The Palestinians tried starting from the 1920s to gain independence. They proposed a constitution that was secular giving all confessions equal rights. The British refused because their goal was to implement Jew rule over non-Jews, in contravention of the Covenant of the League of Nations, the terms of the Mandate and the Charter of the United Nations. They more or less said so in their final letter to the UN regarding Palestine.
UNITED
NATIONS
A
A/AC.14/8
2 October 1947
ORIGINAL: ENGLISH
AD HOC COMMITTEE ON THE PALESTINIAN QUESTION
COMMUNICATION FROM THE UNITED KINGDOM DELEGATION TO
THE UNITED NATIONS
The following letter has been received from the United Kingdom Delegation to the United Nations:
United Kingdom Delegation to the
United Nations, New York
18 August 1947
Sir:
I have the honour to forward to Your Excellency herewith a memorandum by His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom entitled "Political History of Palestine under British Administration".
This memorandum constitutes His Majesty's Government's account of their administration of the league of Nations mandate in Palestine, and is sent to you in accordance with the undertaking given in my note of 2nd April, in which I had the honour to request that the problem of Palestine should be placed on the Agenda of the General Assembly at its next regular session. I shall be grateful, therefore, if you will arrange for this document to be issued as an Assembly document in connexion with Item 21 of the Provisional Agenda of the Second Regular Session of the General Assembly, which was circulated on the 18th July last.
I should call your attention to the fact that this memorandum has already been made available to the Special Committee on Palestine established by the Special Session of the General Assembly called at the request of the United Kingdom Government and which met on April 28th last. His Majesty's Government thought it advisable that the memorandum be communicated to the Special Committee since, as I had the honour to inform the Special Assembly, my Government wished to be entirely at the disposal of the Committee and to give it all the information that it might require.
...............12. Foremost among the exponents of Zionism at that time was Dr. Weizmann. When a Zionist delegation appeared at the Peace Conference in 1919, the American Secretary of State (Mr. Lansing) asked them exactly what was meant by the phrase, a Jewish national home. Dr. Weizmann answered him as follows:-
“The Zionist organization did not want an autonomous Jewish Government, but merely to establish in Palestine, under a mandatory Power, an administration not necessarily Jewish, which would render it possible to send into Palestine 70 to 80,000 Jews annually. The Zionist Association would require to have permission at the same time to build Jewish schools, where Hebrew would be taught, and in that was to build up gradually a nationality which would be as Jewish as the French nation was French and the British nation British. Later on, when the Jews formed the large majority, they would be ripe to establish such a Government as would answer to the state of the development of the country and to their ideals.”13. The King-Crane Commission, touring Palestine later in the same years, found that the Jewish colonists were similarly looking to a radical transformation of the country:
“The fact came out repeatedly in the Commission’s conference with Jewish representatives, that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine....."