Noam Chomsky, the eminent Jewish-American intellectual, observed that
"settler colonialism is the most extreme and sadistic form of
imperialism". The hallmark of settler colonialism is ruthlessness and
the disregard for law, justice and morality.
The Zionist movement was nothing if not ruthless. It did not plan to
cooperate with the native Arab population for the common good. On the
contrary, it planned to supplant them. The only way the Zionist project
could be realised and maintained was by expelling a large number of
Arabs from their homes and taking over their land.
In Zionist jargon, such evictions and expulsions were deceptively referenced and concealed with a softer term - "transfer".
Path to statehood
Zionist settler colonialism was connected by an umbilical cord to Britain, the pre-eminent European colonial power of the day. Without the support of Britain, the Zionist movement could not have achieved the degree of success that it did in its quest for statehood.
Britain made it possible for its junior partner to embark on the
systematic takeover of the country. Yet, the path to statehood was far
from smooth. From its inception in the late 19th century, the Zionist
movement encountered a major obstacle along its path: the land of its
dreams was already inhabited by another people. Britain enabled the
Zionists to overcome this obstacle.
On 2 November 1917, Britain issued the notorious Balfour Declaration.
Named after Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, it promised British
support for the establishment of "a national home for the Jewish people
in Palestine".
The purpose of the declaration was to enlist the help of world Jewry
in the war effort against Germany and the Ottoman Empire. A caveat was
added that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and
religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine". While
the promise was fully fulfilled, the caveat was dropped and forgotten.
In 1917, the area later called Palestine was still under Ottoman
rule. The Arabs constituted 90 percent of the population of the country,
with the Jews constituting 10 percent and owning only two percent of
the land. The Balfour Declaration was a classic colonial document
because it accorded national rights to a small minority but merely
"civil and religious rights" to the majority.
The Balfour Declaration: Enduring colonial criminality
Susan Abulhawa
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To add insult to injury, it referred to the Arabs, forming the vast
majority of the population, as "the non-Jewish communities in
Palestine". Arab resistance to British rule was inevitable from the
start.
There is an Arabic saying that something that starts crooked, remains
crooked. In this case, at any rate, it is difficult to see how the
British administration of Palestine could be straightened without
incurring the wrath of its Zionist beneficiaries.
On 11 August 1919, Balfour wrote
in an oft-quoted memorandum: "Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or
bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future
hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the
700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land."
In other words, the Arabs did not count while their rights, including
their natural right to national self-determination, were dismissed as
no more than "desires and prejudices".
In the same memorandum, Balfour also stated that "so far as Palestine
is concerned, the Powers have made no statement of fact which is not
admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which, at least in the
letter, they have not always intended to violate". There could hardly be
a more arresting admission of British duplicity.
'Sacred trust of civilisation'
In July 1922, the League of Nations gave Britain the mandate over
Palestine. The task of the mandatory power was to prepare the local
population for self-government and to hand over power when they became
capable of governing themselves.
Without the support of Britain, the Zionist movement could not have
achieved the degree of success that it did in its quest for statehood
The mandates were described in the Covenant of the League as
"a sacred trust of civilisation". Their declared purpose was to develop
the territory for the benefit of its native people, and to turn the
former Arab provinces of the defeated Ottoman Empire into modern
nation-states. In reality, they were little more than a cover for
neo-colonialism.
Strong Zionist lobbying induced Britain to insist on the
incorporation of the Balfour Declaration into the Palestine Mandate. It
is often said that this transformed a loose British promise into a
binding legal obligation. This is not so for two main reasons.
First, the mandate contravened Article 22 of the Covenant, which
required the people of the area concerned to be consulted in the choice
of the mandatory power. Balfour refused to consult the Arabs because he
knew too well that, if given a say, they would vehemently reject British
rule.
Second, Britain could not assume the mandate, because in 1922 it had
no sovereignty over Palestine. The sovereign until 1924 was Turkey, the
successor to the Ottoman Empire. This point has been made forcefully by
the American jurist John Quigley
in an unpublished article entitled "Britain’s Failure to Gain Legal
Standing for the Balfour Declaration". In the abstract, he summarises
the argument in the following way:
"The document that Britain composed for its governance of Palestine
(Mandate for Palestine) called for the implementation of the Jewish
national home mentioned in the Balfour Declaration. However, Britain’s
governance of Palestine, purportedly under the mandate scheme of the
League of Nations, never gained a lawful foundation. The League of
Nations had no power under the League Covenant to attribute legal
significance to the Mandate for Palestine, or to give Britain a right to
govern."
