1938, Bethlehem, Palestine: Arab youths with sticks and clubs cheering the burning of the police barracks and post office. Photo Everett Collection Historical/Alamy Stock Photo.
In the Middle East, as elsewhere, the British ruling class sought to justify its interference in other peoples’ countries by blaming them for any troubles…
Britain occupied Palestine from 1923 in the aftermath of World War One and the carve up of the Ottoman Empire by imperialist powers – the League of Nations Mandate.
But, as Albert Einstein told an Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry on Palestine in 1946, “It was the British presence that perpetuated the troubles, not, as received opinion had it, the troubles that perpetuated the need for a British presence.”
In February and March 1936, Britain’s Parliament rejected a legislative council of Palestine. The Palestinian people responded with a general strike, demanding a national government. In September, the British government sent more troops and then imposed martial law. The Palestinian people rebelled. By the end, over 5,000 Arabs had been killed and 14,000 wounded. 101 British troops and 463 Jews had been killed.
National liberation
The British aim was to use the Zionist movement to break the Palestinian people’s national liberation struggle. The Zionists soon became unwilling to serve Britain’s imperial interests. They too sought to create a state, a struggle that also undermined the British Empire. Britain’s rulers opposed the creation of either an Arab or a Jewish state in Palestine. They wanted to stay as long as possible, to keep their military bases there, and to keep control of the country’s oil interests in the Middle East.
In 1947, Attlee’s government, overstretched financially and strategically, had to pull out its 100,000 troops, leaving the US government to dominate the region. The Zionists received strong backing from the US government. Their forces seized 80 per cent of Palestine, including half the land allotted by international agreement to the Arabs, forcibly evicting 800,000 people.
Connived
The British state connived at the Israeli onslaught. It had promised independence to the people of Palestine, but instead helped their dispossession and exile. The colonisation of Palestine was a disaster for the Palestinians. It was no consolation that their national liberation struggle effectively broke British power in the Middle East.
‘The British state promised independence to the people of Palestine, but instead helped their dispossession and exile…’
In July 1956, the US government unilaterally reneged on its agreement to lend Egypt the money to build the Aswan Dam. The British government tamely followed suit. Egypt replied by nationalising the Suez Canal Company to raise the funds, as allowed in international law.
British Prime Minister Anthony Eden tabled unacceptable motions at the United Nations to produce deadlock. He then claimed that there was no choice but war.
On 29 October, Israeli forces attacked Egypt. The next day, British and French forces invaded Egypt, and demanded that the Egyptians and the Israelis withdraw from the canal. They were ordering the Egyptians to withdraw from their own territory, while allowing Israeli invasion forces to remain ninety miles inside Egypt. The Egyptians refused to withdraw. Eden then ordered the RAF to bomb Egypt’s airfields.
The British government used its veto at the UN, for the first time, to block a Security Council Resolution demanding that Israel withdrew its troops.
Cease-fire
In November a demonstration in Trafalgar Square against the war was so huge that it spilled down Whitehall and filled all the streets leading off it. As a result of the opposition, the Cabinet forced Eden to call a cease-fire. The “mad imperialist gamble” (in the words of the foreign affairs’ minster, Anthony Nutting, who then resigned) was over. 1,500 Egyptians were killed and wounded. Four British and five French soldiers were killed.
British and French forces were ousted at once, Israel’s four months later. The war destroyed the British Empire’s position in the Middle East and strengthened Egypt’s independence, the results it was intended to prevent.
On 4 June 1967, the Israeli government, knowing it had the backing of the US and British governments, decided to attack Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Menachem Begin, who fought the British in the 1940s and later became prime minster admitted, “The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us…We decided to attack him.”
Israeli forces invaded Syria and seized the Golan Heights – after Syria had accepted a ceasefire. Israeli forces seized land from Egypt and Jordan too.
On 22 November 1967, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 242 demanding as the prime condition for peace that Israel withdraw from occupied Arab lands. It never has.
The Palestinians have long recognised Israel’s right “to exist in peace and security”, but Israeli governments have always refused to reciprocate.
The peoples of Israel and Palestine have to work out how to achieve the necessary settlement, on their own, rebuffing the outside interference that has for so long held back progress towards peace. That is the only way to end a war in which too many politicians on both sides appear to want to destroy the other people entirely.
US and British interventions have inflamed, not resolved, the conflict. Outside attempts to achieve a solution to war by backing one people against another will always fail. We must press that Britain not be involved in wars abroad, that our people are not divided into factions clashing over foreign wars, and that we unite to focus on Britain.