Kondor3
Cafeteria Centrist
The Brits held out such a promise as part of Balfour et al during WWI and the immediate post-war years...
Trouble is, that promise had zero chance of materializing, due to the Arab Consent poison pill...
Something that Balfour was almost certainly aware of at the time he issued the proposal...
Something that the Jews of Palestine were almost certainly aware of at the time as well...
So... given that this was the best offer yet to surface in the matter... the Jews cherry-picked Balfour and viewed it as a promise and sublimated and set-aside the impractical and deal-breaking Arab Consent poison pill...
Hoping that they could hold the Brits to that promise and deal with the poison pill later, or just ignore it, most Palestinian Jewish folk and most of their political factions ended-up siding with the Brits during WWII and fought for the Brits both individually and in Jewish units, in the hopes that this loyalty to the Empire in wartime would be rewarded with the Empire's backing of the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, without the goddamned Poison Pill (Arab Consent) that would surely kill the deal otherwise...
The Brits cooled to the idea post-WWII, as it became clear to the Brits just how anxious and eager and impatient the Jews had become for independence, and as they re-thought the impact upon their relations with the Arab world, and as it became clear even to the worst dullards amongst the Brits that the Jews could not have their homeland unless they set aside the Poison Pill, and as the Brits began to hamstring the Jews so that they could not import arms and people to establish and defend themselves and as the Brits allowed their fellow Jews to continue rotting in D(isplaced) P(ersons) Camps in Europe and the Med...
After all that waiting (since WWI years) and after all that loyalty (fighting for the Brits in WWII, and, I believe, WWI, as well, on a lesser scale), the Jews finally got pissed-off at the Brits and the consensus for guerrilla warfare against the Brits began to broaden beyond the one or two factions in which it already had gained traction...
The loyalties and attitudes of the Jews changed quickly after WWII...
There is no inconsistency in any of this, if that's what you were hinting...
The Jews of Palestine might very well have been naive to hope-against-hope that they could convince the Brits to implement Balfour without the Arab Consent Poison Pill Deal-Breaker, but that seems to have been their hope, nevertheless...
A hope paid for by the Jewish blood and treasure and energy spent siding with the Brits during WWII.
From their perspective, by the end of the war, they figured that they had paid their dues, and, with the firm resolution of thousands of Jewish British Army veterans returning to their homes in Palestine, they decided the time was right to call-in the marker, and to call upon the marker-holder to set aside the Poison Pill in grateful recognition of their loyalty and efforts during WWII.
When the Brits balked, the Jews got pissed, and stayed pissed, and devoted more energy to working around the soon-to-be-departing Brits, rather than working with them.
One thing led to another, and they were soon killing each other on a part-time basis.
The Brits withdrew from Palestine before it could get too far out of hand.
It's not the way in which either the Brits or the Jews wanted that to play out, but... shit happens... situations change... the practical 'loyalty' of most Jewish factions in Palestine, in the period 1939-1945, was quickly replaced by the 'animosity' of 1946-1948.
Once the Brits made it clear that the Poison Pill would not be set aside, the Jews, fresh from losing 6,000,000 of their own in Europe, threw up their hands, said 'Fuck it', and decided to carve out their own destiny and to fight for a little corner of the world that their people could call their own.
At that point, they had very little choice, and they had very little to lose in trying to create a choice.
Hell, the story even has a Revolution Against the British Empire element to it...
Another of several reasons, perhaps, why that story resonates so well with The West, and especially in the US, who rumbled with the Brits twice themselves, and won, even though they were long-odds underdogs.
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