of a countrywide Arab nationalist revolt against both British rule and Zionism which would end only in the summer of 1939. The strike was accompanied by numerous attacks on Jews and Jewish property as well as on British installations, transport, communications, and personnel, carried out mainly by the numerous village-based guerrilla bands that sprang up in the countryside during the spring and summer of 1936 and gave the revolt an increasingly violent and openly insurrectional character."

Having no benefactor to guarantee his stay in power, Amin al-Husseini turned to Hitler. In this turn, the Mufti allied with Abdel-Karim Qasim, an Iraqi general who took power during the Iraqi Revolution of 1941. Qasim carried out the Farhoud: the Iraqi branch of the Holocaust. He later ousted the Nasserist Free Officers following the 1958 revolutionary coup, installed Iraqi Nazis back into top government positions, and funded the Mufti's SS network.

With the support of Hitler and Qasim, Hajj Amin al-Husseini gained access to an SS network and subsequently headed the SS branch of Palestine. Qasim, the Iraqi Hitlerite, used his position to diplomatically and financially support the Mufti, nominally with 100,000 Iraqi Dinars. In a document quoted in Sovinform's article on Qasim, the CIA admits that the Mufti detested Communists and described the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as either "Communists or saboteurs" of his regime. al-Husseini is also stated in this document to have delayed orders for the assassination of the PLO's head, Shafiq al-Hut, until the 100,000 Iraqi Dinars from Qasim were replaced. He publicly angled this stance against "Palestinian infighting".

According to the Sovinform article:

"...[T]he Mufti had been the head of the ‘Jaysh Al-Jihad Al-Moqaddas’ (translated to English as the ‘Sacred Struggle Army’ or the ‘Holy Jihad Army’), an army of terror created by the direct order of Hitler in 1944, furnished with arms by the SS, parachuted from Germany into Palestine by Sheikh Hasan Salameh (father to the commander of the Fatah’s commando forces, the infamous CIA spy Ali Hasan Salameh), directed by a nucleus of 60 Nazi Palestinian jihadists trained in Nazi-occupied Netherlands during the Great Patriotic War [(World War II)], and operationally commanded by the SS-trained commando Abdel-Qader Al-Husseini. [...] The Mufti cannot in the least be regarded as 'only one Nazi.' Rather, he led a powerful army of SS operatives, whose goal during the 1948 War was not to fight the Haganah and Irgun but to wage war on the Palmach and the kibbutzim."

The Haganah (1920-1948), later the IDF under the Mossad framework (Israeli intelligence), served as a ''de facto'' military force which defended the (largely imported) Jewish population. According to Israeli Prime Minister and historian Yitzhak Ben-Ami, as well as multiple Israeli outlets, the Bitzur branch of the Zionist paramilitary organization Haganah worked to encourage Jews to emigrate to Israel, especially from Arab and European states. This was another tactic employed to create an disproportionate and artificial Jewish population in Palestine, which would ultimately serve the ends of the British, French, and American powers. 
[[File:Immigration.webp|thumb|Graph depicting the 26-year period in which Jews from all over the world, especially Jewish displaced persons from Europe, immigrated to Palestine]]
Meanwhile, the Irgun (1931-1948) was another Zionist military organization headed by Vladimir Jabotinsky which attacked Arabs wantonly, unlike the Haganah which cooperated openly with the British military and security forces and acted deliberately in its terror attacks.

Also from the Sovinform article:

"The CIA reported that the Mufti’s 'followers' – read: jihadist commandos directed by the SS – were integrating into the Palestine 'Liberation' Army [(PLA)] set up by Qasim:

'Former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin Husayni has sent instructions to his followers in the West Bank of Jordan to go to Iraq to join the Palestine Army being formed by Iraqi Prime Minister Abd-al-Karim Qasim for the alleged purpose of liberating Palestine. Many villagers in the Nablus District of the West Bank of Jordan have wanted to go to Iraq for this purpose, but they have had difficulty securing exit permits from the Government of Jordan (GOJ).

