Following World War I, Palestinians organized politically in resistance to both British rule and the implantation of the Zionist movement as the British partner. Petitioning the British, the Paris Peace Conference, and the newly formed League of Nations were among the Palestinian efforts. Their most prominent effort was a series of seven Palestine Arab congresses organized from 1919 to 1928 by a countrywide network of Muslim-Christian societies. These congresses advanced a consistent set of demands, including recognition of Arab Palestine as an independent state, rejection of the Balfour Declaration, support for majority rule, and an end to unrestricted Jewish immigration and land purchases. The congresses formed an Arab executive that met with British officials in Jerusalem and London on numerous occasions, though with no success. It was a dialogue of the deaf.The British refused to recognize the congresses’ or their leaders’ representative authority and insisted on Arab acceptance of the Balfour Declaration and the terms of the subsequent Mandate, the antithesis of every substantive Arab demand, as a precondition for discussion. For over a decade and a half, the Palestinian leadership pursued this fruitless legalistic strategy.
In contrast to these elite-led initiatives, popular discontent with British support for Zionist aspirations erupted into demonstrations, strikes, and riots, with violence erupting particularly in 1920, 1921, and 1929, each episode becoming more intense than the previous one. In each case, these were spontaneous eruptions, frequently sparked by Zionist groups flexing their muscles, just as of what occurred in the 1929 disturbance.
In 1928, the Palestinian leadership agreed to allow Jewish settlers equal representation in the state’s future bodies, despite the wishes of the overwhelming majority of their people. The Zionist leadership supported the idea only as long as it anticipated Palestinian rejection. Shared representation contradicted everything Zionism stood for. As a result, when the Palestinian party accepted the proposal, the Zionists rejected it.
In 1929, Several hundred Zionists marched to the Al-buraq/Western wall, shouting “the Wall is ours,” and raising their flags.The group was led by Jeremiah Halpern and included members of Vladimir Jabotinsky’s revisionist Zionist movement, Betar youth organization. This precipitated the 1929 Palestinian revolt, which reached the Jews in Hebron. The flag-waving demonstration by rowdy Zionist Revisionist extremists at the adjacent Western Wall set off days of violence all over the country with hundreds of casualties on each side. However, there were other reasons for the wave of violence, the most severe since the Mandate’s inception was the dispossession of Palestinian tenants from land purchased by the Jewish National Fund from absentee landlords and local notables. The tenants had lived on the land for centuries, but were now thrown in slums in the towns. (Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, pp. 31-32.)
The events were not isolated to the few gory days of August 1929, nor were they merely the result of contention over a holy site, as important as that contention may have been. They were the product of deep-seated frustration and fear regarding the long-term effects of Zionist colonization in Palestine and the future intentions of the British Mandate authorities, reverberated throughout the country, and ushered in a new phase in the Mandate over Palestine. While their precipitating cause was a dramatic and deliberately provocative Zionist demonstration, which began at the wall and proceeded through the streets of Jerusalem, the immediate Palestinian reaction quickly evolved into a revolt that signaled a sea change in popular Palestinian politics.