British India, Mandate Palestine, and the Origins of Perpetual Conflict, 1919–48

Countless authors have underscored the importance of the interwar British Mandate in Palestine as foregrounding the country’s partition, and the ensuing Arab-Israeli conflict. A similarly robust literature discusses the significance of the same period for the evolution of two distinct and competitive nationalist currents in India, again resulting in national partition, and decades of communal strife and regional insecurity. More recently, political theorists and intellectual historians have begun to discuss these cases in comparative perspective. However, as yet there is no modern historical study of the connections and interactions between the nationalist movements of Mandate Palestine and British India.

This paper draws on Arab, Indian, Pakistani, and European sources to demonstrate the ways in which the histories of the British Raj and Mandate Palestine overlapped and intersected between the end of the First World War and the resort to partition in 1947-8. It thus documents the interrelation of nationalist and imperial politics in the Middle East and South Asia during a period of momentous global transition. It tracks interwar meetings and exchanges between Indians, Arabs, Zionists, and British administrators to underscore the extent to which developments in the Middle East and South Asia were connected during this period, from the Khilafat campaign of the early 1920s up to the UN debates over Palestine's partition in 1948. The paper recounts the rapid ascent, in the intervening years, of partition thinking among both nationalists and imperial administrators. In this sense it responds to the call for “metropole and colony, coloniser and colonised...to be brought into one analytic field”, but it also moves beyond binary frameworks, to consider the emergence, during the interwar period, of horizontal networks of solidarity and political action across the colonised East.