Thanks to the Muslim riots in April 1920, the Nabi Musa riots, the League of Nations quickly acted to confirm the appointment of Britain to be in charge of the Palestine Mandate, which had the duty to implement the provisions of the Balfour Agreement. I’ll talk about that in a moment. The fact that the riots did this was a first and only goal where Muslim resort to violence of this kind worked against them.

But this looked like the last hurrah for Britain’s pro-Zionist enthusiasm for creating a Jewish homeland. It seems to be the case that from this point forward, almost every step Britain took was calculated to prevent any Jewish homeland from ever happening – up until the point when the British unceremoniously bailed out of Palestine in 1948, when the last British High Commissioner, General Sir Alan Cunningham, at 8am on Friday 14 May, without completing Britain’s assignment under the League of Nations Mandate, handed the mess that they had created almost from the beginning, over to the UN to sort out. 

General Cunningham marched out of Government House in his full dress uniform. He reviewed a guard of honour. Then he mounted his armoured Daimler, and drove to inspect the troops at the King David Hotel. After that he then headed out to Kalandia Airport. Flew from Jerusalem to Haifa. From there, after midnight, he sailed for England. The British Mandate, the vital next step to the realisation of creating a home land for the Jews, had been so full of promise. Properly handled it would likely have significantly reduced the slaughter of the Jews in the Nazi holocaust – I’ll explain that at the end of the programme.

This unseemly British scramble to leave Palestine, leaving such chaos in its wake, led to the first of the many wars between the Jews and the Arabs.

What went so terribly wrong that led to this, in world historic terms, failures when the proper handling of the role of administering the British Mandate would have made for an enormous significantly less troubled world today. I’m an admirer of the British Empire – but this, this was unforgivable.

Tag words: Nabi Musa riots; League of Nations; Palestine Mandate; General Sir Alan Cunningham; Kalandia Airport; Nazi holocaust; Sir Eric Drummond; Balfour Declaration; King George V; Kingdom of Transjordania; Chaim Wiezmann; Winson Churchill; 1967 Six Day War; Sir Henry McMahon; Zionism; the McMahon Pledge; Lord Maugham; Historical Summary of Principal Political Events in Palestine Since the British Occupation in 1917; King Abdullah; Paris Peace Talks; Adolf Hitler; Easter Riots; anti-semitism; Sir Harold MacMichael; Palestine High Commissioner;