The war in Gaza is now in its 11th week after the murder of 1200 Israelis. In their understandable yet ever more insatiable lust for vengeance, the Israelis have wreaked incredible havoc and devastation and killed fifteen times as many innocent Palestinians. And the potential long-term consequences across the world loom ominously in the future. This is yet another example of the British Empire’s pathetic legacy of colonial exits and hubris.
The state of Israel and the occupied territories together are the former Mandatory Palestine, a British protectorate defined by the new League of Nations after WWI that was in place from 1920 to 1948. The British and French, still envisaging themselves as global empires, overcame the League’s Wilsonian ideal of self-determination and carved up the former Ottoman empire for their own financial and strategic needs.
The WWI allies had coveted both Arab and Jewish support, the first for on-the-ground battle support, the second for financial support. They made promises to both about postwar rewards. For the Jews, the promise was for a ‘home’ in the holy land (the Balfour Declaration). For the Arabs it was independence after the departure of the hated Ottomans, who had ruled over them for centuries (the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence).
The Jews, who had been a tiny minority in Palestine up through WWI, began to immigrate in large numbers to Palestine as part of the Zionist Movement. WW2 and the holocaust, as well as a US-imposed limit on Jewish immigration, resulted in huge numbers of Jewish refugees who made their way to Palestine through illegal and legal channels. Arab and Jewish uprisings against the British in the 30’s and 40’s created an untenable situation for the British, who were also struggling to maintain other parts of their empire.
The British imperial arrogance began to rapidly fray at the edges, and they saw the writing on the wall in both India and Palestine. Jewish terrorist attacks on British military and civilians in the mid 1940’s and the impossible task of maintaining order in Palestine accelerated their exit plans.
The newly formed United Nations, strongly influenced by Great Britain and the USA, issued a Partition Plan in 1947 that divided Mandatory Palestine into two distinct areas administered by Jews and Arabs. The plan, which heavily favored the minority Jews, was not accepted by the Arabs. It had no timeline or detailed steps. It was merely a recommendation.
The British, rather than use their diplomatic and military resources to modify and shepherd some form of mutually-acceptable shared governance, essentially stole away in the middle of the night in April and May of 1948, knowing that war would ensue and that they were abandoning the area to eternal conflict. The ensuing declaration of Israeli independence and the Arab-Israeli war of 1947-49 set the stage for the irreconcilable situation we have today.
A few thousand miles away, in what is now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the British made another extremely sloppy and tragic exit, dividing the area into two nations – Hindu majority and Muslim majority - in 1947. Again, the British departed quickly and without making adequate efforts to guide the newly formed states into some sort of peaceful transformation. The result was horrific – the desperate migration of between 14 and 20 million people and over one million deaths from violence, hunger and disease.
There are no doubt multiple other examples of British colonial exits that resulted in massive disruption and decades-long conflict that continue to this day. And Great Britain is not the only culprit. France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and, of course, the United States (our Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan exits to name a few), all have grim legacies of their imperial misdeeds.
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