In November 1917 Baron Rothschild, a Zionist leader of the Anglo-Jewish community, received from Arthur Balfour, the British foreign secretary, a letter supporting “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. Whatever the merits of Zionism and its insistence on an ancient Jewish connection to the land of Palestine, every element of this fateful undertaking was steeped in British colonialism.
The origins of Zionism
Zionism itself was a product of 19th century nationalism with its emphasis on the distinctive identities of peoples finding political expression in statehood. The defeated imperialist powers Germany and Austria had to cede lands to new states for Poles, Czechs and others; some Jewish people did not want to be left out.
Their homeland, however, could only be claimed by colonisation of a distant shore and the Zionists could hardly believe their luck in finding the world champions in overseas colonising as sponsors. If there was to be an Israel it would be in British-ruled Palestine. The steps by which colonisation was fostered are laid out in a UN website.
Quite how Britain came to be caught up in the Zionist project when there were so many other calls on her national interest during the treaty-making at Versailles is a story of contingencies and cultural connections. Martin Gilbert, more sympathetic to Israel than the UN historians, gives a readily accessible account in a 2011 lecture, ‘Sowing the seeds of Jewish Statehood: Britain and Palestine, 1900–1922’.
Why 1909? Because it was in that year, Gilbert begins, that a young TE Lawrence, writing home from an archeological adventure in 1909, said Palestine was a decent country in Roman times “and could so easily be made so again. The sooner Jews farm it all the better. Their colonies are the bright spot in the desert”.
Gilbert then relates how Lawrence, still famed as champion of the Arabs during the World War, afterwards played an active role in bringing together his patron Emir Faisal and the chief Zionist diplomat Chaim Weizmann. Together they were able to convince sceptics, notably the Americans, that Palestine would indeed have the kind of democratic self-determination so important to them – after enough Jews had been settled there.
Displacement and colonisation in Palestine
Gilbert charts the Jewish immigration and resistance to it. He does not mention the key reality: displacement. Displacement of one population by another in the Nazi colonisation of Poland was a major factor in Raphael Lemkin creating the new term ‘genocide’. It still figures in international law today. It is not recognised in Israel’s founding in 1948 nor in its origins under the British League of Nations ‘mandate’ 30 years earlier.
That Britain would secure colonial authority over post-war Palestine had already been decided in the secret Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 allotting Syria and Lebanon to France and Mesopotamia to Britain.
The term ‘Arab’ did not appear in the mandate – they were referred to only as “the non-Jewish communities of Palestine” and “nothing should be done which might prejudice [their] civil and religious rights”. No word about their national or political rights, though it was explicitly made clear in Churchill’s 1922 memorandum “that the establishment of self-governing institutions in Palestine was to be subordinated to the paramount pledge and obligation of establishing a Jewish National Home in Palestine”.
Imperial arrogance and violence
We can hear Churchill’s voice still pronouncing this subordination in 2024. And by now we can locate Churchill less sentimentally in the arrogance and violence of imperial era. Despite misgivings at the highest level, Britain pressed on with its mandate claim as a way of securing its influence over the strategically important Middle East, with its Suez connection to India and newly vital oil reserves. When writing about this era of imperialism, Hannah Arendt – like Raphael Lemkin a supporter of Zionism – devoted a long footnote to the British practices of ‘pacification’ in Iraq. It is a quotation from the same TE Lawrence in 1920.
“There is a preliminary Arab success, the British reinforcements are sent out as a punitive force. They fight their way… to their objective, which is meanwhile bombarded by artillery, aeroplanes, or gunboats. Finally perhaps a village is burnt and the district pacified. It is odd that we don’t use poison gas on these occasions. Bombing the houses is a pretty patchy way of getting the women and children… By gas attacks the whole population of offending districts could be wiped out neatly; and as a method of government it would be no more immoral than the present system.”
Genocide and colonisation
Perhaps it was Britain that in those days had “the world’s most moral army”, tasked now and then with “mowing the grass” – two of Israel’s chilling slogans for Gaza. Britain had the most impressive record of colonisation for Zionists to emulate and was second to none in the major challenge facing them: using settlers to displace an already settled population. “A land without a people for a people without a land” was a slogan with a notably British heritage.
There were more genocidal candidates as models: the Americans in their Westward Ho expansion and the Germans driving the Herero into the desert. But the British had not yet had to answer for their genocides in Australia, or for their pioneering innovation in the Middle East— punitive bombing of civilians.
Indeed, this latest example provided a model for terrorism by the State of Israel, to drive out Palestinians and finally to drive out the British themselves.
With the ending of Turkish rule and the territorial claims of the victors, the Zionists had published their own ambit claim. It did not extend ‘from the river to the sea’ but much further east as well, across the Jordan to the railway built from Damascus to Amman and further south.
The plan was rejected, and Trans-Jordan closed to the wave of Jewish people immigrating – over ten thousand in 1919–20 and another eight thousand in 1921. Arab pressure on the British mounted even as Jewish people continued to buy land through the 1920s. In 1929 riots resulted in at least 133 Jews killed and 116 Arabs, all but six at the hands of British Mandate police.
Jewish persecution, migration, partition
Four years later the focus for Jews had shifted back to Europe. In 1933 the Hitler regime began to target ‘world Jewry’ in the shape of Germany’s own Jewish citizens. From the boycott designed to show foreign critics their powerlessness to protect anyone under Nazi rule, to the Nuremberg Laws on the eve of the Berlin Olympics, and then the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938, it was being made clear to Jews that emigration was their only hope.
In the first three years, the Jewish population of Palestine increased from 230,000 to 400,000, a rate of immigration that would equal or outnumber the Arab population within a decade. In response to Arab protests in in 1936, a British commission, the Peel Commission, for the first time proposed a partition into two states. Although the Jewish state was tiny it was rejected by the Arabs outright and by some Jews as insufficient.
Gilbert has a graphic showing just how small the Jewish portion was. He carefully tallies how many olive trees and citrus groves were destroyed by enraged Arabs. He gives no sense at all of how deep and desperate Arab anger had become. Or how, in the end, it was Jewish terrorism that drove the British out. And then, in 1948, it was Jewish terrorism that drove the Palestinians out of the new State of Israel.
For us, the intimate horror and vast tragedy of the Shoah remains more present than the Nakba murders of Palestinians in 1948. The Nazi campaign to destroy Europe’s Jews has blocked the possibility of seeing how the Israeli project meant destroying the rights and lives of Palestinians. The heinous Hamas atrocity of October 2023 has masked one of its aims: to remind the world of that truth.
Israel’s relentless war in Gaza and its renewed campaign of destruction in the occupied West Bank make the record of ruthless displacement stark. The long-settled Arab communities have to learn all over again that they must leave if they wish to survive. From members of the Netanayu government there is now a gathering campaign to clear northern Gaza of its Palestinian population so as to open up the strip to Jewish settlers.
Dare we hope that Britain, so involved from the outset, might take the lead in defending Palestinians against the declared aims of further Israeli expansion? Dare we hope?
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