The school system in the USA must be truly terrible.

Two originally separate trajectories, British imperial expansion and Jewish nationalist movement, converged at World War I for reasons on both sides that were largely independent of each other.

The Balfour Declaration served British wartime purposes: securing Jewish diaspora support for the war effort at a moment when American and Russian Jewish communities could affect both countries' involvement, and denying Germany the same political move.

During the Arab Revolt (1936–39), Britain armed and trained Jewish auxiliary forces, established the Jewish Settlement Police, and allowed the Haganah to develop into a proto-military organization under British supervision. Britain needed the Yishuv's organized capacity to suppress the revolt.

The 1939 White Paper, issued immediately after the Revolt was crushed, capped Jewish immigration at 75,000 over five years and then ended it entirely without Arab consent, proposed a unitary Palestinian state with an Arab majority within ten years, and severely restricted Jewish land purchases. This was explicitly a response to Arab pressure and strategic calculations about the coming war, Britain needed Arab stability across the Middle East and could not afford another revolt. The Yishuv's military utility had been extracted. The political cost of honoring the Balfour commitment now exceeded its benefit.

The White Paper's immigration restrictions ran from 1939 through the war years, when European Jews were being systematically murdered. Britain intercepted refugee ships, and enforced the blockade with naval vessels. The Mandate administration knew what was happening in Europe. The calculation was explicitly that Arab strategic value in the war theater outweighed the lives of Jewish refugees. After the war, Britain continued the blockade and detained survivors of the Holocaust in Cyprus internment camps rather than allow entry to Palestine, which is what produced the Irgun and Stern Gang escalation and eventually the 1947 UN referral.

It was British imperial interests that exploited both populations instrumentally.