Chapter CLXVI: Peeling a Tricky Jaffa.
In this chapter we turn our attention to a land rocked by a bitter sectarian conflict between two implacably opposed groups who, despite a considerable shared heritage and sharing many common beliefs, were widely believed incapable of reaching lasting agreement. We are, of course, talking about the dispute between the Foreign and Colonial Offices about British policy in Mandatory Palestine. The first obvious question is why the Foreign Office was even involved in the matter, a clue to the answer can be found in the name of the territory; Mandatory. Palestine was legally a League of Nations mandate and thus subject to a large number of requirements ranging from the vague and aspirational to the concrete and keenly monitored. To be specific it was a Class A mandate and so the initial view of the League of Nations was that it was ready for internal self government with some lingering British protection and support. This was broadly the relationship Britain had with the Trucial States and other British Protectorates in the region, therefore the mandate was initially put under the control of the Foreign Office as they generally were responsible for such states. It rapidly became apparent that the League Council's official view bore little resemblance to the reality of the situation; the regular mass rioting and the refusal of the Jewish and Arab groups to agree even to regular talks, let alone what form self governance should take, were just the most obvious problems. As government realised that Palestine would be a longer term commitment the mandate was moved across to the Colonial Office, against the wishes of said office who correctly foresaw that it would be an expensive and bloody endeavour which would never repay the costs incurred. Given the League connection the Foreign Office would remain involved to ensure the League commitments were met and to handle the international aspects of the Mandate. The balance of power between the two Offices would vary with the situation on the ground, not the ground in the Mandate of course but in Geneva; when the League was flying high and the British government was concerned with mutual security and international opinion the Foreign Office had greater influence, but as the League's influence and reputation waned so did concern with meeting the full letter and spirit of the Mandate. Beneath the Whitehall power plays and disagreements on the correct interpretation of the Mandate there was a serious policy difference.
The Foreign Office was mostly concerned with just getting out, the Class A Mandates were explicitly temporary and both Iraq and the Trans-Jordan had been shepherded though from being a Mandate to their semi-independent status; the Foreign Office aim therefore was to reach any sort of agreement that would allow Palestine to be granted the same status, at which point it's internal problems were no longer a British responsibility or concern. As noted the Colonial Office agreed about the extent of the problem, they even grudgingly accepted the League requirements, they just could not see how the region would be anywhere close to ready for self government in any plausible time scheme. The political problems were immense, but were matched by the practical ones; the annual deficits of the region were considerable even before allowing for security costs, a considerable ongoing subsidy would be required much as was granted to the Protectorate of the Trans-Jordan. The Colonial Office therefore adopted an approach of stability through prosperity, aiming to expand the local economy as fast as practical on the basis that a richer state would be able to afford the needed investments and that richer locals would be happier locals. A stronger economy also offered the possibility to reduce the value of the required British subsidy, an approach which ensured Treasury support, and could be sold to the League as making any future state more viable. The push for growth part of the plan worked well, the economy more than tripled in size and GDP per capita well over doubled, however this growth was very unevenly spread and had entirely failed to bring about the promised stability. The rehabilitation of the League after the Abyssinian War was the justification for the Foreign Office to mount another effort to change policy and push the Mandate towards independence. To the surprise of both Offices the situation in the Mandate had somewhat improved since the last time they had debated the matter, but this was not due to any British policy or the initiative of any local faction. The changes were instead due to the efforts of Mussolini and Marshal Rydz-Śmigły, though not in the way either had hoped or intended.
A reclamation pump dredger at work in Haifa harbour in 1931, deepening a channel to allow a new wall to be built and expelling the excavated material to the left to build up new land. These dredging contracts proved contentious as the terms of the League of Nations mandate required no discrimination against League member companies with regards to contracts, which very much went against the British government's preference to give the contracts to British, or at least Empire, firms. Indeed even American firms, despite not being in the League, tried to argue they should also get contracts on the same basis and got the US government to bombard their British counterparts with complaints. In the end the bulk of the work did go to British firms but one Dutch firm was given a smaller contract. It is interesting to note that no complaints about British actions with respect to the non-commercial Articles of the mandate were raised.
