Britain and the Nakba: A history of betrayal
Palestinian refugees return to their village after its surrender during the 1948 Arab war against the proclamation of the Israeli State on 15 September 1948
Avi Shlaim writes in Middle East Eye:
Britain created the conditions that made the Palestinian Nakba possible.
In 1948, the Palestinians experienced a collective catastrophe of monumental proportions: some 530 villages were destroyed; more than 62,000 homes were demolished; about 13,000 Palestinians were killed; and 750,000 Palestinians, two-thirds of the Arab population of the country were driven out of their homes and became refugees.
This was the climax of the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
In its essence, Zionism had always been a settler-colonial movement. Its ultimate aim was to build an independent Jewish state in Palestine on as much of the land as possible and with as few Arabs within its borders as possible. Zionist spokesmen constantly reiterated that they meant no harm to the Arab inhabitants of the country, that they wanted to develop the country for the benefit of both communities.
But this was largely rhetoric, kalam fadi in Arabic, empty talk.
The Zionist movement was propelled by the logic of settler colonialism. Settler colonialism is a mode of domination characterised by what historian Patrick Wolfe has termed “a logic of elimination”. Settler colonial regimes seek to extinguish the native people, or at least to extinguish their political autonomy. The elimination of the native people is a precondition for expropriating the land and its natural resources.
Noam Chomsky, the eminent Jewish-American intellectual, observed that “settler colonialism is the most extreme and sadistic form of imperialism”. The hallmark of settler colonialism is ruthlessness and the disregard for law, justice and morality.
The Zionist movement was nothing if not ruthless. It did not plan to cooperate with the native Arab population for the common good. On the contrary, it planned to supplant them. The only way the Zionist project could be realised and maintained was by expelling a large number of Arabs from their homes and taking over their land.
In Zionist jargon, such evictions and expulsions were deceptively referenced and concealed with a softer term – “transfer”.
Path to statehood
Zionist settler colonialism was connected by an umbilical cord to Britain, the pre-eminent European colonial power of the day. Without the support of Britain, the Zionist movement could not have achieved the degree of success that it did in its quest for statehood.
Britain made it possible for its junior partner to embark on the systematic takeover of the country. Yet, the path to statehood was far from smooth. From its inception in the late 19th century, the Zionist movement encountered a major obstacle along its path: the land of its dreams was already inhabited by another people. Britain enabled the Zionists to overcome this obstacle.
On 2 November 1917, Britain issued the notorious Balfour Declaration. Named after Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, it promised British support for the establishment of “a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine”. The purpose of the declaration was to enlist the help of world Jewry in the war effort against Germany and the Ottoman Empire. A caveat was added that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. While the promise was fully fulfilled, the caveat was dropped and forgotten.
In 1917, the area later called Palestine was still under Ottoman rule. The Arabs constituted 90 percent of the population of the country, with the Jews constituting 10 percent and owning only two percent of the land. The Balfour Declaration was a classic colonial document because it accorded national rights to a small minority but merely “civil and religious rights” to the majority.
To add insult to injury, it referred to the Arabs, forming the vast majority of the population, as “the non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. Arab resistance to British rule was inevitable from the start.
There is an Arabic saying that something that starts crooked, remains crooked. In this case, at any rate, it is difficult to see how the British administration of Palestine could be straightened without incurring the wrath of its Zionist beneficiaries.
On 11 August 1919, Balfour wrote in an oft-quoted memorandum: “Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”
In other words, the Arabs did not count while their rights, including their natural right to national self-determination, were dismissed as no more than “desires and prejudices”.