Earlier this month, a succession of countries formally recognised a Palestinian state. Among them was the UK – the country that, in its imperial heyday, was responsible for the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine. Speaking on 21 September, the British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, declared that recognition was necessary ‘to revive the hope of peace and a Two State solution’. Criticisms of the prime minister’s gamble abound: some accuse him of indulging in hollow gesture politics; others censure him for caving in to Islamist pressure at home and rewarding Hamas for the terror of 7 October. Whatever the truth of the matter, it was a moment rich in symbolic significance, even if it will do little to change the situation on the ground.

This wasn’t the first time that a British government has sought to radically alter its approach to Palestine. In 1939, a coalition led by Neville Chamberlain undertook what was arguably an even more fundamental reappraisal of British policy. In an explosive White Paper, issued in May 1939, the British government made an extraordinary offer to the Palestinian Arab leadership: Britain would recognise an independent, Arab-majority Palestinian state within 10 years. For Palestine’s Jews – the Yishuv – it was seen as a betrayal of the Balfour Declaration, with its pledge to facilitate ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. But for Palestine’s Arabs, it was a spectacular deal – surely one that was too good to turn down.

The past is filled with ‘turning points’ at which history fails to turn, to coin a phrase from the great AJP Taylor. This was one such occasion: unsurprisingly, the leaders of Palestine’s Jewish community rejected the proposals of the 1939 White Paper; more surprisingly, so did the Arab leadership. Had the Arabs consented to the White Paper, it might have changed the entire history of the modern Middle East. Explaining why they did not seize the moment requires diving headlong into Britain’s Palestine quagmire – an imperial conundrum that by 1939 was in desperate need of a solution.

Britain’s problems in Palestine began with the contradictory and irreconcilable commitments made in the 1917 Balfour Declaration itself. After stating Britain’s intention to favour a Jewish national home, the declaration went on to announce that ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’. These ‘communities’ (they were not deemed by the British to be a ‘nation’) included the 600,000-strong Arab majority, who then formed 90 per cent of the population of the territories that would be included in future mandatory Palestine. These contradictory commitments to the interests of different peoples were then embedded into the 1922 text of the Palestine Mandate issued by the League of Nations.

The conflicting elements of the 1917 declaration stemmed from a divergence of views within the Cabinet in Westminster. Arthur Balfour, the foreign secretary and author of the eponymous declaration, believed that a pro-Zionist policy would help Britain to court support among Jews worldwide. He assumed (wrongly) that they wielded an important influence over policymaking in the United States and Revolutionary Russia.

Thereafter, Balfour and others thought that a Jewish community in Palestine, protected by British power, would provide a useful client population, a vital strategic buffer for Britain’s interests across the Sinai Desert in Egypt. In one of his last memoranda as foreign secretary, delivered in August 1919, he had expressed this in a typically cavalier manner: ‘Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.’

In expressing this view, Balfour clashed with George Nathaniel Curzon, a Tory grandee and former viceroy of India, who was then serving as Lord President of the Council. Lord Curzon worried about the declaration’s potential to enrage Arab popular opinion in the Middle East and Muslim subjects in the British Raj. He warned the Cabinet that ‘Syrian Arabs’ had ‘occupied [Palestine] for the best part of 1,500 years’: ‘They will not be content either to be expropriated for Jewish immigrants or to act merely as hewers of wood and drawers of water to the latter’. It was on Curzon’s insistence that the qualification covering ‘non-Jewish communities’ had been inserted into the final draft of the Balfour Declaration.

Curzon’s reservations were prescient; Palestine’s Arabs launched anti-Jewish riots in 1920, 1921 and 1929, leading to waves of attacks and reprisals between Arabs and Jews in the Holy Land. As time progressed, the demands of Palestine’s Arab leaders, echoed by nationalist ideologues in the Mandate’s Arabic-language press, began to coalesce around three core demands: halting all Jewish immigration; an end to Zionist land purchases; and the recognition of an Arab-majority state in Palestine.

These demands were expressed more forcefully just as the Nazis’ rise to power in Germany caused Jews to flee to the Mandate in ever greater numbers. Between 1918 and 1936, the Jewish population of Palestine increased from nine per cent to 28 per cent of the total.

Matters came to a head in the mid-1930s when the Palestinian Arabs rose in revolt. What started with the murder of two Jews by an armed Arab band in April 1936 ultimately erupted into a violent insurgency against both the Yishuv and the British authorities. The ensuing uprising – known as the Great Revolt – would rage for the best part of three years. It witnessed the first sustained, coordinated efforts to use armed struggle to advance the Arab cause, as rebel fighters calling themselves mujahideen (holy warriors) and thuwwar (revolutionaries) attempted to defeat the British and Zionists by force of arms.

The revolt reached a dramatic climax following the announcement in July 1937 of a proposal to partition the Palestine Mandate between Arabs and Jews – the first iteration of a two-state solution. During the revolt’s bloodiest year in 1938, the fighting claimed the lives of 69 Britons, 292 Jews, 486 Arab civilians, and 1,000 Arab militants. In the end, it required a British troop surge, deploying some brutal counterinsurgency methods that had been honed in Ireland, to repress the uprising and restore order.

