In 1917, the British Cabinet had been convinced by London Zionists, proponents of turning Judaism into a form of nationalism that sought to colonize a territory, to issue the Balfour Declaration to Lord Rothschild. "His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people," the declaration stated, "and will use their best endeavors 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." It was a ridiculous pledge, since no such home for the Jewish people (even if the British then thought about it more as a community center than a new nation-state) could have avoided injuring the rights of the indigenous Palestinians.
The British rulers of hundreds of millions of Asians and Africans thought nothing about moving people around to suit their imperial interests, and even at one point considered transporting millions of Punjabis to Iraq to relieve what they saw as India's dangerous population pressure. In 1915, two years before the tragic Balfour Declaration, 683,389 Arabic-speaking natives dwelled in the territory that the British would call Palestine, about 81,000 of them Christians and the rest Muslims. There were only 38,752 Jews, most of them recent immigrants from Russia and Europe permitted to come into these provinces by the Ottoman sultan, some as pilgrims or retirees.
The British in Palestine created a province of Gaza, separating it from the Bedouin-dominated area of Beersheba and the Negev, and permitted its notable families to administer it, though some refused to cooperate with the foreigners and others were distracted by local clan-based political faction-fighting. The war-time food crisis passed, probably helped more by the "highly fertile" land of Gaza than by laissez-faire British economic policies. Still, growing landlessness and poverty kept much of the population on the edge.
The influx of Jewish immigrants into Palestine, whom the indigenous viewed as illegal aliens sponsored by an illegitimate colonialism, created tensions. People in Gaza, as in the rest of Palestine, demonstrated annually against the Balfour Declaration. The Jews who colonized Palestine (their words) established a Jewish National Fund to buy land, which it forbade ever after to be sold to a non-Jew. The Palestinian population, in a largely agricultural country, doubled from 1915 to 1947, with multiple children splitting up the family farm in each generation, which had the effect of turning many Palestinian proprietors into very small farmers or landless laborers. At the same time, Jewish immigrants took 6 percent of the best land off the market. A riot against Jews in 1928 in Jerusalem had echoes in Gaza, where the 54 Jews who lived there were threatened by a mob. The former mayor, Said Shawa, and his clan intervened to protect the Jews.
Some mayors in the 1930s, as historian Jean-Pierre Filiu details in his book Gaza: A History, undertook improvements, establishing a new hospital, a park and a fancy neighborhood near the beach. Filiu says that the French tourist magazine, Le Guide Bleu, in 1932 praised Gaza City's lively markets, its antiquities such as the ancient mosque, and its good communications, since it lay on the rail link from Haifa to the Suez Canal. It put Gaza City's population at 17,480, more than four times larger than Khan Younis. Deir al-Balah and Rafah were small.
To cite this essay, use the following reference:
Cole, J. (2025, March 28). Tracing Gaza's modern history, from Balfour to Hamas. Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN).
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