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Arab-Israeli Relations 1917-1970, The Middle East Online Series One contains 200,000 pages of documents on the politics, administration, wars and diplomacy of the Palestine Mandate and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Assembled from the National Archive, Kew, this online archive presents material from the British Admiralty Record, Cabinet, Colonial, Dominions, Foreign and Colonial, Foreign, Prime Minister's and War Offices and the Treasury.

Content includes:

• Typescript reports, minutes and correspondence by, to and from British government departments, embassies and consulates
• Government documents set out major policy statements in their full contemporary context, with minor documents and marginalia revealing the workings of colonial administration and following the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, British diplomacy towards Israel and the Arab states
• The Balfour Declaration in 1917 and files from the British Occupation of Jerusalem
• The workings of the British Mandate in Palestine, 1922-48, from the ratification of the Mandate by the League of Nations in 1922, all the Palestine Sessional Papers 1924-48 to the partition plans dating from 1937-38
• Documents on the latter years of the Mandate (1937-48): the Zionist Revisionists, the Stern Group, Irgun Zvai Leumi, the Arab Higher Committee and the Arab Union
• Records of the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry and Report of 1946 and the U.N. resolution to partition Palestine in November 1947
• The Palestine War, 1947-49 — the most significant event in Arab politics in the 20 th century — documents selected trace the civil war that erupted between Jewish and Palestinian urban centers following the Partition, the termination of the British Mandate, the proclamation of the State of Israel 1948 and the course of the war in 1948, the armistice of 1949 and the regional consequences of the war
• Key files from the Arab-Israeli conflict through the 1950s, including the “Border Wars” as thousands of displaced Arab families crossed back over the borders of the new state to recover property, tend farms and vent their fury against the occupiers of their land and the regional instability following the fall of Palestine marked by assassinations of neighboring Arab leaders
• The Cold War in the Middle East as the old colonial axis of power shifted towards the new superpowers — US and USSR — with the U.S. backing Israel and the USSR backing Syria and Egypt
• The June War of 1967 when Israel shattered the armies of Syria and Jordan, then swept into the Gaza Strip, Sinai, Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. The foundation of the PLO and Britain’s reactions to the Palestinian struggle up to Black September 1970-71

Subjects covered include:

• Origins of British Rule in Palestine
• The Balfour declaration and the politics behind it
• The Palestine campaign 1914-1918
• Britain’s military occupation of Jerusalem from 1917
• League of Nations Mandate for Palestine in 1922
• Palestine sessional papers 1924-48
• The aftermath of UN Partition Resolution
• Background to the establishment of the State of Israel
• The 1948 war and armistice agreements of 1949
• Britain’s early relations with Israel
• Britain’s relations with Transjordan, Egypt and Iraq
• The assassinations of 1951
• The Suez Crisis
• The effect of the Cold War in the Middle East
• The Six-day War of 1967
• The PLO resistance movement