British Imperial Constitutional Law and the Zionist Campaign against the Legislative Council in Mandatory Palestine
Keywords:
constitutional, the Zionist campaign, introduce, Palestine, leadership, representativeAbstract
This article examines the role of British imperial constitutional law in the Zionist campaign against establishing a Legislative Council in Palestine during the early 1930s. At the time, the British government sought to introduce limited self-government in Palestine through a parliamentary institution that would include both locals and British officials. However, the Zionist leadership opposed this initiative, fearing that a representative institution reflecting the country’s demographics would threaten the development of the Jewish National Home. This article explores the Zionist engagement with the British imperial constitutional experience within its campaign against the Legislative Council, emphasizing the strategic application of British constitutional law by two Zionist officials, Leo Kohn and Chaim Arlosoroff. Through this case, the article highlights the influence of British constitutional law on interactions between national movements and the British Empire. It argues that the British imperial system offered an adaptable and flexible political framework. The Zionists’ attentiveness to this flexibility not only sheds light on the interplay between Zionism and the British Empire during the mandatory period but also underscores the place of constitutional flexibility in political debates within the British Empire.
References
1
“JTA Bulletin,” November 26, 1932, A18542, Central Zionist Archives (hereafter CZA).
2
Ibid.
3
Ephraim Salant, An Outline of the Constitutional Laws of the British Empire: With Appendices of Statutes (London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1934).
4
Shmuel Ussishkin, Praḳim ba-mishpaṭ ha-ḳonṭiṭutsioni ha-’angli [Writings on English Constitutional Law] (Jerusalem: Dfus ha-po’alim, 1927), 6.
5
Ḳore vatiḳ [“Experienced Reader”], “Bibliografia [Bibliography],” Ha’olam, December 30, 1927.
6
Shmuel Ussishkin, Shiṭot ha-shilṭon ba-ḳeisarut ha-briṭit [Methods of Governance in the British Empire] (Tel Aviv: Mizpeh, 1937), 5–6.
7
“Information Section,” November 11, 1932, A18542, CZA.
8
See his argument that once familiar with the British ‘way,’ the Jew “will not be talking of fifty-fifty representation in a legislative council” (“JTA Bulletin,” November 26, 1932, A18542, CZA).
9
For a non-exhaustive list, see: Norman Rose, The Gentile Zionists: A Study in Anglo-Zionist Diplomacy, 1929–1939 (London: F. Cass, 1973), 41–69; Yehoshua Porath, The Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement, 1918–1929 (London: F. Cass, 1974), 147–58; Yehoshua Porath, The Palestinian Arab National Movement: From Riots to Rebellion, 1929–1939 (London: F. Cass, 1977), 143–59; Neil Caplan, Palestine Jewry and the Arab Question, 1917–1925 (London: Frank Cass, 1978), 146–75; Bernard Wasserstein, The British in Palestine: The Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict 1917–1929 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978), 109–39. See also more recently: Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 359–73; Nimrod Lin, “People Who Count: Zionism, Demography and Democracy in Mandate Palestine” (Ph.D. Diss., University of Toronto, 2018); Yair Wallach and Julio Moreno Cirujano, “The Unbuilt Parliament: British Colonial Plans for a Legislative Assembly in Jerusalem,” Jerusalem Quarterly 92 (2022): 69–101.
10
Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960, Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 2. For a recent and compelling use of the term, see: Rotem Giladi, Jews, Sovereignty, and International Law: Ideology and Ambivalence in Early Israeli Legal Diplomacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
11
Arie M. Dubnov, “Notes on the Zionist Passage to India, or: The Analogical Imagination and Its Boundaries,” Journal of Israeli History 35, no. 2 (2016): 184.
12
Mordechai Naor and Dan Giladi, Erets yisrael ba-me’a ha-‘eśrim: Mi-yishuv le-medina, 1900–1950 [Eretz Israel in the Twentieth Century: From Yishuv to Statehood, 1900–1950], 2nd ed. (Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defence, 1991), 114.
13
Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Pedersen, The Guardians.
14
For example, the Zionist leadership simply forwarded a memorandum submitted to the Colonial Office, which stressed the lessons drawn from the British imperial experience, to the members of the Permanent Mandates Commission in Geneva. See: To Shertok, October 17, 1934, A223221, CZA.
15
On the ambivalent relationship between nationalism and the British Empire, see: Mantena Karuna, “Popular Sovereignty and Anti-Colonialism,” in Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective, ed. Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 297–319; Mrinalini Sinha, “Whatever Happened to the Third British Empire? Empire, Nation Redux,” in Writing Imperial Histories, ed. Andrew S. Thompson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 168–87.
16
John Darwin, “Britain’s Empires,” in The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives, ed. Sarah Stockwell (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 20.
17
Donal K. Coffey, “Constitutional Law and Empire in Interwar Britain: Universities, Liberty, Nationality and Parliamentary Supremacy,” Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly 71, no. 2 (2020): 193–209; Harshan Kumarasingham, “Constitution and Empire,” in The Cambridge Constitutional History of the United Kingdom, ed. Peter Cane and Harshan Kumarasingham, vol. 2: The Changing Constitution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 496–528; Dylan Lino, “Albert Venn Dicey and the Constitutional Theory of Empire,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 36, no. 4 (2016): 751–80.
18
J. M. Machover, Governing Palestine: The Case against a Parliament (London: P. S. King & Son, 1936).
19
Max Laserson, Ha-mandaṭ, ha-ḳonsṭiṭutsia ṿe-ha-mo‘atsa ha-meḥoḳeḳet [The Mandate, the Constitution, and the Legislative Council] (Tel Aviv: A. Y. Shtibel, 1936). On Laserson, and specifically this book, see: Assaf Likhovski, “The Many Exiles of Max Laserson,” Clio@Themis. Revue électronique d’histoire du droit 22 (2022): 1–22.
20
The very idea of the mandatory system was to train the nations “not yet able to stand by themselves” for self-government (“The Covenant of the League of Nations,” Avalon Project, accessed April 22, 2024, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/leagcov.asp, art. 22). Class-A Mandates, which covered areas previously under the control of the Ottoman Empire, were deemed more prepared for self-government than the Class-B and Class-C Mandates in Africa and the Pacific region. Thus, the mandatory powers in the Middle East were asked to act as trustees of these nations until they were ready to enact full self-government.
