PEEL COMMISSION

in full, Royal Commission Of Inquiry To Palestine, group headed by Lord Robert Peel, appointed in 1936 by the British government to investigate the causes of unrest among Palestinian Arabs and Jews. Discontent in Palestine dated back to 1920 when the British government was given a mandate to control Palestine; this mandate, intended to implement the Balfour Declaration of 1917, provided for both the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine and the preservation of the rights of non-Jewish Palestinian communities. Palestinian Arabs, desiring political autonomy and resenting the continued Jewish immigration into Palestine, disapproved the mandate, and by 1936 their dissatisfaction grew 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 recognized that such partitioning would be infeasible and ultimately rejected the commission's report.