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Israel-Gaza: How British elites have long blocked peace in the Middle East [1]
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Date: 2023-12
Our family has lots of old stories set in Palestine. My mum’s dad enjoyed long walks in the beautiful countryside – hikes Palestinians today couldn’t take – when he was posted there before the Second World War. My dad’s parents had their honeymoon there after meeting in Egypt during the war. Both sets of grandparents lost friends when Zionist terrorists blew up the King David Hotel in 1946.
The reason so many British families have similar residual memories is obvious: the crisis in Palestine was made, at least in part, in Britain.
As Nicola Perugini, a senior lecturer in international relations at Edinburgh University, put it to me: “Britain was the original sin.” Perugini previously led the human rights programme at Al Quds University in Jerusalem and lived in Palestine for several years studying the conflict.
When we met in his flat last week, we were less than 20 miles from the childhood home of Arthur Balfour, the former British prime minister whose 1917 declaration as foreign secretary promised Palestinian land to Zionists. Balfour was chancellor of Edinburgh University at the time.
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Perugini argues that, in the Balfour Declaration, Britain “instituted a political right to a community” of Jewish settlers “within the framework of colonial expansion, while denying political rights for the Indigenous Arab population of Palestine”.
“That,” he said, “was the moment that instituted the impossibility of political rights for Palestinians. The history of the last century is a reproduction of that differential inception of rights. Palestinians were entitled, according to Balfour, to civil and religious rights. But [he] didn’t think Palestinians were able to govern themselves.”
Balfour was a Conservative. But the declaration, which was Israel’s conception, was agreed by a British wartime cabinet that included Labour ministers and was led by a Liberal, Lloyd George.
Its effects are still being felt to this day. When 240 Palestinians were released from Israeli cells last month, more than half had faced no trial. Those who had been through some kind of judicial process had seen not a court with a jury of their peers, but a military tribunal where the judge was an Israeli soldier.
West Bank Palestinians arrested, often for little reason, by occupying troops are held indefinitely under a legal process called ‘administrative detention’. This, along with Israel’s powers to bulldoze houses, ban books and newspapers, seal off whole areas and impose curfews, was introduced under emergency laws in 1945 – not by Israel, which didn’t exist, but by Britain, which had taken responsibility for governing Palestine after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War.
Racist assumptions about different peoples’ capacity for self-government were used to justify this colonialism. Palestine was among places described by the League of Nations as “inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world”. Britain, whose empire reached its largest ever extent three years later in 1920, and who wanted a buffer zone to protect the Suez Canal and so the sea route to India, was awarded a mandate to rule “until such time as they are able to stand alone”.
If Israel was conceived by the Balfour Declaration, it was gestated in the following three decades of British rule. Balfour, Perugini explains, “had in mind a hierarchy of races. He starts having an idea that Jews might be the right settlers ‘in-between’ whites and the races which are ‘not capable of governing themselves’.”
When hundreds of thousands of Jews desperately fled the Nazis in the 1930s, Britain refused them entry, just as it had done to Jewish refugees fleeing a wave of pogroms in Russia more than 30 years earlier when Balfour was prime minister. Of course, this meant that many Jewish people ended up in Palestine. Millions more, denied escape routes by Britain and the US, were murdered.
Fearful that British support for a Jewish state in their homeland would permanently dispossess them, Palestinians held a general strike and revolt in the late 1930s, which the British, supported by British-trained Zionist militias, put down by force. Around 5,000 Palestinians were killed, and many more wounded and imprisoned in a violent campaign that included brutal collective punishment. It’s estimated that up to 10% of adult male Palestinians, including most political leaders, were killed, wounded, or detained by the British in response to the uprising, which ended with the start of the Second World War.
After the war, Israel’s birth was bloody. Arab Palestinians and Zionist Jews fought for dominance, with Britain trying to police the two after declaring the mandate would end in 1948. But the Palestinians had been forcibly disarmed by Britain, while Zionist militias had been trained and allowed to arm themselves. And the baby that emerged looked remarkably like its parents: from its unwritten constitution and common-law system to its steep racial hierarchies, Israel is in many ways a beloved child of the British empire.
A path to genocide
In 1956, when Britain and France joined Israel in invading Egypt in what became the Suez crisis, Israeli troops attacked the Gaza Strip – then under Egyptian control – killing a “large number” of civilians (exact figures vary). That year, my nephew’s grandfather, Nahed Al Afranji, was born in Gaza.
The Al Afranjis had lived in Gaza in previous generations, I am told by Nahed’s daughter Dina, who is my nephew’s mum and my brother’s ex-wife. But they had moved 45 miles north to Jaffa (now Tel Aviv) by the time her dad’s five older sisters were born, well before the UN agreed to partition Palestine in 1947.
The proposed carving-up handed the Jewish state 56% of the land and the Arab state 42%, with the remaining 2% – Jerusalem and Bethlehem – staying under international control. But in the civil war the following year, Jewish militias captured the land allocated to them and around 60% of that designated for Arabs and declared independence. One of Dina’s relatives was killed in the violence, and her family was forced to flee to Gaza.
There, Nahed and his brother Talal Al Afranji were born, and the family continued to suffer from Israeli assaults. During its invasion of Egypt in 1956 in the Suez Crisis, Nahed’s father and brother were among men and boys rounded up and forced to squat in agonising positions, hands in the air, in the blazing sun all day. Other members of the family fled to a nearby woodland, where they hid, foraging on leaves, for four days. Others still were forced by Israeli troops to march into the desert and bury the bodies of killed Egyptian troops.
In 1967, when Israeli troops occupied Gaza and the West Bank, Dina’s family fled to another area of the strip. At one point, she told me, her uncle and dad’s school was surrounded by Israeli tanks, with children beaten up by soldiers as they entered or left. The following year, when Nahed’s sister went with their mum to Jordan for a gymnastics competition, the rest of the family decided to briefly join them “until things calmed down”.
They were never allowed back: Israel occupied the Gaza Strip from 1967 until 2005, when it withdrew and instead placed it under siege. Like most Palestinian refugees, they still have the keys to the family home.
Dina’s maternal grandmother Etaf Al Deeb also fled to Jordan in 1948 as a 15-year-old girl, along with her own mother Salam and nine younger siblings. On that journey, a starving Salam was forced to abandon her baby daughter in the woods in the hope of improving the chances of saving her nine other children. The baby survived only because Etaf went back for her, and carried her across the Jordan river. Both sisters are still alive. Neither has ever been allowed to return to their homeland.
Almost 60 years later, I travelled to Jordan, where Dina was born in the 1980s, to watch her marry my brother. There, I stood with her grandmother on the east bank of the River Jordan, now narrowed to a stream by Israeli irrigation, and looked across to the West Bank, a homeland she is not allowed to return to. She wept.
The village where her grandmother had lived in Palestine “doesn’t exist any more,” Dina tells me. “Everyone who didn’t leave was killed.” Israeli historians have recently revealed that it was not uncommon for Israeli militias to sow typhoid bacteria into the wells of the Arab villages they destroyed to ensure anyone who tried to return died.
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[1] Url:
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