Update July 2024:
I realize I have left out one of the key insights – a simple number, namely 400.000. On the eve of WWII the number of Jews of European descent in Palestine was 400.000. This had risen to 650.000 by 1948. In other words, the entire Zionist society was for all intents and purposes established before the Holocaust. Yet we are told, time and time again, that Israel was a result of the Holocaust. That is false. Israel was already a reality, created by the dual forces of Zionism and British imperialism; the latter tried to maintain its foothold in the Middle East, and therefore supported Zionism. The Balfour declaration was one of pure self-interest.
From the outset, the main thrust of Zionism, as embodied by Vladimir ‘Zeev’ Jabotinsky, explicitly rejected any common ground with the Arabs. The new state was to be for Jews only. And so it was. No effort was made to create a common society.

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The following are excerpts from Eugene Rogan’s “The Arabs – A History” 2009-2011
Do buy the book, and read it. The beginning is a bit heavy, then it picks up pace.

p 245 “The British mandate in Palestine was doomed from the outset. The terms of the Balfour Declaration were written into the preamble of the mandatory instrument issued by the League of Nations to formalize Britain’s position in Palestine. Unlike all of the other postwar mandates, in which a great power was charged with establishing the instruments of self-rule in a newly emerging state, the British in Palestine were required to establish both a viable state from among the indigenous people of the land and a national home for the Jews of the world.”

“The Balfour Declaration was a formula for communal conflict. Given Palestine’s very limited resources, there simply was no way to establish a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine without prejudice to civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”

p 245 “Palestine was a new country in an ancient land, cobbled together from parts of different Ottoman provinces to suit imperial convenience. The Palestine mandate originally spanned the Jordan river and stretched from the Mediterranean to the frontiers of Iraq through the vast, inhospitable desert territory. In 1923 the lands to the east of the Jordan were formally detached from the Palestine mandate to form a separate state of Transjordan under Amir Abdullah’s rule. The British also ceded a part of the Golan Heights to the French mandate in Syria in 1923, by which point Palestine was a country smaller than Belgium, roughly the size of the state of Maryland.”

Some population statistics: late 1900: 85% Muslim, 9% Christian, 3% Jewish. The figure is given as 24000, which would make the entire population 800.000. By 1914 the number of Jews had risen to 85.000 due to immigration. In this period, the indigenous population was beginning to oppose the immigration.

p247 “Jewish immigration and land purchase provoked growing tension in Palestine from the beginning of the mandate. Opposed to British rule and to the prospect of a Jewish national home in their midst, the Arab population viewed the expansion of the Jewish community as a direct threat to their political aspirations. Moreover, Jewish land purchase inevitably led to Arab farmers being displaced from the lands they had tilled as sharecroppers [tenant who gives part of the crop as rent to landlord], often for generations.”

By 1930 at least another 100.000 Jewish immigrants had arrived. Riots broke out and the British established commissions and wrote White Papers, and suggested measures to curb Jewish immigration. The Zionist lobbies in the UK successfully challenged and shut down these measures. After a few years of moderate immigration, a new wave peaked in 1935 with 62.000 new arrivals. The Jews now made up about a quarter of the population [McCarthy, “Population of Palestine”]

In 1936 the Arab Higher Committee called a general strike. The British sent 20.000 soldiers, and put pressure on their Arab allies [so-called] to influence the Palestinians to call off the strike- which they did. There followed, after a pause, a general, uncoordinated revolt from 1937 to 1939 which was violently quelled by the British who used military courts, house demolitions and concentration camps, or imprisonment without trial. Younger offenders [sic!] were flogged (whipped). The tally was 5000 Palestinians killed and 10.000 wounded or more. The Palestinians were broken. We are now at 1940, and the gates of hell are about to open in Europe. The British proposed a deal that neither Jews nor Arabs accepted, and Irgun and the Stern gang [Lehi ]declared Britain the enemy. Among their deeds were the 1946 bombing of the British headquarters in the King David hotel, and the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte (1948), the man who had saved thousands from the camps at the end of the war.

We will leave the story here, but a short trip to Iraq is useful. Here, the British puppet prince was exiled to Transjordan in 1941 and pro-German Rashid Ali, who thought the Axis powers would win, came to power with the support of the army. He was later ousted by the British, and Baghdad descended into chaos.

p260 “It was the Jewish community of Baghdad that fell victim to the chaos after the fall of Rashid Ali’s government in 1941. Anti-British sentiment combined with hostility to the Zionist project in Palestine and German notions of anti-Semitism to produce a pogrom unprecedented in Arab history, known in Arabic as the Farhud. The Jewish community of Baghdad was large and highly assimilated into all levels of society – from the elites to the bazaars to the music halls, in which many of Iraq’s most celebrated performers were Jewish. Yet all of this was forgotten in two days of communal violence and bloodshed that claimed nearly 200 lives and left Jewish shops and houses robbed and gutted, before the British authorities decided to enter the city and restore order.”