Even before the assumption of the mandate, members of the British Anglican church in Palestine had expressed a degree of opposition to the idea of a Britishdefended Jewish National Home. In 1919, the Bishop in Jerusalem, Rennie MacInnes, wrote that ‘the talk about creating a Jewish State which is bitterly and unanimously opposed by the whole [Arab] Christian and Moslem population throughout the land, [is] most unsettling…I for one am inclined to wish it might be possible that the mandate should be given to some other power than Great Britain. It will be a most thankless task to whoever undertakes it’. The difficulties caused by Britain’s endorsement of the project of a Jewish National Home in Palestine constituted a frequent refrain in the writings and commentary of the Anglican clergy in Palestine during the early years of the mandate.
MacInnes in an early letter to Davidson, he told the Archbishop: ‘The Arab Muslims and Christians in Palestine are all very much disturbed at all this talk about the Jews being given a national home in their own country, and wonder what is going to happen to those who as a matter of fact have lived in that country for nearly 1900 years since the Jews left.
Anti-Zionist feeling continued to grow among both the Arabs and the British missionaries who worked among them. In 1936, a general strike marked the beginning of a major anti-colonial Arab rebellion that would take the British three years to put down, deploying all their most brutal anti-insurrection tactics. By this time, many British church workers in Palestine had become quite outspoken about their political views. In the early stages of al-thawra al-kubra, the ‘Great Revolt’, Mabel Warburton (founder of the Jerusalem Girls’ School and one of the most prominent British women in Palestine) wrote, ‘It should never have come to this….Of course the [Jewish] immigration should have been suspended long ago, now it is being made a most serious issue’.
MacInnes’ successor as the Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem, George Francis Graham Brown, also opposed the project of a Jewish National Home. In a letter to the Jerusalem and East Mission in October 1936, he wrote, ‘Does not his [Jesus’] teaching of a spiritual Israel, really deny the basis of a ‘National Home’ in Palestine?