I'm going to give this a cursory bunch of answers, but can expand if necessary. This was a very charged question at a very charged time, so I'm going to write quickly.

You know, as opposed to putting billions toward the Israeli military so it could continue its illegal occupation of Palestine territory?

Well, setting aside the discussion of this that takes place in today's world and is wildly politically charged, I'd like to note that the West did not fund or arm the Israeli military in the 1948 war in any serious capacity. Instead, most of the funding went towards the Arab states. Israel sourced most of its weapons by smuggling them out of the United States, or from Czechoslovakia, i.e. the Soviets.

The West was certainly supportive of Jews being in the Jewish homeland, and a Jewish state, for a variety of reasons. However, this was because by 1947, there were already 600,000 Jews there. The reasons for them not funding land in "unoccupied" land is an interesting one; the West considered many other areas, but the Jewish people themselves wanted no place other than the "historic homeland", as put by Herzl, for the Jewish people. And, of course, Jews and the West believed that the area was not exactly densely populated, and so they believed there was space for both peoples there.

a1) I know that the Jewish (soon to become Israelis) community felt a religious claim to Israel, but was there any Jewish land to that was not occupied?

I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to. The Jewish claim to Israel was not purely religious; it was on multiple different grounds. Some couched it in terms of religious backing, others in terms of Jewish indigeneity to the land, and still others in terms of there being no other place where Jews could find empty space that was not already part of another state or empire, since in that area alone there was already a Jewish presence that had moral and religious and historical backing (one dating back thousands of years) and the Ottoman Empire was collapsing. Jews in other parts of the Arab world frequently dealt with antisemitism and had no sense of indigeneity to those lands; Iraqi Jews did not feel that they originated in Iraq, usually, but in Israel. And as I mentioned, the Ottoman Empire was collapsing, and there was no "Palestine" as a state there; following the collapse, the British assumed control of the area through a British Mandate formalized by the League of Nations, which they established with the goal of allowing a Jewish "national homeland" to be there.

a2) Supposedly, Jewish political figures in Britain aggressively expressed their desire to reside in Israel to British leaders, but how much power did Jewish citizens actually have in Europe around this time? Were they not navigating the aftermath of WW2, living in ghettos, and continuing to be treated like second-class European citizens?

Most of the Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine took place before WWII, much of it many years before. This was, yes, during a time still of great persecution of Jews, but Jews managed to also convince some to support their cause through moral and strategic arguments. Churchill, for example, believed that Jews returning to Israel had both a moral force and a strategic value, as a British ally-to-be, and also argued that a Jewish state would be good for the world.

These arguments were bolstered by Jews who did manage to contribute to the war effort during WWI, like Chaim Weizmann (a chemist) for example. Weizmann's contribution to the war let him become friends with British leaders, which was a big boon to the Zionist movement at the time during WWI and beyond.

b) Why continue to encourage and fund Israeli establishment in Palestine if the Palestinian leader (Amin al-Husseini) was openly antisemitic and supposedly encouraged another Holocaust? Did that not guarantee issues would arise in the future?

Husseini was indeed openly antisemitic during WWII, that much is true. Before that, he had been less so; he had certainly taken part in antisemitic incitement, but how much is unclear. However, by the time Husseini was "in charge" of anything (and even that is more complex of a question), there were already hundreds of thousands of Jews in the area asking for the right to self-determination. Confronted with a choice of succumbing to Husseini and those like him and expelling hundreds of thousands of Jews (before or after the Holocaust) or granting Jews the right to self-determination, the choice to the West seemed rather simple.

c) Is there anything to be said about Britain political gain in regards to Middle Eastern territories, etc.?

The British did initially believe a Jewish state would be beneficial to them. The British also came to reconsider this view, and indeed some of their intelligence operatives encouraged the Arab states to invade Israel in 1948, in the hopes of destroying Israel before it could truly be born.

Hey there,

Just to let you know, your question is fine, and we're letting it stand. However, you should be aware that questions framed as 'Why didn't X do Y' relatively often don't get an answer that meets our standards (in our experience as moderators). There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, it often can be difficult to prove the counterfactual: historians know much more about what happened than what might have happened. Secondly, 'why didn't X do Y' questions are sometimes phrased in an ahistorical way. It's worth remembering that people in the past couldn't see into the future, and they generally didn't have all the information we now have about their situations; things that look obvious now didn't necessarily look that way at the time.

If you end up not getting a response after a day or two, consider asking a new question focusing instead on why what happened did happen (rather than why what didn't happen didn't happen) - this kind of question is more likely to get a response in our experience. Hope this helps!