'In November 1960 some Jordanian followers of Haj Amin Husayni departed for Baghdad by way of Beirut and Damascus. Among those who wanted to go but had not yet secured permits to go to Iraq were Farid Fakhir-al-Din and his two sons who are in the Jordan Arab Army. Farid Fakhir-al-Din intended to use the Beirut-Damascus-Baghdad route if the GOJ persisted in not issuing permits to villagers of the West Bank of Jordan to travel to Iraq. (‘SUBJECT: Recruits from West Bank of Jordan for Palestine Army in Iraq’, CIA, CIA Sources: A Jordanian (B) with good West Bank contacts; from a former follower (F) of the ex-Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin Husayni. Date of Report: 5 December 1960, Date of Information: November 1960, p. 1)'"

Continuing on:

"By force, the Palestinians living in Iraq were to join the Mufti’s Nazi army of terror. The Iraqi Major-General Dr. Akram Al-Mashhadani wrote:

'The late Al-Husseini had a close relationship with Abdel-Karim Qasim, and he constantly visited Iraq. He was the one who convinced Qasim to establish the Palestine Liberation Army in 1961, which was trained in the Al-Mahawil ‘Al-Musayyib’ camp during the early 1960s. Service in this Army was made compulsory for Palestinians.' (The Mufti Haajj Amin Al-Husseini and his relations with Adolf Hitler and Abdel-Karim Qasim, Al-Gardenia, Major-General Dr. Akram Al-Mashhadani, November 2015)"

Therefore, in the midst of turmoil in British Palestine, with the organic Arab revolts, the artificially whipped-up Nazi-Arab collaborators, and the Zionist paramilitary violence, Hajj Amin al-Husseini was in fact not in support of Arab self-determination, but of using Palestine and Iraq as a Nazi "launching pad" from which to stage another front against the Soviet Union during the second World War. With this, we turn to the massacres committed by these Zionist paramilitary organizations, the diplomatic and military situation unfolding into the events of Arab-Israeli war of 1948, and the subsequent founding of the State of Israel.

=====More on the Irgun, Haganah, Lehi, and Nili=====
The British hired a Jewish network to gather intelligence in the Levant during the first World War, called the Nili. Agronomist Aaron Aaronsohn and his siblings and friends composed the group, and actively supported the alliance of Britain and the Zionists against the Ottomans.

In 1921, amidst the revelation that Britain promised both the Arabs and Jews the land of Palestine, with the Arabs also supposed to gain an independent Syria in their offer, violence erupted. This lasted until 1923, after which a period of relative peace ensued. Later, in 1929, due to mutual suspicion between Palestinian Arabs and Jews, violence flared up again, leading to the deaths of 133 Jews and 116 Arabs. The British took their time in responding, but eventually restored calm among the people. The Zionists continued forging ahead under the British, taking over major infrastructure and establishing their own institutions and elected assembly. 

As the Anglo-Nazi alliance was being forged, the Zionists saw opportunity in Hitler's destruction of Jews. They called all European Jews to take refuge on land their ancestors might have never touched. This also played out well for the British, who needed a large enough population to move ahead with a Jewish state with a Jewish majority.

By May 1936, Arab violence broke out; not against Jews out of hatred, but against the British and Jews (especially immigrants) out of anger that Britain was at every turn refusing Palestinian Arabs self-determination while importing all the Jews they could find into the region to deform the organic population demographics. This reasoning was the reasoning behind the majority of the violence on the Arab side, with the aforementioned plot of al-Husseini and Qasim fanning the flames and discrediting the real (violent) expression of the Arab population. The British resorted to brutal methods to put down the revolt: public hangings, house demolition, and the use of civilians as human shields. By 1939, the insurrection was decimated, and the Palestinian leadership was crippled.

That same year, Neville Chamberlain's government wrote the 1939 White Paper, which claimed that Britain would support a single, jointly-governed state, including limitations on Jewish immigration and land purchases. Although the streets were filled with Jews protesting the decision (made for Britain's fear of war with the Arabs), Britain upheld the limits on immigration. This caused Jewish settlers to turn against Britain.

The Lehi insurgent group, lead by the seventh Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, sought to make an anti-British pact with Nazi Germany. They and other Zionist insurgent groups (Haganah, which later was absorbed by the Israeli state in 1948, and the Irgun, led by Jabotinsky and Begin among others) attacked military and civilian targets.

In October of 1945, they coordinated an attack on colonial oil refineries, railways, and police boats in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Palestine. This began a two-year long struggle by underground extremist groups against both Palestinian Arabs and the British. In July of 1946, the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the British Mandate's headquarters, killing 92 people.

The American military expert John Lois Peeke wrote that Robert Asprey (American military historian), Menachim Begin (Israel's sixth Prime Minister), and Samuel Katz (New York Times best-selling author and "Middle East security and international terrorism expert") all "indicate that the King David was blown up for two reasons, to retaliate for the British attack on the Jewish Agency and to destroy the secret documents which would have linked the Jewish Agency and [David] Ben-Gurion to Haganah terrorism."

