The League of Nations' Response to
the 1929 Riots in Palestine 
By Eran Shlomi 

In early December 2023, Eli Cohen, Israel’s Foreign Minister, accused United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres of supporting Palestinian terror group Hamas, called for his resignation, and said his tenure as head of the international organization was “a danger to world peace.” This was a furious reaction to a letter Guterres had written pressing for an immediate ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas and his invocation of a rare clause in the UN charter to urge Security Council intervention. Cohen’s denunciation, like many statements made by Israeli officials disappointed with the international institution’s response to the October 7 th massacre, should be seen in the context of a decades-old Israeli narrative of the United Nations as biased against Israel.

As horrific details of the massacre became known to the public, many drew comparisons to the August 1929 riots in Palestine (Meora’ot Tarpat), when Arab mobs attacked unarmed Jews in the streets and in their homes. These attacks shocked Jews and non-Jews worldwide. Given this comparison, a question arises: How did the League of Nations, the UN’s predecessor, respond to the 1929 riots?

The World Zionist Organization-and primarily its president and top diplomat, Chaim Weizmann-had been lobbying the League from its inception in 1920. Since 1925, the WZO also held a permanent office in Geneva, the League’s seat, headed by another veteran Zionist diplomat, Victor Jacobson. Weizmann’s and Jacobson’s acumen and diplomatic skills were instrumental in creating a favorable reception for Zionism in the League, primarily among members of the Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC), the League’s supervising body of all mandates.

In June 1930, the PMC convened to discuss the riots in Palestine as well as British policy before, during, and after the riots. Shocked by the violence and influenced by the Zionist lobby, the PMC issued a harshly critical report about the British government’s endeavors to appease the Arabs of Palestine. Unsurprisingly, the PMC’s report enraged the British government, whose members bitterly criticized the Zionists for going “over their heads” to lobby the League and the PMC for cooperating with a third party against a mandatory power. Yet the report also helped the Zionists in
London in their campaign to avert proposed restrictions on Jewish immigration and land acquisition.

Ultimately, Zionist maneuvers in Geneva came at a price, straining the Anglo-Zionist alliance enshrined in the Balfour Declaration and the mandate. With the deterioration of this alliance in the 1930s, the Zionists looked more and more to Geneva, hoping to find an international buttress. However, the League (and the PMC) were losing influence and prestige during these years, as the world powers slid toward war. Although it aligned again with the Zionists, the PMC could not effectively oppose the May 1939 White Paper, which ended British support for a Jewish National Home. In hindsight, the Zionist triumph at the League of Nations in the early 1930s marks a high point of Jewish engagement in international institutions, perhaps not surpassed until 29 November 1947, when the Zionists won UN support for partition.

How does the UN’s position towards the terrorist massacre of October 7th differ from the position of the League of Nations towards the 1929 riots? The PMC’s favorable stance on Zionism was the fruit of the influential Zionist lobby of that time; however, that lobby could not have been so successful without the prior leanings of its members.

They noted that the text of the mandate included the Balfour Declaration, while the Arab population was not mentioned and hence lacked formal standing in the League. To them, the Zionist project accorded with the principle of self-determination and with the ideological framework of tutelage that the League undertook to protect. Indeed, they considered the Jews a diasporic and indigenous people whose claim to Palestine was no less, and perhaps more, valid than that of the local Arabs.

By contrast, the plight of Palestinian refugees since 1948 has given global currency to associations between Zionism and colonialism. Especially since the early 1960s, UN assemblies and committees, prompted by Arab-Muslim states, have linked Zionism with racism, apartheid, and colonialism. By and large, this approach continues to reign in the UN and accounts for its institutions’ critical stance towards Israel’s current war with Hamas.

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