British Mandate Palestine

British civil administration replaced the post-war military occupation of Palestine in 1920, and the League of Nations mandate later formalised British rule. The mandate incorporated Britain’s commitment to support a Jewish national home while also requiring protection of the rights of the country’s existing population, creating obligations that proved politically incompatible in practice.

Palestinian Arab society developed newspapers, political organisations, unions, schools and forms of resistance as Jewish immigration, land purchase and separate national institutions expanded. British policing, detention and emergency legislation became central features of government, while Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa and rural districts experienced the period in sharply different ways.

This context supports fiction about colonial administration, village life, landholding, migration, nationalism and the growing conflict that preceded 1948. It is the parent setting for the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt in Palestine and for the middle portion of Ibrahim Nasrallah’s Time of White Horses.