Mussolini had long realised the value of propaganda and initially Italian overseas influence had concentrated on North Africa, the British being particularly concerned about efforts in Egypt. This changed in 1934 with the establishment of Radio Bari, an Arabic language propaganda station based in southern Italy that broadcast across not only North Africa but also into the Middle East. After some initial fumbles it switched from being pro-Fascist and pro-Italian to being anti-French and heavily anti-British. This reflected the practical limits of radio propaganda, given Italian actions during the 'pacification' of Libya making anyone in the region love Italian Fascism was all but impossible, but also the changing direction of Italian foreign policy in the run up to the Abyssinian War as Mussolini looked for future expansion and conquest. Having the local Arab population on side, or at the very least not on the side of the British or French, could potentially offset Italian military and strategic weaknesses, not that anyone expressed the policy in those terms to Il Duce. Italian efforts in Palestine soon progressed to the financial and SIM (Servizio Informazioni Militare, Military Information Service) agents made contact with a number of key Arab figures in the Mandate willing to overlook their distaste for Italian activities in exchange for hard cash; the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini and Musa Alami, the chief Arab Affairs advisor to the British High Commissioner for Palestine, were both on the Italian payroll by 1935 along with a multitude of others. The fateful next step would be arms and further funds to 'encourage' (bribe) the Bedouin Tribes of the Trans-Jordan to form the basis of a revolt that would spread to Palestine. How successful this plan would have been is hard to say, because likes so much of the Italian state the outbreak of the Abyssinian War came as an unpleasantly early surprise to SIM. The resultant hurried operation failed to deliver a significant amount of arms to the Mandate but that was still sufficient for a brief but bloody terrorist campaign as the Grand Mufti encouraged his supporters to take advantage of the war to kick the British out of Palestine. While such a campaign could have potentially overwhelmed the Palestine Police, due to the war the garrison would be significantly expanded to protect the ports and oil pipeline terminals, this along with the cutting of the supply lines meant the 'great revolt' fizzled out even before the war ended. The mains success of the operation was in handing mountains of damning evidence to the British authorities about the extent of Italian operations and the identity of their collaborators in the Mandate. Traditionally the sentence for being excessively aggravating to the colonial authorities in the Middle East was exile, in serious cases to as far as the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean, on the theory that such a sentence removed the figure from the situation while denying their cause a martyr as they were still alive. The Italian affair had gone far beyond that, given the Empire had been at war the attempted revolt and collaboration was within the realms of high treason with all that followed. While the High Commissioner declined to pursue the death penalty, in line with their long standing policy of trying to avoid making martyrs, there was a very public trial of the ring leaders including the Grand Mufti and the headmen of the Husseini clan. While the Arab public was not especially bothered about treason against the British authorities, the revelations about the collaboration with the Italians, and the fact that the planned 'great revolt' had so publicly failed, meant protests were limited and the wider faction discredited. Leadership of the Palestinian Arab cause therefore fell to the Nashashibi clan who, while far from pro-British, were at least prepared to talk to their Jewish opposite numbers and work with the British authorities towards independence, provided those authorities worked fast enough.
An interesting coda to the Italian Affair was the investigation into the mechanics of the abortive arms smuggling, it was easy for Mussolini to say he intended to arm the Grand Mufti's allies and ship weapons to the Bedouin but far harder to make it happen. While a number of blockade runners did make runs from the Italian Dodecanese Islands to the Palestinian coast these were intercepted by the Royal Navy or aborted due to lack of a safe docking site. The bulk of the effort was therefore via Italian East Africa, short hops across the Red Sea into Saudi, up to the border and then across the corner of the Transjordan and into Palestine. While the Royal Navy's surge into the Red Sea would eventually cut the naval part of the path, enough shipments evaded the desert patrols along the border to get some weapons into the Mandate. While never used in anger, unless one counts their use as particularly damning prosecution evidence in the trials, they did still concern the British authorities in the region. The Bedouin tribes had proven reassuringly loyal, not perhaps to Britain but to the Emirate of the Transjordan and as the Emir was loyal this was close enough, so the concern was about the Saudi involvement. It remains unclear how much the King of Saudi Arabia actually knew about the affair, certainly the Italians believed they had royal approval and the inaction of the various patrols and defence forces who could have stopped the shipment does support this. King Saud however professed ignorance and claimed that had he known he would, of course, have made sure the British had been informed and deployed his own forces to assist. Lacking any hard evidence the British decided not to push the matter however London formed the view that even if the King and his advisors had somehow been entirely ignorant, this suggested a deeply worrying lack of competence and control over their own state apparatus. This range of views, that the Saudi regime was either unreliable or incompetent, formed the backdrop to the decisive and blunt intervention in Saudi internal politics discussed in Chapter LVI. Caught between the revived ambitions of the India Office and the consequences of it's involvement in the Italian Affair, the House of Saud would see itself brought firmly back into the Imperial fold.
