Palestinian Arab and Jewish Leadership in the Mandate Period

Abstract

I t is, of course, an oversimplification to speak of the Jewish Agency (JAE) and the Arab Higher Committee (AHC) as the Jewish and Palestinian Arab political leadership in the last decades prior to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. A range of other leadership elements existed in both communities. The equation is valid in broad historical terms, however, since the JAE and the AHC played the key roles in relation to and on behalf of their respective communities during the crucial transition that began when the League of Nations assigned the Palestine mandate to Britain after World War I. For the Jewish leadership, the time frame is 27 years beginning in 1921, the year in which the Twelfth World Zionist Congress elected the first Executive and charged it to cooperate with Britain in carrying out Article 4 of the Mandate, the creation of a Jewish national home. The Palestinian Arab leadership became an organized group somewhat later with the creation in 1936 of the Arab Higher Committee incorporating the six political parties that had gone their separate ways after the death of Musa al-Husseini in 1934 and the subsequent disintegration of his largely passive Arab Committee. In the periods of 27 and 12 years respectively during which two leadership groups helped to set history on its present course by the ways in which they interacted with their own constituencies, with each other, and with the British, the total cast of characters participating in them was but 96 32 men in four Arab Higher Committees, 64 men and women in the 12 JAEs elected during the life of the Jewish Agency. The smallness of the two segments of this pivotal universe facilitates comparative study. And the striking socio-economic, ideological,