Haganah was the armed wing of the Jewish Agency for Palestine (JA), itself a branch of the same World Zionist Congress founded by Herzl and later led by Weizmann. The JA changed its official name to the Jewish Agency for Israel following the Arab-Israeli war in 1948, but continued to "encourage, ensure, and implement" the resettling of Jews in Palestine. David Ben-Gurion served as their president 1935-1948, playing a pivotal role in the Haganah's operations. "Haganah" is Hebrew for "defense force", which was the inspiration for the naming of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) following the founding of Israel. 

The Irgun and Lehi cooperated in the massacre of Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948. 107 Palestinians in a village of 600 near Jerusalem were slain, including women and children. In addition to the destruction of the native population, such massacres were committed with the intention of scaring them to leave. The following massacres in Saliha and Lydda triggered the flight of Palestinians from violence en masse, the expulsion, or the Nakba ''sensu stricto'' (the displacement of these refugees of the 1948 war, and later the June 1967 war).

On May 14th, 1948, Israel declared independence from Britain. (Here we cease to use the term "State of Israel" to denote a difference between the ancient kingdoms of Israel and the modern nation-state.) With the declaration of independence came the consolidation of all Zionist paramilitary forces into the official Israeli Defense Force.

Thus, there are direct links not only between the Mufti's paramilitary forces in the 1950s and the Anglo-Nazi alliance, but between Zionist paramilitary forces, the Anglo-Nazi alliance, and the IDF. Far more massacres have been carried out over the years, as are linked below.

Some try to relate the founding of Israel to the founding of America, whether it be Zionists attempting to court supporters from the unipolar order, "landback" liberal "anti-Zionists" comparing the genocide of Palestinians to that of First (Native) Americans, or those in between. However, this is a false equivalence. The two share only the fact that they were both products of British imperialism, and that they turned against Britain-- the US in a historically progressive revolution during early capitalism, on the one hand, based on popular sovereignty and constitutional democracy; and Israel in a historically reactionary revolution founded upon the explicit dispossession and genocide of an authentic, indigenous population, on the other. Where the whole of America had plenty of land to share and European settlers didn't require immanently the dispossession and mass murder of First Americans in order to live on the land, the Zionist Jews knew that the violation of Palestinian/Arab self-determination and popular sovereignty was inherent within the plan to found a Jewish state in the holy land. Infrared views the treatment of First Americans by European settlers and later by America under Andrew Jackson as a "mutual misrecognition [of antagonism]" and a product of "incommensurate ways of life" owing to differences of culture and means of production, we also think it was wrong to steal their land and that First Americans should have better representation in our country. On the same token, the Israelis knew what they were doing and tried to assert it as progressive (viz. "socialist" kibbutzim and "labour Zionism"); Palestinians don't want representation within what they view as an invading force supported by the imperialist system, they want an authentically Palestinian state and authentic popular sovereignty. This is why, whether in favor of Palestine or not, the comparison between First Americans and Palestinians falls flat.

Following the violent uprisings previously discussed, the Peel Commission was convened to assess what Britain should do about the unrest. In 1937, the Peel Commission recommended that Palestine be partitioned, or divided by the judgement of the British, for the very first time. The proposal was a Jewish region in the north, a large Arab region encompassing the West Bank, Gaza, and southern Palestine, and a British mandate engulfing Jerusalem and its surrounding areas, stretching northwest towards Tel Aviv. Though it was thrown out, the Peel Commission served as the basis for the 1947 Partition plan, much like Sykes-Picot served as the basis for the Anglo imperialization of Arab territory which followed. The Mufti rejected this plan, acting as if he had sympathy for the Palestinian Arabs in his saying that no land could be ceded to Jews.

In 1942, the Biltmore Conference was held in New York. Ben-Gurion and the Zionists, for the first time, --diplomatically, politically, officially -- demanded "that Palestine be established as a Jewish Commonwealth." Chaim Weizmann demanded the British allow unrestricted immigration of Jews into Palestine, while Jabotinsky worked to organize said immigration efforts on the logistical end.

1944 British Labour Party endorses "transfer" (expulsion) of Arabs out of Palestine. At this time Bertrand Russell was a member of the Labour Party.
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When the French Mandate of Syria expired in 1946, the newly independent Syrian Arab Republic was formed, which retained control of the Golan Heights region in northern Palestine. This is important with regard to the war of 1967, when Israel began to occupy the Golan Heights and heightened tensions between itself and Syria.

