I was speaking with a friend recently about how difficult it is to have a nuanced understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict and its causes, and his (tongue-in-cheek) advice was "When in doubt, blame the Brits and run". To what extent is that approach valid when understanding the conflict?
Like many things its complicated. I would argue that in sum the British were less at fault than the local Jewish and Palestinian community and blaming the British is kind of a politically convenient way that everyone can be innocent and the victim except for a historical actor that no longer is really a factor because its helpful to the peace process
So when people point to British complicity they generally point to one of three things.
So lets address each of these points.
The first is the most fair. The British in 1917 did endorse zionism and this did lead to a major increase to Jewish immigration into the mandate. It is fair to say that the creation of the mandate created the conditions in which it was possible for a large Jewish community to establish themselves in Palestine and the Balfour declaration helped spur Jewish Immigration.
It would be wrong to say that Jewish immigration began because of the British Government. Jewish Immigration to Palestine had begun in the 1880s. Its also wrong to say that the British government was necessarily supportive of large scale Jewish Immigration. The British government imposed strict quotas on Jewish immigration which they vigorously enforced. Mass Jewish immigration to Palestine was motivated as much by the inability to immigrate to the US and anti-semitic violence in Eastern Europe as it was by British policy or a religious conception of Zionism. There were two periods 1917-1923 and 1929-1936 in which the British could be said to have a pro-immigration stance where as between 1923-1929 and 1936 to 1947 the British were decidedly stingy about granting immigration papers. Was it wrong to allow refugees come to Palestine? Thats a hard question to answer especially given what we know befell those who remained in Eastern Europe. The British did not force the Palestinians off the land Israelis settled. The Israelis largely bought it from Arab landlords. The establishment of Jewish communities prior to 1947 was by and large done legally . The problem was that often the Israeli settlers would replace the Palestinian peasants already on the land they purchased. The peasants did not own the land but they worked it, lived on it and relied on it. The Israelis were largely not interested in being feudal landlords and instead establish their own communities with Jewish labor especially in the late 1920s and 1930s and displaced the peasants.
The antagonism between the two groups was a natural one, not one caused by the British. The Palestinians resented the Jewish immigrants mostly because of economic displacement but also to some degree cultural and religious reasons and often attacked them. The Jewish settlers partially out of racism and partially due to the reasonable belief that the Palestinian population would wipe them out if they could did not like the Palestinians. You could argue that the use of Jewish Police in the Great Arab revolt inflamed tensions but I think the mutual distrust and dislike was pretty well set in stone by the late 1920s.
The second point is in my mind largely unfair.
The British did not pack up and leave Palestine. The British left after a fairly effective 3 year insurgency by Jewish groups and who could blame them. Much of Britain laid in ruins. They had just lost hundreds of thousands of men fighting in WWII. The last thing Britain wanted to do was spend millions of dollars and station tens of thousands of men to try to fight a never ending insurgency.
An insurgency that was not going particularly well. It had become clear by 1947 that the more moderate Jewish groups were solidly behind the insurgency and that violence would continue to increase if the British did not leave. British attempts to punish the insurgents had failed and the insurgents had show that they could engage in tit for tat escalation pretty effectively. In the famous sergeants affair the British decided to hang two insurgent leaders to set an example and one of the jewish insurgent groups threatened and then did hang two British POWs as a response. The fight in the Mandate was also unpopular with the US and was making the British look bad internationally.
So the British decision to withdraw was understandable. Could the British have withdrawn in a way that enforced the 1947 partition plan or prevented violence from breaking out further? Maybe but probably not without high costs. The British tried locally to stop the progress of the Jewish militias against the Palestinians but the Jewish militia groups fought back and at this point had become much better organized. They even managed to repulse a British armored assault towards Haifa at one point. It was clear to the British that fighting the Jewish militias would be a costly affair. Another problem was bias and optics. It was clear to the British that as soon as they left the Arab armies were going to intervene on the side of the Palestinians. If they destroyed the Jewish militias and then left only for the arab armies to come and massacre the now defenseless Jewish population it would look pretty bad and the Americans especially would have not been pleased. If they decided to stay and defend the Jewish population from ethnic cleansing then they would have to not only fight the Jewish militias but the arab armies and this would ruin Britians reputation in the Arab world. Thus they were caught between a rock and a hard place and withdrawal seemed to be the only viable option.
The Third Point is entirely unfair.
The British supported a one state solution. It was the UN special commission on Palestine largely spearheaded by the US that championed the partition plan. This was both because the US and some other states were sympathetic to the Jewish cause and because of the reality that if some compromise was not made a civil war was inevitable because the Jewish population had no intention of living under Arab majority rule and the Palestinians had no intention of allowing for a large autonomous Jewish community to continue to exist in a new Palestinian state. The partition plan in 1947 was seen as the only way to maybe prevent civil war, but without the support of the arab states for the partition the Palestinians had little reason to compromise. It could be argued that the partition was more favorable to the Jewish position than it had to be. It definitely gave the Jewish Population most of the territory it could reasonably ask for. But I don't think a moderate scaling down or a major scaling down of this territory would have prevented war. In the case of a moderate scaling down, the Palestinians would still likely have rejected the partition. In the case of a major scaling down, the zionist groups would not have accepted the compromise. So I would argue that regardless of what the British had done by the early 1930s at the latest a civil war between the Palestinians and Jewish populations was going to be the inevitable result of any withdraw.