This book is a chronology of the dialogue between the colonised Palestinians and their British colonisers during the ‘Mandate’ years from November 1917 through May 1948. It names, dates, quotes from and discusses 490 separate manifestos, letters, statements of policy, petitions, resolutions, minutes and debates going either from the British to the indigenous Palestinians or vice versa. A few examples: Samuel’s The Future of Palestine, the Balfour Declaration, the League of Nations Covenant, the Report on the State of Palestine and other tracts by the Palestine Arab Congress and the Moslem-Christian Associations, the King-Crane report, the General Syrian Congress, the Palin, Haycraft, Cavendish, Shaw, Hope Simpson, Peel and Anglo-American investigations, the arguments of the Palestinian Delegations to London, the Churchill, Passfield and Mac Donald White Papers, some petitions of the Arab Executive Committee to the League of Nations, various positions of the Palestine High Commissioners, protests of the Women’s Delegations, debates in both Houses of Parliament, Ramsey Mac Donald’s Black Letter, the manifestos of several Arab newspapers and many leaders such as Musa Kazem al-Husseini, Musa Alami, Awni Abdul Hadi, Ragheb Nashashibi, Izzat Darwaza, George Antonius, Yaqub al-Ghussein, Matiel E.T. Mogannam, Jamal al-Husseini, Izzat Tannous, Emil Ghoury, Aref Abdul Razzak, Henry Cattan, Amin al-Husseini, Mohammed Zafarullah Khan and Albert Hourani, and finally the spewings of the UN General Assembly and its Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). Its main sources are: 1) records held at the National Archives at Kew, London, mainly the minutes of Cabinet meetings and material written by the Foreign and Colonial Offices; 2) other records accessible online held by universities and private historians; and 3) other books and articles about the Mandate, i.e. ‘secondary sources’. It thus traces the ins and outs of the three decades of robbery of Palestine by Britain from its rightful owners, preparing the ground for Palestine’s takeover in 1948 by Egypt, Jordan and the Zionist state of Israel. The story is nothing if not simple: The Palestinians demanded their independence, the British denied it. The book is dedicated to the Palestinians who fought and suffered, or died, for their self-determination, and to the often-unsung Palestinian freedom fighters, resisters and historians who have related these events in their own ways.