By the time that the Mandate had been brought back under control, the British were desperate to escape from their Palestinian quagmire. During the 1930s, the rise of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy had changed the geopolitical equation. The Italian conquest of Abyssinia of 1935-37 posed a serious threat to Sudan, the soft underbelly of British Egypt. Confronted by these Axis powers’ expansionist designs, an overriding concern of Chamberlain was to placate popular opinion in the Arab states and among Indian Muslims in preparation for a coming total war.

The looming clouds of war provided the backdrop to the 1939 White Paper. The paper rejected the idea of partition off the bat. Instead, it proposed to limit Jewish immigration to 75,000 over the next five years and placed tight restrictions on land purchases; any further immigration figures would then be subject to Arab consent. Crucially, Britain promised to recognise an independent, sovereign Palestinian state with representative institutions within ten years.

An indication of just how great a sea-change had taken place in British policy is provided by the text of the White Paper itself. It stated:

His Majesty’s Government believe that the framers of the Mandate in which the Balfour Declaration was embodied could not have intended that Palestine should be converted into a Jewish State against the will of the Arab population of the country… His Majesty’s Government therefore now declare unequivocally that it is not part of their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish State. They would regard it as contrary to their obligations to the Arabs under the Mandate… that the Arab population of Palestine should be made the subjects of a Jewish State against their will.

Critics of the White Paper condemned it as a shocking betrayal of the Zionist cause, and a dangerous reward for terror. In the House of Commons, Winston Churchill – the leading critic of Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in Europe – denounced the White Paper as ‘another Munich’. Others saw it as a craven surrender to Arab violence. For Jews around the world, it was a sickening blow at a time when many were trying to escape intensifying persecution in Europe.

Palestine’s Arabs were euphoric. Two decades after the Balfour Declaration, they appeared to have struck a decisive blow against their Zionist foes. Hilda Mary Wilson, who was working at an Arab school in Birzeit at the time, wrote that: ‘The average Arab one spoke to was triumphant, regarding the White Paper as a concession won by Arab arms.’ This, at long last, was their chance to capitalise on Britain’s volte face and press home their demands.

It was not to be. Some accounts suggest that a majority of the Arab Higher Committee – the body set up in 1936 to rival the Zionists’ Jewish Agency – had approved the White Paper. Yet any agreement was ultimately scuppered when the committee’s president, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammed Haj Amin al-Husseini, rejected all compromise, refusing to accept anything less than complete independence.

The Mufti’s rejection of the White Paper seems surprising: not only had he been appointed to his position with British approval in 1921; before the Great Revolt he had worked consistently to keep a lid on Arab nationalist opposition to British rule. His biographer, Philip Mattar, wrote that the Mufti’s decision was ‘short-sighted and irresponsible’ and ‘clearly indicated that he was putting personal considerations and his idealism above practical politics’.

The Mufti was probably motivated by a mixture of principle and self-preservation. He may have feared that the British would end up ensnaring him with a treaty designed to serve Britain’s imperial interests – as they had done with Iraq in 1930 and Egypt in 1936. It also seems that he had been radicalised by the Great Revolt and sensed the future direction of Arab politics. Across several Arab states in the 1930s, including Egypt and Iraq, political momentum began to shift towards those calling for more militant action to oust colonial regimes. In Palestine, Amin al-Husseini found himself beholden to an uncompromising alliance of militant mujahideen and radical nationalists. Rather than try to talk the British out of the country, and risk being condemned as a collaborator, the Mufti opted to ride the tiger of Arab nationalism; embracing this path would lead him to play a key role in a pro-Axis nationalist coup against the British in Iraq during the Second World War.

Historians disagree over the extent to which the 1939 White Paper was a missed opportunity for the Palestinians. There were no ideal options for them in 1939, just as there would not be in subsequent negotiations. Yet it is difficult to avoid the conclusion of Palestinian historian Yezid Sayigh, that ‘the Palestinians had, through their own reactions, lost the opportunity to enter into the mandatory administration at higher levels and prepare for their own postcolonial state’. From the Palestinians’ point of view, a chance had gone begging in 1939 – and would not come around again. In 1948, the British would be gone, compelled to withdraw from the ungovernable quagmire they had created.

Time and time again, the Palestinians and their cause have been blighted by poor – and often self-defeating – leaders. As the Israeli diplomat Abba Eban remarked, generations of Palestinian politicians have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

The story of the Palestine Mandate is a timeless cautionary tale about the dangers of ill-considered interventionism. In the end, the British came unstuck in Palestine because they ran roughshod over the wishes of those whom they sought to govern, and then because their counterinsurgency campaigns only served to further radicalise the Arab cause. By the time of the 1939 White Paper, they had already irrevocably transformed the demography and political geography of the Mandate, which only made the task of ensuring peace between Palestine’s competing national movements immeasurably harder. Having failed to placate the Arabs, the White Paper then sowed the seeds of the Jewish insurgency that would force Britain out of Palestine altogether.

The failure of the 1939 White Paper also provides lessons for the United States as it seeks to bring peace to Gaza. President Trump, in alliance with former British prime minister Tony Blair, has pledged to reform and rebuild the Gaza Strip under the auspices of a ‘Board of Peace’ and an International Stabilisation Force. Yet so much hangs on whether Hamas and its most ardent supporters can be demobilised, disarmed and de-radicalised. This would not be a straightforward task under any circumstances, let alone after almost two years of brutal conflict. So long as the most militant wing of Hamas holds the upper hand and continues to call the shots, Trump’s 20-point peace plan may well go the way of the 1939 White Paper.