The camel mounted troops of the Desert Force of the Arab Legion, the main military force of the Emirate of the Transjordan and an 'Imperial Service' unit which meant they had signed up to serve anywhere within the Empire, though in practice that meant anywhere in the Middle East. While the activities of Lawrence of Arabia and the Palestinian Arab Fasail al-Salam (Peace Bands) would attract most of the press and popular attention, it was the experienced and professional Al-Badia (Desert Force) under John "Glubb" Pasha that did most of the real work in protecting the IPC oil pipelines and patrolling the borders with Saudi Arabia. The Desert Force, and the wider Arab Legion, would attract considerable interest in London as the British government looked for ways to secure the region without committing to a permanent garrison of British regulars.
Turning to the second of the figures named previously we find Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły, the de facto dictator of Poland though the situation was far messier than that. In any event while Polish colonial ambitions in the period were not limited by hidebound concerns about practicality or possibility, embracing as they did schemes for Polish colonies everywhere from West Africa to the Far East, the Polish government was not interested in claims or concessions in the region. It was an even darker drive that motivated their actions, in a stark change from the state nationalism of Marshall Piłsudski his successors had instead embraced ethnic nationalism. Fortunately we can spare ourselves the unpleasant details of this particular euphemism as it is sufficient to know that due to this policy the Polish government had become very keen on increasing Jewish migration out of Poland without being especially concerned where to or if the people in question wanted to leave. Setting aside moral or ethical issues the main practical concern was where these migrants would move to, many nations refused to accept Jewish immigration and even those that did required new immigrants to prove they could support themselves, a significant barrier given the relative poverty of the people Poland was trying to push out. This led to the slightly unusual looking position of an anti-Semitic Polish government becoming a firm support of full throated Zionism, on the basis that they could then ship out their own Jewish population to this new Jewish State. The plan soon expanded beyond speeches and appeals to the League of Nations as the Polish government began funding and arming various extremist groups within the Mandate, with the hope of increasing the pressure on the British to allow a Jewish state to form. The British were aware that groups like the Haganah (The Defense, a Jewish paramilitary organisation) were attempting to import arms from a variety of sources not just Poland, but as with Arab gun running efforts they had been reluctant to provoke another cycle of riots by cracking down too hard. The outbreak of the Abyssinian War turned the matter from a concern to a threat, so a round of raids were launched by the British authorities and the majority of the caches found along with much of the membership arrested. In general this was less serious than the Italian Affair as Britain was not at war with Poland or the other suppliers and most of the Haganah members pleaded the caches were for 'defence' and protecting their communities, which was perhaps true but still very illegal. The exception was the more extremist Irgun (National Military Organisation) group who boasted about their participation in 'active defence' of their communities, which amounted to tit-for-tat retaliation attacks on random Arabs civilians and Mandate officials. It has been cynically suggested that the seriousness of this was somewhat overstated by the High Commission and Mandatory authorities, it did allow them to put a group of Jews through a high profile treason trial and so look more 'balanced' to the local population rather than giving a gentler treatment to one side. This certainly was a benefit but the more robust counter-argument is that carrying out terrorist attacks during a time of war was always going to attract a serious response from the authorities, if only because every soldier having to police and garrison the mandate couldn't be sent to the front lines. In any event the evidence was overwhelming and those involved were found guilty, thoroughly gutting the leadership of the para-military arms of the Jewish Agency in Palestine and providing the information for another round of raids on the caches that had been missed the first time. The trial verdicts did not increase the splits in the Zionist community, but only because almost all of those who had argued for 'active defence' over restraint were dead, in prison or in exile, leaving the restraint and co-operation group in charge by default.
