Hi,

This is a wonderful question and really gets at some interesting and overlooked dimension of how we think of Israel/Palestine. I’m a historian focusing on mostly the history of Zionism, so I can answer some components of your question, but a historian of British imperialism probably would be able to offer a more thorough answer.

The overarching, though somewhat unsatisfactory takeaway, is that there is no one answer to this question. Different constituencies (in terms of political party, branch of the government, or groups of elites) had very different visions of the ideal future for the Mandate and its relation to Britain. And while these different groups often agreed on some overarching goals of the Mandate visions of how to achieve these goals, or which goals should be subordinated to other policy objectives differed wildly and shifted over time. (more detail on all this below)

First, however, I have to digress a little and discuss inter-war imperialism more broadly in order to address how it is possible that a “great power” would have such a vague vision for its imperial project. While this at first may appear outlandish, in many ways this shouldn’t be too surprising. While I put myself at risk of breaking Askhistorians “twenty-year” rule, I do think contemporary events provide an apt comparison. I’m speaking of course of Afghanistan. American lawmakers and elites broadly certain shared ideals about the ideal results of the American project there. IE Afghanistan should eventually be an American ally with increased “freedom” democracy and stability. Yet these decision-makers had little agreement on the practical arrangements that would secure this for the long-term future. Clearly, overseas involvements can often be long on ambition but short on details. (note, if I need to edit this out because of the twenty-year rule I will, but I do think it provides a good comparison!)

While vague long-term imperial visions are clearly not a relic of the distant past This was a particularly salient feature of the inter-war period (and to be precise these conversations began already during the war), where elites across the globe were convinced that the old order of empires would undoubtedly be transformed in the aftermath of the war but shared little consensus for what would arise afterward. In the United States, we tend to focus on Wilson’s fourteen points and ideas of self-determination as being the dominant post-war discourse. This perspective helps create a teleological narrative that assumes the eventual rise of the nation-state as the normative model of governance (note, this narrative was strongly reinforced a generation later once decolonize was achieved and colonial powers retroactively argued that this had been their goal all along). However, in the waning years of WWI most European intellectuals, perhaps most famously the British roundtable movement which published the journal “The Round Table: A Quarterly Review of the Politics of the British Empire” sought alternatives to the nation-state model, and hoped for a reorganization, rather than an eventual disintegration of the empire. Multiple visions existed for this new international arrangement, but in general, they tended to share the vision that in the short term the metropole would help “develop” the economic infrastructure of “primitive” lands, and in the long term maintain some sort of relationship in which the metropole would continue to hold responsibility, and power, over at least some of these nations’ affairs. While the terms of the Mandate called for the nation to eventually “stand on its own” opinions of what this would look like varied widely among different constituencies and throughout British rule of the mandate.

Speaking specifically about Palestine, British elite and lawmakers widely agreed about certain overarching goals. Ruling the mandate was intended in both the short and long term to increase British influence in the Middle East, gain prestige for the metropole, attract global Jewish capital for investment in Palestine, endear (or at least not estrange) Arab nations, provide a national home for the Jewish people and ensure Christian access to holy sites. However, just how to achieve these objectives, or, more importantly, which objectives to prioritize when multiple objectives appeared to be in tension was not agreed upon.

Despite this plethora of opinions on what goals to prioritize in Palestine, there were certain patterns that tended to stay true throughout the period of the Mandate. In general, especially after 1929, the opposition government (whether it be Labor or Conservatives) tended to look more favorably on the goal of creating the Jewish national home, while the government in power tended to be more concerned with not alienating other Arab countries. The cabinet tended to view Jewish settlement in Palestine as a positive good in bringing Palestine into “modernity”, while the colonial office and bureaucracy in Palestine tended to favor policies that limited Jewish immigration, fearing that development was upending Arab life and throwing the country into chaos.

Ultimately, what resulted from this was a disjointed policy that tended to both favor Jewish settlers while simultaneously limiting new Jewish settlement. Ultimately, the irreconcilable nature of British goals in the area, combined with regular unrest, resulted in the long-term goals of the mandate being subordinated to more immediate short-term needs, such as ending strikes or riots. When the British government did seriously try to investigate the future of the Mandate, with the 1936 Peel commission, partition into a Jewish and Arab state was proposed as the most workable solution. The choice of this solution is notable, as it could theoretically preserve the divergent British goals outlined above by neither alienating the Jewish or Arab population. Just how independent these states would really be was never really explored, as partition was widely rejected by the Arab population, and the country was largely thrown into chaos with the so-called “great revolt.”