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It's pretty dishonest to not include the fall of the ottoman empire in this analysis. A whole lot of events happened between 1919 and the nakba. The Jews aren't the only actors on the world stage.
Not sure what you mean. I was thinking in terms of Palestinian Arab x Jewish relations in Palestine proper. AFAIK there wasn’t a lot of violent animosity in this period, and even though there wasn’t a high population, we should expect more violence if the thesis “Palestinians will always be violent to Jews” were correct. Or do you mean that the Arabs would have been violent but the Ottoman Turks prevented it?
The Ottoman Turks ran the territory, not the Palestinians, and the whole mandate period was a question of precisely how that territory was to be handed off from legitimate British control to local management. The whole of the post-Ottoman territory was going through this proto-nationalist phase, the Jews were not uniquely trying to cut out a piece. Many of them were fleeing other previously Turk run territories going through their own nationalist movements. I'm not trying to say they behaved as angels or anything, there were lots of tit for tat escalations going on as different populations laid claim. But to just gloss it as "in the 1919 apropos of nothing the jews hatched a plan to conqueror the peaceful Arab land" is ahistorical. Much of the original land was bought from Arab landlords who were themselves granted ownership from the Ottomans as legitimately as such things were done back then. Which certainly sucked for the Arab tenants that the new Jewish land owners kicked off the land and I don't blame them necessarily for fighting back but you're putting a hell of an isolated demand for non-national sentiment on the Jews just after they watched millions of their brothers and sisters get slaughtered.
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