Partitioning Palestine: British policymaking at the end of Empire

Abstract

of the partition idea, insisting that for the Arabs and many in Britain to accept the proposal, it could not appear to have come from the Zionists. Incidentally, as Dubnov shows, when the idea of cantonization was floated in the months preceding the Peel Commission, British leaders felt precisely the same way. “It would be a big advantage if Dr. Weizmann were to spontaneously and of his own accord make some suggestion on these lines,” wrote the colonial secretary (75). Not all Zionists of course supported partition. In his essay on binationalist Zionists, Adi Gordon shows how Brit Shalom’s “subversive” understanding of Zionism – as a movement with undeniable colonial connections that, as a countermeasure, needed to strive for horizontal alliances in the anticolonial Arab world – led to a rejection of partition. Because partition sat at the interstices of imperial strategy, on the one hand, and the language of self-determination and nation-building, on the other, studying it throws into relief the blurred boundaries between seemingly distinct political ideals. This volume highlights the interconnectedness of binationalism, federation, cantonization, dominionization, and partition, as well as the capaciousness of each individual vision and its capacity to provide space for warring political perspectives (particularly in the case of Palestine). What is more, partition exposes how the ostensible dichotomies of imperial history, which we generally assume to be self-evident, were in fact very often anything but clear-cut opposites. Of course, historians are already long-accustomed to the idea that empire and metropole were mutually constitutive and that the empire functioned as an interconnected web unto itself. But Partitions underscores something more: how, as Chester puts it, “anticolonial forms of protest could coexist with more ambiguous relationships to colonialism” (131); how the language of autonomy and self-determination were not always the natural antecedent to the language of sovereignty and independence; and how being the supporter of a nationalist movement or rejecting the idea of partition in no way limited one’s imperial imagination. Partitions also presents historians of the Yishuv and Zionism in particular a new window into a much broader set of interwar conversations about, to quote Gordon, the “merits and demerits, the applicability or inapplicability” of the nation-state (176). More broadly, the volume serves as a model and directive – one for conceptualizing the Yishuv in transnational and transimperial perspective and also for working across historical subfields. In sum, Partitions offers critical and compelling reading for students and scholars of twentieth-century empire, Indian nationalism, Zionism, Palestine/Israel, and decolonization.