Palestine Royal Commission Report. Presented by the Secretary of State for the Colonies to Parliament by Command of His Majesty July 1937. [“The Peel Report.”]

The Royal Commission on Palestine under the chairmanship of Lord Peel was appointed by the British Government on August 7th, 1936, to study the underlying causes of the Arab riots in Palestine. In July 1937 the Commission presented its report recommending the partitioning of Palestine into a Jewish state, an Arab state, and a British mandatory enclave. The partition proposal of the Peel Commission was a revolutionary solution to the Palestine problem and a concept that dominated attempts for peace in the region culminating with the United Nations Partition Plan of 1947, the Arab rejection of which sparked the War of Independence in 1948. One notes with interest the Commission’s finding that “restrictions on Jewish immigration will not solve the Palestine problem. The National Home seems already too big to the Arabs [the Jewish population of Palestine numbered 400,000 persons in 1937], and, whatever its size, it bars the way to their attainment of national independence” (p. 13). Nonetheless, due to Arab pressure, the British subsequently adopted precisely this approach - a drastic reduction of Jewish immigration to Palestine, a policy laid out in the infamous White Paper of 1939.