=====1947 Partition Plan=====
The UN, weighing in on the situation in the British Mandate, came up with Resolution 181: it proposed 55% of the land be held by a Jewish state and 45% by a Palestinian Arab state, with Jerusalem under international control. Thirty-three countries approved, including the entire Anglophone world and the Soviet Union among others. Nearly the entire Arab world rejected this proposal, along with Orthodox rabbis who appeared at the UN. Along with the massacre of Deir Yassin and Israeli declaration of independence the following year came a steady stream of immigration encouraged by the Zionists; for Palestinian Arab sovereignty and determination, the outlook was bleak. The Arab states, which recently declared their own independence from the European imperialists, chose not to sit back and watch: Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq sent forces to Palestine, which also was the founding event of the Arab League. 
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Some actors weren't concerned about the self-determination of Palestinians however-- King Abdullah of Jordan, for one, sought to expand his borders, beginning special negotiations with Zionist organizations. King Faruq of Egypt also didn't show conviction on the issue, according to Professor of International Relations Fawas A. Gerges. That being said, it was only a matter of weeks before Israel was surrounded by Arab troops, at which point the UN called for a 4-week-long ceasefire. Though there was a UN arms embargo on the entire region, Israel evaded the UN by importing Czechoslovakian armaments seized by Slansky and company. 

Using the time to regroup and reload, Israel immediately launched a counteroffensive once the ceasefire ended. Forming garrisons in Lydda and Ramla in the West Bank, two Palestinian towns in UN-allocated Arab territory, the IDF expelled 70,000 Arabs from their homes, to join the other thousands of Palestinian refugees of the Nakba. This is known as the Lydda Death March. 

In total, over half of the Arab population fled or were expelled, and many more were killed.

With their armies uncoordinated and the IDF occupying Palestinian-Arab territory in the West Bank, King Faruq led the charge to create a Palestinian government based in Gaza; however, this was mostly a play by Faruq against King Abdullah, to prevent his expansion. This took the Arab leadership away from focus on repelling , while the Israelis continued gaining ground and fortifying what they had already taken. The IDF launched an air raid on Egyptian forces in Gaza. By 1949, Egypt was defeated, destroying both the plans of Faruq and the hope for a unified Palestine from the rest of the Arab League.

Egypt turned to Britain's authority to protect its territory, and the Arab states signed bilateral peace agreements with Israel, which then occupied 77% of the former British Mandate of Palestine. Egypt continued its military presence in the Gazan area and Jordan annexed the West Bank. Israel controlled the larger portion of Jerusalem, and the armistice which followed roughly set the modern borders of all future conflicts.

The State of Israel was founded on May 14th, 1948. President Truman issued a statement within a few hours recognizing Israel. On May 17th that year Britain attempted to distance itself from Israel in a statement, claiming it "didn't meet the criteria" of an independent state. That same day the USSR, via Molotov, issued a formal recognition of Israel. 

Some point out Stalin and the USSR's early support for Israel, which we see as a mistake which was corrected only a few years later, both personally by Stalin and by the few Soviet republics which supported Israel. Stalin recognized Israel by simply accepting reality as it was; he thought that Israel, on the basis of Labor Zionism, might become socialist and adhere to the outline given by the Balfour Declaration. However, Stalin did not sanction the Czech arms sent to the Zionists by the Geminder-Slansky group, while he didn't interfere with other Soviets arming Syria. Stalin supported the Israeli Mapam party, a left-wing party which was really an outfit for Soviet intelligence. In the aftermath of the 1948 war, when many Soviet Jews applied for visas and exit permits to emigrate, Soviet authorities arrested and deported Jews who expressed pro-Zionist and pro-Israel sentiments. From May 15th, 1948 until the end of 1951, emigration was halted; only four old women and a disabled ex-serviceman were allowed to leave for Israel. It was on February 12th, 1953 that the Soviet Union severed its relations with Israel after a state-sanctioned bombing, which injured three Soviet officials and destroyed the Soviet embassy. The Soviets soon closed the embassy and withdrew its personnel from the area. Finally, when Stalin was informed of the Czech arms shipments to Israel by Matyas Rakosi, they together informed Gottwald and other Czech leaders. The Geminder-Slansky group was executed on charges of service to the UBD (Yugoslav secret service), MI6, CIA, and Mossad.