British Colonial Rule
The British Mandate
The mandate lasted until 1947; during this period the British colonial state proposed a constitutional framework which effectively stripped the Palestinian native population of any meaningful say over the future of their country and deprived them of means to control or stop the influx of Jewish settlers into the country. From the very outset Palestinian notable leadership opposes the terms of the British mandate and attempted to negotiate with the imperial power. Popular protest and opposition increased over time and culminated in the 1936-1939 Great Revolt, the first widespread, organized Palestinian popular resistance. However, with an overwhelming military power and over 20,000 armed forces, the British eventually crushed the Palestinian anti-colonial revolt. At the same time, during this period the British also began arming Zionist forces in the thousands.
In 1947 Britain washed its hands and handed responsibility for the fate of Palestine over to the newly formed successor to the League of Nations, the United Nations. Ignoring the fact that waves of Jewish immigration in the post-war years had skewed the demographic make-up so that rather than 90 percent, as at the start of the mandate, the Palestinian majority had shrunk to two-thirds of the population, the UN partition plan nevertheless proposed that over 50 percent of the land of Palestine should be partitioned and allocated to form a “Jewish” state. The partition plan was effectively a colonial solution to the question of Palestine, which for all intent and purposes sanctioned the displacement of the Palestinians indigenous population from their lands to provide a state for European Jews. The partition plan, UN Resolution 181, was accepted by the Zionist leadership, and rejected by the Palestinians who refused to acquiesce to their marginalization and displacement in their own land.
Two weeks after the UN partition plan was adopted in November 1947, the ethnic cleansing operations began and Zionist forces began expelling Palestinians from the area allocated to the Jewish state. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine thus began and was conducted under the eyes of the British, carried out while the British colonial forces were still in the country. In May 1948, when the last British forces left Palestine, one third of the Palestinian population had already been expelled from their homes by the Zionists paramilitary forces.
Contemporary British Role
Britain has been among Israel’s staunchest supporters, especially in the years after 1948 and until the war in 1967. In the post 1948 period, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, upon which the Israeli state was created, was absent in western consciousness and still remains an “unrecognizable episode” in the west. Israel was then widely seen as a little state surrounded by a “sea of enemies” and worldwide sympathy for the Jewish people allowed Israel effectively unlimited political capital. Israeli and British collusion in starting a war with Egypt in 1956 to strike a blow at Egyptian President Jamal Abdel Nasser – the Suez Crisis – was evidence of this close relationship. That war, however, and the role the US played in ending it and reversing its results back in favor of Egypt, also marked the end of Britain’s effective influence in the Middle East.
Popular perceptions in Britain, as in the rest of the world, changed only slowly. The Israeli occupation of the rest of mandate Palestine in 1967, its subsequent oppression of Palestinians in the occupied territories, and, perhaps decisively, the Palestinian popular uprising against the occupation that started in 1987, has gradually swung British popular sympathy toward the Palestinians. The British government however has been slow to respond, and its policies continue to be pro-Israeli. Primarily, Britain, as with most countries in the world, focus their efforts almost exclusively on the Israeli occupation that started in 1967, ignoring the underlying core of the Nakba. But even vis-à-vis the 1967 occupation Britain has failed to take a clear and unequivocal position in line with international law.