Palestinian refugees return to their village after its
surrender during the 1948 Arab war against the proclamation of the
Israeli State on 15 September 1948 (AFP)
"Britain
failed to gain sovereignty, which was a prerequisite for governing
Palestine or for holding a mandate. Britain gave varying explanations at
different times in an effort to show that it did hold sovereignty. The
United Nations did not question Britain’s legal standing in Palestine
but accepted the legitimacy of the mandate for Palestine as a basis for
dividing the country. The issue of territorial rights in historic
Palestine remains unresolved to the present time."
In Quigley’s opinion, Britain never moved past the status of
belligerent occupant. He develops this argument, with a great deal of
compelling evidence, in his 2022 book Britain and its Mandate Over Palestine: Legal Chicanery on a World Stage.
Chicanery is not too strong a word to describe the manner in which
Britain manipulated the League of Nations to give it power over
Palestine, or the way in which it misused this power to turn Palestine
from an Arab-majority state into a Jewish-majority state.
Obligation to protect Arab rights
The importance of including the commitment to a Jewish national home
cannot be overestimated. It is what fundamentally differentiated the
Palestine Mandate from all the other mandates for the Middle Eastern
provinces of the Ottoman Empire.
The British mandate for Iraq, the French mandate for Syria, and the
French mandate for Lebanon were all about preparing the local population
for self-government. The Palestine mandate was about enabling
foreigners, Jews from anywhere in the world, but especially from Europe,
to join their co-religionists in Palestine and to turn the country into
a Jewish-controlled national entity.
The mandate included an explicit obligation to protect the civil and
religious rights of the Arabs - "the non-Jewish communities in
Palestine". Britain utterly failed to protect these rights. The first
British high commissioner for Palestine, Sir Herbert Samuel, was both a Jew and an ardent Zionist.
During his tenure, Britain introduced a series of ordinances that
allowed for unrestricted Jewish immigration to Palestine, and Jewish
purchase of lands, which Palestinians had farmed for generations.
The Arabs demanded restrictions on Jewish immigration and land
acquisitions. They also demanded a democratically elected national
assembly, which would reflect the demographic balance. Britain resisted
all these demands and held back from introducing democratic
institutions. The basic guideline for mandatory policy was to withhold
elections until the Jews became the majority.
In 1936, an Arab revolt broke out against British rule in Palestine. It was a national revolt
that lasted until 1939. The British army was deployed to crush it. The
army acted with the utmost brutality and often in violation of the laws
of war. Its methods included torture, the use of human shields,
detention without trial, draconian emergency regulations, summary
executions, collective punishment, house demolitions, the burning of
villages and aerial bombardment.
Much of this violence was directed not just against the rebels, but
against villagers who were suspected of aiding and abetting them.
British counter-insurgency gravely weakened Palestinian society: around
5,000 Palestinians were killed, 15,000 injured, and 5,500 imprisoned.
Final British betrayal
Rashid Khalidi, the eminent Palestinian historian, has argued,
convincingly in my opinion, that Palestine was not lost in the late
1940s, as is commonly believed, but in the late 1930s. The main reason
he gives for this point of view is the devastating damage that Britain
inflicted on Palestinian society and its paramilitary forces during the
Arab Revolt. This argument is advanced in Khalidi’s chapter in a book
co-edited by Eugene Rogan and me, The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948.
The final British betrayal of the Palestinians occurred as the
struggle for Palestine entered its most crucial phase following the end
of the Second World War. By this time, Britain had fallen out with its
Zionist protégés and the extremists among them conducted a campaign of
terror designed to drive British forces out of the country. The most
notorious episode in this violent campaign was the attack, in July 1946,
by the Irgun, the National Military Organisation, on the King David Hotel in Jerusalem which housed the British administrative headquarters.
Following this attack and other attacks, the embattled British
government decided unilaterally to relinquish the mandate. On 29
November 1947, the United Nations passed a resolution to partition
Mandate Palestine into two states, one Jewish, the other Arab.
The Jews accepted partition and the Arabs rejected it. Consequently,
Britain refused to implement the UN partition plan on the grounds that
it did not enjoy the support of both parties.
There was another reason, however: hostility to the Palestinian
national cause. The Palestinian national movement was led by Hajj Amin
al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, who had fallen out with the
British and fled the country during the Arab Revolt.
In British eyes, a Palestinian state was synonymous with a mufti
state. Hostility towards the Palestinian leadership and Palestinian
statehood was therefore a constant and defining factor in British
foreign policy from 1947 to 1949.
The mandate ended at midnight on 14 May 1948. Britain's way out of the quandary was to encourage its client, King Abdullah of Jordan,
to invade Palestine upon the expiry of the mandate, and to conquer the
West Bank that the UN had allocated to the Arab state. By this time, the
wily king had reached a tacit agreement with the Jewish Agency to divide up Palestine between themselves, at the expense of the Palestinians.
