[ It is this commonality that firmly establishes that the British
Empire policies are the root cause of the violence in these regions;
there are simply too many instances of these conflicts being traced
back to the empire to imagine a coincidence.]
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THE BRITISH ROOTS OF THE CONFLICT IN PALESTINE  
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Saurav Sarkar
November 10, 2023
The Bullet
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_ It is this commonality that firmly establishes that the British
Empire policies are the root cause of the violence in these regions;
there are simply too many instances of these conflicts being traced
back to the empire to imagine a coincidence. _

The Balfour Declaration,

 

Israeli flags are flying [[link removed]]
over all government buildings in the United Kingdom currently, but
this isn’t the first time the former imperial hegemon has put its
weight behind Zionism. In 1917, the British government issued the
infamous Balfour Declaration
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document – 67 words
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point in modern Palestinian history. It committed Great Britain to
establishing a “national home” for Jewish people in Palestine.
(The initial language promised a “Jewish state,” but was changed
later.) The Balfour Declaration contained language that was meant to
safeguard Palestinians, but we have seen how that has played out in
the ensuing century.

From World War I to 1948, the British ruled Palestine, the bulk of
that time under a mandate
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League of Nations [[link removed]].
The population of Jewish settlers in Palestine increased
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these decades – particularly the 1930s – as the British government
fostered their immigration. In 1922, only 11 percent
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Jewish. By 1931, the figure was up to about 17 percent. By 1939, it
was almost 30 percent.

Origins of Colonial Project

At that point, the British government sought to limit
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further expansion of the Jewish population in order to ensure
stability in the region. But by then, it was too late – the facts on
the ground had changed. What had been a region that was almost 90
percent
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Palestinian had become a contested land between two demographically
numerous groups. Moreover, the British had confiscated land from
Palestinians
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to hand it over to Jewish people and engaged in violent repression of
incipient Palestinian nationalism. And in the 1930s, a British
government commission [[link removed]]
recommended that Palestine be partitioned, laying the groundwork for
the failed “two-state solution
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In other words, this conflict is the product of specific imperial
policies that were practiced in the first half of the 20th century to
foster a colonial project. The “Jewish question” – Europe’s
longstanding inability to adequately address its own antisemitism –
was made into Palestinians’ Zionist problem by the British Empire.

One of the key features of British rule was to play different groups
against each other. One of the key methods adopted by them over the
course of centuries and a global collection of provinces was to study
the social history of their subjects to manage the politics and play
different groups against each other.

The support for Jewish migration to Palestine triggered resentment and
mobilization by Indigenous Palestinians, eventually leading to the
Great Revolt of 1936-1939
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included a general strike and peasant uprising, was violently
repressed
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by the British government in collaboration with Zionist
paramilitaries. However, after the revolt, the British began to limit
further Jewish immigration to the region, turning against the group
they had supported in order to protect their imperial interests. This
led to violent attacks by Zionists in Palestine
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Divide and Rule

Palestine is not alone in this fate. In region after region, the
British used strategies of “divide and rule” to pit one people
against another for the benefit of the empire. In British India, they
pushed
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the Hindu-Muslim divide, sometimes favoring one population, sometimes
the other. In Cyprus, they pitted
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the Greeks against the Turks. In Sri Lanka, it was the Tamils against
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the Sinhalese. In Ireland, it was the Catholics against
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Protestants. The list goes on.

In all of these places, the supposedly “ancient” politics of
intergroup conflict have persisted beyond when the sun set on the
British Empire. There have been territorial divides based on ethnicity
and/or religion. British India became India and Pakistan. Pakistan was
then further subdivided into Pakistan and Bangladesh. Ireland was
split up into the Republic of Ireland and the UK’s Northern Ireland.
Cyprus is divided in two, and its legal status is still unresolved
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Sinhalese-dominated Sri Lanka, a 30-year civil war waged
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Tamil state, which ended in 2009 in a similar fashion to what we are
witnessing in Gaza today. And in 1948, Palestine was formally
partitioned, establishing a Zionist state and what was meant to be a
Palestinian one, with the blessing of the former British rulers who
oversaw the beginning of the Nakba
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Each of these places has been marked with violent conflict based on
“ancient” hatreds that can be traced to the last one or two
centuries. It is this commonality that firmly establishes that the
British Empire policies are the root cause of the violence in these
regions; there are simply too many instances of these conflicts being
traced back to the empire to imagine a coincidence.

While the proximate causes of Israeli apartheid, occupation, and
genocide clearly lie squarely at the feet of Israel and its chief
sponsor the United States, the United Kingdom has a special
responsibility to make right its historical sins in Palestine – and
everywhere else. A minimal first step would be to work to stop the
current genocide instead of waving an Israeli flag. But this – let
alone reparations – does not seem to be on the table. •

This article was produced by Globetrotter
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Saurav Sarkar is a freelance movement writer, editor, and activist
living in Long Island, New York.

 

* British imperialism
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* Palestine
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