The paper is aimed at identifying the main causes of the dominance of violence in the interaction of Arabs and Jews in the Middle East in the first half of the 20th century. At that time Zionism finally took shape as political force, and the active migration of Jews to the territory
of Palestine began to provoke the Arabs. The author researches the conflict through the prism of the international presence in the region and concludes that the UK has not coped with the stabilization of the situation in the mandated territory.