As the dust settled after the Treaty of Valletta the authorities in the Mandate carried out their own informal review of the events and almost no-one came out of it well. The High Commissioner's Office had selected al-Husseini as Grand Mufti, failed to notice how many of it's staff were on the Italian payroll and had been surprised by the attempted revolt, the decision not to crack down on the weapons smuggling by both sides also looked ill-judged in hindsight. The Colonial Office was both responsible for the failures of the High Commissioner and for the overarching policy of prioritising economic growth which had clearly failed to bring any security while further dividing the two communities. On the military side the RAF, who had been the only British military presence in the region prior to the war, were forced to concede there were some limits to the effectiveness of aerial policing, as a result the Air Staff would put extra effort into modernising the RAF armoured car companies, putting them into competition with the Army's ongoing armoured car procurement efforts. The Army itself had a mixed experience, on the positive side the various Arab and Bedouin desert forces all performed well and 'Lawrence of Arabia' had been back in his elements leading patrols along the border which had brought a great deal of good publicity, and so political credit, to the Army. The negative entry in the ledger was the abortive Jewish Settlement Police, an effort to mobilise Jewish citizens of Palestine into trained units that could protect settlements and eventually take over some counter-insurgency dutie much as the Arab auxiliary units had. The JSP spectacularly collapsed when it emerged that many of the volunteers were linked to the Haganah or Irgun, who's leadership had seen the scheme as a way to get free training and further arming of their members, indeed several of the men identified as potential leaders would be arrested and convicted as part of the trials. Scarred by the debacle the Army command abandoned any future efforts and limited itself to assisting the Palestine Police in reviewing (and disarming where necessary) it's own volunteer auxiliary units. The Foreign Office could not escape censure either as they had failed to keep a proper eye on affairs in Saudi and had argued that Radio Bari was just propaganda and there were no serious Italian plans to threaten the region or incite revolt, a prediction the India Office in particular enjoyed repeating back to them. This neatly leads to one of the few unambiguous 'winners', the India Office had fairly clean hands over any of the mistakes and had warned against the mistakes of others in good time. As the presence of their Western Affairs Bureau in the region was still controversial, indeed as Aden would be detached from the Raj in the spring of 1937 they arguably had less reason than ever for their presence, a track record of being right was exceptionally useful to justify the continued existence of the Bureau to cabinet. Cabinet themselves were increasingly coming around to the view that the Foreign Office has been correct and they should start making progress towards self governance in the Mandate and reduce British involvement in the whole matter. As we have seen neither the High Commision nor the Foreign or Colonial Offices were in a position to inspire confidence they could execute such a plan, while letting the India Office dictate policy in the region was still a step too far. The approved Whitehall solution was therefore a Royal Commission, which was duly established under the safe pair of hands Lord Peel.
A Short Scion II in the livery of Palestine Airways, the Pobjoy Niagara engines had a distinctive above-centre propshaft resulting in the distinctive very high propeller. The Scion was a popular aircraft for smaller airlines and was operated by firms from Aden to Australia, including the intriguingly named Elder Colonial Airways in Sierra Leone. The Hebrew underneath the English name translates as Land of Israel Airways, a not particularly subtle clue as to the founder's long term plans of the airline. Having received support and investment from Imperial Airways under the previous growth focused policy the Mandatory authorities were forced to consider how the airline should operate when nation building became the main concern. Palestine Airlines would not be the only firm affected, but it would be one of the more high profile.
British Imperial Policy had two main tools for dealing with colonial issues; partition and federation, either dividing areas up to stop groups fighting or smashing them together to make a more sustainable state. Neither was appropriate everywhere and both had been mistakenly employed in the past, but if one accepted that a unitary state was not working and could not work, and almost every in the Mandate did, then one or both of those solutions would be required. The Peel Commission initially leaned towards partition, on the basis that the Arab and Jewish communities had different aspirations, goals, and national ideals. They were also concerned that both communities were more loyal to their own race/religion/group than any notional Palestinian government, which would cause serious issues for any future state. A number of practical difficulties soon arose around the financial subsidy required by the notional Arab state, the holy sites and the need or not for 'population transfer' to avoid either state having a sizeable minority that would provoke later conflict. The main problem however was that both sides utterly hated the idea, not in the 'if both side dislike it then it must be balanced' sense but to the point of even the moderate groups refusing to discuss the plan and threatening to boycott the entire process. This left Federation which solved a number of these issues but introduced new ones, though it was hoped not insurmountable ones. Broadly speaking the plan was for the states of the new federation to have considerable powers on key matters like land sale and transfers, matters of enormous concern to both groups, while the federal government guaranteed the rights of citizens in all states (so avoiding the need for population transfer) and had a generous budget to allow transfer between the richer and poorer areas. A federal structure also allowed the holy sites around Jerusalem and other contentious areas to be carved out as territories that belonged to the federal government not either of the new states, the Shanghai Settlement or Tangier International Zone model of government was tentatively suggested for these territories. The commission argued the plan met the strict wording of the Balfour declaration as the Jewish state would be a 'national home' even if it was not an independent country, while the entire area would stay intact and still be called Palestine as nod to Arab priorities. Naturally all of this was roundly condemned, but crucially not as vitriolically as the partition plan and both sides focused on the many changes that would be needed before they could consider it rather than ruling it out completely, which was as near as the region got to enthusiastic acceptance. The key reasons behind this response was that both sides believed that the plan was just a first step towards their desired outcome and that time was on their side, to a considerable extent the British encouraged this thinking as it was crucial to getting any agreement at all, they also knew that it would be harder for both sides to walk away from the federation once it was up and running than either side believed. While the details would take many months to thrash out, the general approach had been set and the broad outline of the future Dominion of Palestine and it's route to independence had been agreed.
