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Who colonized Palestine?

Middle East — the powers that ruled Palestine, the dates, and what independence did and did not change.

In short

Who colonized Palestine?

Britain, as the Mandate for Palestine from 1920 to 1948, following four centuries of Ottoman rule and the 1917 Balfour Declaration.

The British Mandate is the hinge of the modern conflict: London made incompatible wartime promises and then governed a territory in which it had committed to two mutually exclusive futures.

Reference

Who ruled Palestine, and when

1516–1917
Ottoman Empire
1920–1948
British Mandate for Palestine

At a glance

Key facts

Colonising powers
Britain, Ottoman Empire (previously)
Independence
Mandate ended 1948; statehood unresolved
Balfour
One European state promising a second people's homeland in a third people's land
1936–39
Britain demolished homes and used collective punishment to crush the revolt
1948
Around 750,000 Palestinians displaced

Chronology

Key dates

  1. 1917

    Balfour Declaration issued by the British government.

  2. 1920

    Britain assumes the mandate.

  3. 1936–39

    Arab revolt suppressed by British forces.

  4. 1947

    UN partition plan.

  5. 1948

    Mandate ends; war and mass displacement (the Nakba).

Context

What the record shows

The suppression of the 1936–39 revolt destroyed Palestinian political and military leadership, with consequences that shaped 1948.

Questions

Frequently asked

Who colonised Palestine?
Britain governed Palestine under a League of Nations mandate from 1920 to 1948, after four centuries of Ottoman rule.
What was the Balfour Declaration?
A 1917 British government statement supporting the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, issued while the territory was still Ottoman and inhabited overwhelmingly by Arabs.
When did the British Mandate end?
15 May 1948.

Read on

Related in the archive

References

Sources — colonial Palestine

  1. [1]Bartolomé de las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (Seville, 1552).
  2. [2]Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650 (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
  3. [3]Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America (Monthly Review Press, 1971; English 1973).
  4. [4]Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost (Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
  5. [5]Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa (Random House, 1991).
  6. [6]Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India (Hurst, 2017).
  7. [7]Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (Henry Holt, 2005).
  8. [8]Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Wisconsin, 2009).
  9. [9]Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).
  10. [10]Jürgen Zimmerer, "The birth of the Ostland out of the spirit of colonialism", Patterns of Prejudice 39:2 (2005), on the German South-West Africa → Holocaust lineage.
  11. [11]Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Bogle-L'Ouverture, 1972).
  12. [12]Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (1867), Chapter 31 ("Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist").

All works cited in good faith for documentary, educational and critical use. Errors and omissions: contact the archive.