Britain Appointed a Zionist to Govern Palestine — He Rewrote the Land Laws in Five Years

In 1920 Britain appointed a committed Zionist to govern the very territory the Balfour Declaration had promised to his movement. His name was Herbert Samuel. He was the first High Commissioner of Palestine. The commander of British forces called the appointment highly dangerous. Lord Curzon asked him to reconsider. He did not reconsider. In five years Samuel rewrote the land laws of Palestine. His Attorney General — Norman Bentwich, a Zionist Congress delegate since 1907 — drafted ten land ordinances that separated land use from land ownership for the first time. Palestinian farmers who had worked the same land for generations but held no Ottoman-era title deed could now lose that land to someone who had never set foot on it. The Zionist Organization received advance copies of every new law before the public saw them. The Jewish National Fund targeted absentee landlords in Beirut and Damascus who owned vast tracts of Palestinian land but had never lived on it. Over fifty-five percent of agricultural land acquired by Jewish institutions was purchased from these families. The Palestinian farmer received an eviction notice. The laws that made it legal had been written by men whose movement stood to benefit. In 1933 a formal financial agreement was signed between the Zionist Federation of Germany and Nazi Germany. It was called the Haavara Agreement. One hundred and five million Reichsmarks in goods were transferred to Palestine. Without this agreement the entire financial project would likely have collapsed during the Great Depression. By 1947 Britain had one hundred thousand soldiers stationed in Palestine. The territory was costing forty million pounds a year. Seven hundred and fifty British military and police personnel had been killed. The empire that had written sixty-seven words in 1917 could not afford to stay and could not afford to leave. The United Nations vote on partition was delayed by three days because the votes were not there. In those three days Firestone threatened Liberia with the withdrawal of development funding. A five million dollar loan may have secured Haiti's vote. The Philippines reversed its position after a phone call from Washington. On 14 May 1948 — eleven minutes after Ben-Gurion declared independence — the United States became the first nation to recognise the State of Israel. The man who convinced President Truman was not a diplomat. He was a haberdasher from Kansas City named Eddie Jacobson who had once shared a clothing shop with Truman and had never asked him for a political favour in thirty-seven years of friendship. This is the documented financial history of how sixty-seven words became a country on the map. 📖 Sources and Primary Documentation: Herbert Samuel — private memorandum to the British Cabinet, January 1915 Norman Bentwich — Mandate Memories, The Hogarth Press, 1965 Chaim Weizmann — Trial and Error, autobiography, 1949 Assaf Likhovski — Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine, University of North Carolina Press, 2006 Martin Bunton — Colonial Land Policies in Palestine 1917–1936, Oxford University Press, 2007 Edwin Black — The Transfer Agreement, Brookline Books, 1984 The Peel Commission Report — Palestine Royal Commission, July 1937 The White Paper of 1939 — British Government policy statement Harry S. Truman — presidential papers and handwritten cabinet notes, Truman Library Edward Jacobson Papers — Truman Library, Independence Missouri Michael Joseph Cohen — Truman and Israel, University of California Press, 1990 Francis R. Nicosia — The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, University of Texas Press, 1985 United Nations Resolution 181, General Assembly, 29 November 1947 British Foreign Office records released under the thirty-year rule King-Crane Commission Report, 1919 The Balfour Declaration Part 1 is on this channel. The paper trail has been open for over a century. #BalfourDeclaration #Palestine #FinancialHistory #TreasuryOfHistory #HerbertSamuel #Zionism #BritishEmpire #HaavaraAgreement #Truman #MiddleEast