It was into this atmosphere that the request from London arrived to see if the Mandate could increase orange production as part of the drive to find Empire sources of citrus. The request itself was just a formality so the civil service in Whitehall could say they had tried for an Empire solution before presenting the cabinet with the various less pleasant alternatives. The Mandatory authorities were well aware of this, but the request did highlight one of the issues with the federation plan that would need considering. The Jaffa Orange was sweet, had few seeds, and was easily peeled, a combination which made it popular with consumers and attracted a modest but worthwhile price premium. Named after the city and port of Jaffa the fruit had come to prominence in the late 19th Century and by the mid 1930s was one of the major exports of the Mandate. In the early years of the Mandate the citrus trade had been one of the relatively few joint Arab-Jew endeavours, both communities attending the same agricultural exhibitions and even more social activities such as competitive orange crate packing contest. However as the tension between the communities grew and occasionally burst into violence these endeavours dwindled. It must be said that the citrus trade itself was one of the causes of this tension, as a profitable and relatively low-capital endeavour an orange grove was a popular choice for a newly arrived immigrant to purchase, this typically displaced an Arab tenant farmer from both their livelihood and the housing attached to the grove. The growing popularity of the Zionist doctrine of 'Conquest of Labour' (Jewish firms should only employ fellow Jews) further increased the polarisation, as did the developing banks and distribution networks all of which only served one community whether by choice or boycott. The obvious concern was that if the new states developed isolated and unconnected economies this would result in a de facto Partition, something both communities professed to be violently against. There was a temptation on the British side to just leave the whole matter alone, while it may well become a problem it would be one for later and there were genuine concerns that trying to resolve the matter up front could derail what progress had been made. However after some informal discussion with the League Permanent Mandate Commissions it became clear that they expected the issue to be solved as the Commissioners, and indeed the Council above them, were somewhat unsettled by the federation plan and wanted reassurance it was not actually a plan for partition but on a delayed timescale. The matter was thus booted back to the civil service and negotiators to put some measures in place to address the problem, not specifically for oranges but for all Mandate wide industries.
A share certificate for the Bank of the Temple Society, having nothing to do with the Knights Templar they were a radical Lutheran sect originally based in Germany who believed Christ's second coming was imminent and it was important to be in the Holy Land when that happened. After moving to the region in the mid-19th Century they became surprisingly influential despite their small numbers; they were the first group to export the local oranges under the brand "Jaffa", were heavily involved in road building in the Mandate, survived the Great War and then founded the bank in the mid 1920s to serve all the communities in the Mandate. From the mid 1930s onwards the Bank rose in importance due to the significant increase in trade with Germany due to the Haavara Agreement, a growing concern for the High Commissioner and the financial authorities in London.
This endeavour would end up being the Woodhead Royal Commission that would dive into the details, eventually make a very large number of detailed recommendations on the laws, departments and bodies that the federal government would need. The orange scheme was typical of the solutions adopted, the line between state and federal was drawn at the import/export level with everything before that left to the new states. The existing community specific marketing and sales groups were to be scrapped and everything done through the Palestine Citrus Marketing Board. The dividing line also caught up funding, trade credit and similar, so only banks that had branches in all states and loaned to all communities would be allowed to engage in those activities. This required the federal level to have considerable power for enforcement of laws and rights, which was balanced by a very limited power to introduce new legislation without agreement from both communities. More broadly the Woodhead Commission decided that the Swiss Federal Council model was appropriate, not least because it lacked any Head of Government position and it was recognised neither community would accept someone from the other in post, the Head of State would naturally be the King as represented by the Governor-General. In parallel with this the Foreign Office continued it's work to sell the League on the Dominion idea, particularly the large amount of reserve powers that would end up with the Governor-General to cover the possibility of an intractable disagreement within the council. The main argument made was Danzig, after the recent experiences there no-one in the League really wanted to take over that sort of responsibility again, so in the absence of the alternative they accepted the scheme. It should also be noted that there was also wider pressure to just get the matter sorted, all of the other Class A mandates had achieved at least some degree of self-governance and so it was hard to argue for yet more delay in this case, particularly when the plan had acceptance from the two main communities in the Mandate.
