Mandatory Palestine

Mandatory Palestine[lower-alpha 1][2] was a geopolitical entity established between 1920 and 1948 in the region of Palestine under the terms of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine.

Palestine
1920–1948
Flag Public Seal
Mandatory Palestine in 1946
Status	Mandate of the United Kingdom
Capital	Jerusalem
Common languages	English, Arabic, Hebrew
Religion	Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Baháʼí Faith, Druze faith
High Commissioner
• 1920–1925 (first)	Sir Herbert L. Samuel
• 1945–1948 (last)	Sir Alan Cunningham
Legislature
• Parliamentary body of the Muslim Community	Supreme Muslim Council
• Parliamentary body of the Jewish Community	Assembly of Representatives
Historical era	Interwar period World War II Cold War
• Mandate assigned	25 April 1920
• Britain officially assumes control	29 September 1923
• Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel	14 May 1948
Area
• Total	25,585.3 km2 (9,878.5 sq mi)[1]
Currency	Egyptian pound (until 1927) Palestine pound (from 1927)
ISO 3166 code	PS
Preceded by Succeeded by Occupied Enemy Territory Administration Israel Jordanian annexation of the West Bank All-Palestine Protectorate
Today part of	Israel Palestine

During the First World War (1914–1918), an Arab uprising against Ottoman rule and the British Empire's Egyptian Expeditionary Force under General Edmund Allenby drove the Ottoman Turks out of the Levant during the Sinai and Palestine Campaign.[3] The United Kingdom had agreed in the McMahon–Hussein Correspondence that it would honour Arab independence if the Arabs revolted against the Ottoman Turks, but in the end, the United Kingdom and France divided the area under the Sykes–Picot Agreement — an act of betrayal in the eyes of the Arabs.

Further complicating the issue was the Balfour Declaration of 1917, promising British support for a Jewish "national home" in Palestine. At the war's end the British and French formed a joint "Occupied Enemy Territory Administration" in what had been Ottoman Syria. The British achieved legitimacy by obtaining a mandate from the League of Nations in June 1922. One objective of the League of Nations mandate system was to administer areas of the defunct Ottoman Empire "until such time as they are able to stand alone".[4]

During the Mandate, the area saw successive waves of Jewish immigration and the rise of nationalist movements in both the Jewish and Arab communities. Competing interests of the two populations led to the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine and the 1944–1948 Jewish insurgency in Mandatory Palestine. The United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine to divide the territory into two Arab and Jewish states was passed in November 1947. The 1947–1949 Palestine war ended with the territory of Mandatory Palestine divided among the State of Israel, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which annexed territory on the West Bank of the Jordan River, and the Kingdom of Egypt, which established the "All-Palestine Protectorate" in the Gaza Strip.