Hello Britain, are you happy now with the misery you inflicted on the Palestinians?
Allow me to respond. The world accuses you of eighty years of suffering, dispossession, exile, and death — of creating a catastrophe that spread cancer-like across generations. Gaza, Jenin, Deir Yassin. These are not single atrocities, but stepping stones to a century of calamity hatched in Whitehall salons. You lit the flame which ravaged Palestine, and now you recoil, your hands clean, as if you were never the arsonist. But history does not forget. And history accuses.
The Balfour Declaration on banknotes
Few know the cynical origins of your promise. In 1917, when your treasury was drained by the First World War and your empire was on the brink of bankruptcy, your politicians turned to American loans for rescue. You needed the Washington bankers; you needed Jewish pressure to grant the loans. And so Lord Balfour, his pen moist with imperial arrogance, guaranteed that which he had no right to guarantee — a homeland for the Jews in a foreign land. A cheque drawn on someone’s account.
Israeli historian Avi Shlaim calls it “one of the most duplicitous documents in British imperial history.” You didn’t want to make peace. You wanted a strategic foothold in the Middle East as the Ottoman Empire disintegrated. The Balfour Declaration wasn’t an act of generosity — it was a cynical bargain, a bribe wrapped up in biblical rhetoric. You occupied Palestine under the League of Nations Mandate, promising “to prepare the inhabitants for self-government.” You governed instead by arming Zionist militias and disarming Palestinians. You meted out not justice but perfidy.
The terror you forgot to remember
Do you remember, Britain, those times your own soldiers were hunted along Jerusalem streets? When the Stern Gang and the Irgun — led by men who would be Israeli prime ministers — bombed your officers and strung your soldiers from branch to branch? Do you remember the 1946 King David Hotel bombing that murdered ninety-one people, including your citizens?
You designated them terrorists, but you provided them with the keys. You armed them, withdrew in a hurry, and left behind an arsenal and chaos that engulfed it. In 1948, you left Palestine with your flag folded, yet your conscience remained unyielding and untouched. And each generation that has followed has borne the cost of your imperial caution.
Swiss cheese diplomacy: Trump’s hollow peace parade in Jerusalem
The empire that could not learn
You once boasted that “the sun never sets on the British Empire.” Today, it does not rise. The empire you built on loot, piracy, and sanctimonious deception has broken down into denial and nostalgia. You plundered India for $44 trillion, enslaved nations, partitioned continents, and called it White Man’s burden of spreading civilization to the world. You left deep wounds: Bengal’s hunger, Amritsar’s blood, and borders drawn in ignorance from Baghdad to Kashmir.
In Palestine, you sowed discord as policy, cynicism as diplomacy. You were the creator of a disaster that outlived your empire. And now, as Gaza burns upon the same colonial logic you forged, your silence is your confession.
The ghost of Deir Yassin
The Deir Yassin massacre of 1948, when Zionist paramilitaries killed over 100 Palestinian men, women, and children, was the precursor to an exodus you authored. Your generals expected it. Your diplomats warned you. You did nothing. You called it “tragic,” then washed your hands like Pilate. The Israeli historian Ilan Pappé calls it what it was — Ethnic Cleansing. You weren’t an innocent bystander; you were the midwife of disaster. You gave birth to a nation by burying another.
The price of the first sin
For decades, you have been the elder statesman of peace — holding summits, issuing statements, and calling for restraint. But you are not the mediator. You’re the first transgressor. The “two-state solution” you are promoting today is the overdue funeral of the promise you broke a century ago. The memory of your betrayal is cast over every refugee camp, every bombed-out hospital, every mourning tent in Gaza. It speaks on the rubble: This was Britain’s work.
As Professor Rashid Khalidi notes, “Without Britain’s deliberate engineering of Zionist colonization, the Palestinian tragedy would not exist in its modern form”. You started the fire and then allowed other individuals to burn.
The fall of the once-great power
Think of yourself today. That empire that split continents is now barely splitting relevance. Your prime minister, in the Sharm El-Sheik summits, where he is barely visible, was pushed to the back row like an old antique. Keir Starmer, the lawyer who genuflects to Washington and describes Israeli bombing as ‘self-defence,’ is the essence of post-imperial hypocrisy — moral immobility cloaked in polite language. History is not fooled. The empire curve bends towards obsolescence. The horrors you outsourced to your successors have haunted you back in the form of judgment.
Conclusion: The judgment you can’t avoid
Hello, Britain, you believed you were wily. You believed history could be manipulated, that shame could be put away and buried. History never forgets. The ghosts of Gaza, of Deir Yassin, of 1948, never forget. The skeletons never forget.
You set the stage for endless war and called it diplomacy. You came up with the dispossessing of a people and called it statecraft. And now you look at the fruit of your duplicity and dare to call it peace.
You can bury your empire in nostalgia, but you cannot bury your sin. The world witnessed what your creativity fashioned—and the reckoning has barely begun.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.