The talks and commissions would last until the end of the decade and include a great many items not even touched upon here, as an example there were 100,000 odd Christians in the Mandate mostly, but not all, in the Arab population and their specific concerns would make their way into the final commission recommendations and the structure of the Dominion. The first serious test of the efforts to forge a broader national identity for the Mandate would come long before then, in early 1938 when the national football team began it's quest for qualification to the 1938 World Cup, a matter we shall return to in a future chapter.
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Notes:
How to address one of the most controversial and topical issues without causing problems (hopefully)? By considering it from the perspective of a British inter-departmental squabble and not looking too deeply at the grim bits. Fingers crossed this works.
With that done I should admit this is all something of a retcon. The events here are not quite in line with what Past Pip said in Chapter LVI, but this is much more interesting and most of that update was high level anyway so I think it should be fine. It is also a small retcon on the Saudi section as well, though mostly some background that helps justify what Past Pip did beyond 'easy way to get rid of some traitors'.
The Italian radio and support are OTL as was the plans for arms shipments from Italian East Africa to Palestine via Saudi. Those plans never happened but got very close so I went with Mussolini approving it after his first gamble at Suez failed. This does mean I owe the South African govt. a very slight apology, it turns out they were not completely paranoid worrying about an enemy plotting to supply arms and support revolts inside the Empire because Italy literally did do that in East Africa and the Middle East, so someone doing it around Southern Africa was not completely mad. OTL the Saudi King had talks with the Italians about the smuggling but hedged a lot as he was worried about the British finding out, with a war on and the British seemingly on the back foot I think he'd take a punt and agree to turn a blind eye to it.
Polish arms and training supply is OTL for the stated slightly grim reasons. This was not the only source as Irgun and Haganah were buying guns and smuggling in from anywhere they could, but the training was very Polish - ran into tens of thousands in the Betar being trained and drilled in Poland. Unsurprisingly this was a source of Anglo-Polish tension and argument.
T E Lawrence was dead at this point in OTL, but as he survived he gets to be the PR friendly hero charging around the desert which seemed nice for him. Glubb Pasha is a very fun figure who I hope to include again, an incredibly influential figure at the time and during WW2 but faded away after badly mishandling things post-war. In contrast Orde Wingate never gets a chance to form his Special Night Squads from the Jewish police and auxiliaries, there will also never be a Gideon Force in Ethiopia. I'm tempted to say he will fade into obscurity, but I think he is just too mad to do something so dull.
This Peel Commission is somewhat different, OTL it spent ages on 'why' various riots happened and I believe the conclusion of Partition was influenced by them having months of hearings about how much both sides hated each other. In Butterfly the riots were far milder, most of the real extremists on both side are dead or in prison, and the terms of reference are more about getting a solution than litigating the cause. Is this all a bit too convenient? Maybe, but if you want a better than OTL outcome the region needs a bit of luck so here we are. Another positive butterfly for so much of the Zionist leadership being arrested, the people who bugged the Commission hearings also get swept up so the Jewish Agency is no longer listening to all the secret evidence and debates, which I think also increases the change of a lasting agreement. The OTL Woodhead Commission had the job of killing off partition once London realised everyone hated the idea, fixing Royal Commissions to get the answer you want is as old an idea as Royal Commissions. Here the instruction is "This is going to happen so just do the best you can".
The Butterfly plan is a mix of various OTL schemes with some new bits sprinkled on top. The main fudge is giving each group a separate state where they can do their own thing, while making the overall Mandate enough of a country that the League is happy, it also has to be one country so that both sides think that in the future they can take over and control the whole lot. It will not be a stable place politically, but the bar is so low I think it's still an improvement. The other main change is most of the plans had British/Mandated/UN-controlled zones for Jerusalem and various other disputed/mixed areas, with the idea being to park a decision on those until the Jewish and Arab bits could agree a proper solution. This plan just makes that semi-permanent, making them federal territories rather than part of either state.
The German Templer Society Bank is not strictly relevant but I could not resist including them however briefly. There was going to be a large chunk on the Nazi involvement in facilitating Jews to illegally emigrate to Palestine which would have involved them in more detail, but I couldn't find space to fit it in. Also it's basically the same as the Polish efforts only a bit crueller and with more financial tricks which I realise can be a niche interest.
