Summary
The British Royal Commission under Lord Peel, whose report, published on 7 July 1937, recommended partition and the establishment of a Jewish state, and whose hearings preserved much of the testimony Kanafani uses.
Details
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George Mansour, secretary of the Federation of Palestinian Arab Workers in Jaffa, reported to the Commission on Arab workers’ conditions, and Archbishop Gregorius Hajjar told it the story of the Roma village committee (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.7 / printed p.13; PDF p.12 / printed p.23).
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Kanafani criticises the Commission’s report for sidestepping the immediate causes of the revolt and attributing the outbreak to the Arabs’ desire for national independence and their aversion to the Jewish national home, two causes he says are really only one; he lists its six secondary factors as cited in the testimony collection (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.18-19 / printed p.35-36).
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Most Palestinian leaders who testified before the Commission in 1937, and before previous commissions, are said to have eulogised Ottoman imperialism in comparison with British imperialism (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.13 / printed p.24).
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The Palestinian leadership first decided to boycott the Commission, then was obliged by the Arab kings and amirs to meet it; its report, published on 7 July 1937, recommended partition and the establishment of a Jewish state; Britain abandoned the partition proposal in November 1938 (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.24 / printed p.46-47; PDF p.26 / printed p.50).
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The Commission admitted that security expenditure in Palestine had risen from PL 826,000 in 1935 to PL 2,223,000 in 1936 (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.26 / printed p.51).
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In Pappe the Zionist leadership responded favourably in 1937 to the recommendation by the British Royal Peel Commission to partition Palestine into two states, accepting a modest portion of the land as the first of two steps — Peel in 1937, the maximalist demand for all of Palestine in 1942 — while the principal objective, an exclusively Jewish state, remained the same (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.38-39).
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David Ben-Gurion likewise accepted the British offer of a state in 1937, over a much smaller portion than he had in mind, as a good start, aspiring to Jewish sovereignty over as much of Palestine as possible (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.48).
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In Manna, it was following the Peel Commission plan of 1937 that the expulsion of the Arabs from the Jewish state — or transporting them to neighbouring Arab countries — became a declared policy (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.27).
Related pages
The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, Arab Higher Committee