The tacit agreement was that the Jews would establish a Jewish state
in their part of Palestine, while Abdullah would gain control over the
Arab part, and that they would make peace after the dust had settled.
Fake neutrality
During the civil war that broke out in Palestine in the run-up to 14
May, Britain stood on the sidelines, thereby abdicating its
responsibility to maintain law and order. Its fake neutrality inevitably
helped the stronger Zionist side. During the last months of the
mandate, the Zionist paramilitary forces went on the offensive and
intensified the ethnic cleansing of the country.
The first big wave of Palestinian refugees happened on Britain's
watch. Britain effectively abandoned the native Palestinians to the
tender mercies of Zionist settler colonialists. In short, Britain
actively created the conditions for its own selfish imperialist ends, in
which the Palestinian catastrophe - "the Nakba" - could unfold. An
unbroken thread of duplicity, mendacity, chicanery and skulduggery
connects British foreign policy from the beginning of its mandate to the
Nakba.
When the going got tough, the mandatory power simply cut and ran. There was no orderly transfer of power to a local body
The way in which the mandate ended was the worst blot on Britain's
entire record as the great power in charge of Palestine. It showed how
little Britain cared about the people it was supposed to protect and
prepare for self-government.
When the going got tough, the mandatory power simply cut and ran.
There was no orderly transfer of power to a local body. The "sacred
trust of civilisation" had been finally, irreversibly and unforgivably
brutalised and betrayed.
Lord Balfour’s dream turned into a Palestinian nightmare. In the
collective consciousness of the Palestinians, the Nakba is not an
isolated event but a continuous historical process. Today, over 5.9
million refugees are registered with UNRWA, the United Nations agency
for Palestine refugees.
Hanan Ashrawi coined the term “ongoing Nakba”
to denote the continuous Palestinian experience of violence and
dispossession at the hands of Zionist settler colonialism. In a speech
at a UN conference in 2001,
she referred to the Palestinian people as “a nation in captivity held
hostage to an ongoing Nakba, as the most intricate and pervasive
_expression_ of persistent colonialism, apartheid, racism, and
victimisation”.
Contradiction in British policy
It is melancholy to have to add that no British government has ever
apologised for the part that Britain played in the emasculation of
Historic Palestine. The last five Conservative prime ministers, starting
with David Cameron, have all been staunch supporters of Israel.
In 2017, on the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, then Prime Minister Theresa May stated
that it was “one of the most important letters in history. It
demonstrates Britain's vital role in creating a homeland for the Jewish
people. And it is an anniversary we will be marking with pride.” There
was no mention of the Palestinian victims of this important letter.
Boris Johnson, in his 2014 book The Churchill Factor,
described the Balfour Declaration as “bizarre”, “a tragically incoherent
document” and “an exquisite piece of FO fudgerama”. But in 2015, on a
trip to Israel as mayor of London, Johnson hailed the Balfour
Declaration as “a great thing”.
Britain's then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson (R) shakes hands
with Israeli President Isaac Herzog at No 10 Downing Street, London on
23 November 2021 (AFP)
In October 2017, in his capacity as foreign secretary, Johnson introduced a debate
in the House of Commons on the Balfour Declaration. He repeated
Britain’s pride in the part it played in creating a Jewish state in
Palestine. Despite a large majority for recognising Palestine as a
state, he declined to do so, saying the time was not right.
This exposed a basic contradiction in the heart of British policy: advocating a two-state solution but recognising only one.
Current British foreign policy is unapologetic about the Nakba and unashamedly pro-Zionist
It was left to Johnson’s successor, Liz Truss, to demonstrate the
depth of Tory politicians’ indifference to Palestinian sensitivities and
the length to which they would go to ingratiate themselves with Israel
and its uncritical supporters in this country. During her campaign for
election as Conservative Party leader, she floated the idea of moving the British embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Luckily, during her 49-day premiership, Truss was not able to follow up on this asinine idea.
Current British foreign policy is unapologetic about the Nakba and
unashamedly pro-Zionist. A policy paper issued by the government on 21
March 2023 was entitled “2030 Roadmap for UK-Israel Bilateral Relations”. This paper covers trade and cooperation in a large number of spheres.
But it also includes a British pledge to oppose the referral of the
Israel-Palestine conflict to the International Court of Justice, to
oppose the global, grassroots, non-violent Boycott, Divestment,
Sanctions (BDS) movement for ending the Israeli occupation, and to work
towards reducing the scrutiny of Israel at the UN.
In short, the policy paper gives Israel the full spectrum of immunity
for its illegal actions and indeed crimes against the Palestinian
people. As such, it is a faithful reflection of the pro-Zionist bias in
British foreign policy over the last 100 years.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.