Peel Commission

Peel Commission, group headed by Lord Robert Peel, appointed in 1936 by the British government to investigate the causes of unrest among Palestinian Arabs and Jews. In July 1937 the commission recommended the mandate be partitioned into an Arab state and a Jewish state, but the idea was ultimately rejected in 1938 as infeasible. The commission’s findings influenced UN Resolution 181 (1947), which likewise called for partition.

Discontent in Palestine intensified after 1920, when the Conference of San Remo awarded the British government a mandate to control Palestine. With its formal approval by the League of Nations in 1922, this mandate incorporated the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which provided for both the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine and the preservation of the civil and religious (but not the political or national) rights of non-Jewish Palestinian communities. Palestinian Arabs, desiring political autonomy and resenting the continued Jewish immigration into Palestine, disapproved of the mandate, and by 1936 their dissatisfaction had grown into open rebellion.

The Peel Commission published its report in July 1937. The report admitted that the mandate was unworkable because Jewish and Arab objectives in Palestine were incompatible, and it proposed that Palestine be partitioned into three zones: an Arab state, a Jewish state, and a neutral territory containing the holy places. Although the British government initially accepted these proposals, by 1938 it had recognized that such partitioning would be infeasible, and it ultimately rejected the commission’s report.