Hand over the Reins: Britain’s Relinquishment of Dominance in the Palestine Issue

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-475-4_151How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Palestine; Britain; mandate; decline of power; process tracing

Abstract

The new round of Palestinian-Israeli conflict has lasted for nearly two years and has not yet completely subsided. The biased position of western countries led by the United States towards Israel remains the same. Britain, the former leader of Palestine, followed suit to the United States, which reflects the policy adjustments of Britain due to serious decline of its power after World War II. This paper employs the process tracing method to investigate the causal mechanisms underlying Britain’s decision to transfer the Palestine issue to the United Nations. The analysis reveals a strategic withdrawal driven by three key factors: a drastic post-war decline in national power, which strained its financial and military resources; the increasing financial and human costs of governing Palestine amidst escalating violence from both Jewish and Arab nationalist movements; and a fundamental shift in perception of decision makers from an imperial retentionist mindset to a pragmatic one of stop-loss. This reassessment was heavily influenced by the emergence of the Anglo-American relationship as the new crux of the Palestine problem, supplanting traditional imperial interests. With the backing of the US, the rising Jewish power and intensifying Arab-Jewish conflict, coupled with the pressures of the emerging Cold War, contributed to the final decision to relinquish the Mandate on Palestine. The power vacuum in Palestine created by Britain was later filled by the US, among which Britain could create another niche for its own interests in the whole Middle East. This study arrives at the conclusion that the relinquishment was not an isolated event, but an intricate consequence of Britain’s systemic paralysis and calculation across its resources, strategic priorities, and international standing, symbolizing a definitive moment in its post-war contraction.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Murong Rui
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/11/11
TI  - Hand over the Reins: Britain’s Relinquishment of Dominance in the Palestine Issue
BT  - Proceedings of the 2025 10th International Conference on Modern Management, Education and Social Sciences (MMET 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1400
EP  - 1415
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-475-4_151
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-475-4_151
ID  - Rui2025
ER  -