Mandate Palestine

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

Palestine’s interwar history remains underappreciated and misunderstood – often overshadowed by the history-defining events of 1948. Without examining that decisive era, however, students of the Arab-Israeli conflict cannot contextualize those events, let alone the intervening eight decades. This course is bookended on one side by Britain’s Balfour Declaration and the birth of its Mandate enshrining the Jewish National Home policy, and on the other by the creation of Israel and the dispossession and dispersal of much of Arab Palestine. Students will delve deeply into primary-source material from all three sides of the “Palestine triangle” – Britons, Arabs and Jews – including secret Mandatory documents, classified testimonies, private correspondence, and contemporary press coverage translated from Hebrew and Arabic. Secondary-source readings will likewise reveal overlooked perspectives from all three national and linguistic camps, and the panoply of political, ideological and religious convictions motivating them. Investigating the Palestine Mandate sheds essential light not just on the conflict’s origins, but on its current troubled impasse.