RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/30/israel-an-anti-colonial-triumph/

The history of the conflict between Israel and Palestine has become a contest of one-sided interpretations and outright myths. For Israelis, Palestine was never a country. For Palestinians and their supporters in the West, Israel is an illegitimate settler-colonial state.

There is perhaps no historical moment that has been more distorted by such mythmaking than 1948, the year the British colonial ‘mandate’ ended and the modern state of Israel was founded. It was a moment of celebration for the Zionist movement, which had finally realised its dream of a Jewish homeland. But it was a moment of misery for Arabs. Indeed, it is remembered as a ‘catastrophe’ or ‘disaster’ – the Nakba. In their telling, it was the moment when hundreds of thousands were exiled to refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank and in Lebanon and Syria.

To Arabs, Britain has often been portrayed as the midwife to the Israeli victory. ‘The British and the Jews defeated us’, said one prominent refugee at the time. The Brits gave ‘their weapons to the Jews’, said another. According to Palestinian artist Ismail Shammout, British support for Zionism was a conspiracy (1). The Arabs of Palestine were certainly right to conclude that history had defeated them. But the nature of that defeat has long been mischaracterised as a British-Jewish collaboration, when nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, after the Second World War, the Jews fought a war of national liberation against Britain, the ruling colonial power. They forced Britain to withdraw from the then British Mandate for Palestine, which it had ruled over since the 1920s. In the fighting between Arabs and Jews in 1948, Britain did not support the Jews. Britain was actually involved in arming the Arab forces and even fighting alongside them in an attempt to limit the Zionist victory.

This shouldn’t be all that surprising. Britain’s alliance with the Arabs began in the First World War, when Colonel TE Lawrence – otherwise known as Lawrence of Arabia – allied with Sharif Hussein in a revolt against the Ottoman Empire (which was allied with Germany). The Arab Revolt ended Ottoman rule over the Middle East in 1918. After the war, in 1922, the League of Nations eventually gave Britain the mandate over Palestine (including ‘East Palestine’, which is today Jordan). This kickstarted more than 20 years of contested British rule in the Holy Land.

There had been a Jewish minority in Palestine for millennia. But its numbers had been growing during the 19th and 20th centuries, as refugees fled anti-Semitic persecution in Europe. As a result, by the interwar years, Jews in the area were becoming a numerical and political threat not just to British rule, but also to Arab aspirations to the land.

Britain’s colonial rulers saw Arab and Jewish nationalism as equal threats, and they governed by keeping the two communities divided. When Arabs challenged colonial rule, as they did in the 1930s, Britain collaborated with the Jewish community. And when Jews challenged colonial rule, especially from 1946 onwards, Britain collaborated with Arabs to keep the Jews down.

Arab historians have not seen it this way. In their eyes, Britain always favoured Zionism – as was evidenced in British foreign secretary AJ Balfour’s ‘declaration’ in a letter to Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, that ‘His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. To Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi, this – the famous Balfour Declaration – was proof that Britain ‘incorporated Zionism as an integral part of its postwar imperial strategy for the Middle East’.

However, the Balfour Declaration was only one of many promises Britain made to get support for the British Mandate. Lieutenant colonel Sir Henry McMahon had also promised Sharif Hussein an Arab homeland. And the Balfour Declaration itself insisted that ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’. Put simply, Britain had made many contradictory promises to win acceptance of its colonial rule.

According to British Jordanian commander John Bagot Glubb, ‘a great Arab state extending from Anatolia to the Indian Ocean had been the vision of the British government in 1916’, a proposal he argued had been revived ‘in a different form’ in 1945. That was the year Britain brokered the founding of the Arab League, persuading Egypt to join Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan and Yemen in a new pan-Arab front. This would be the force – in the shape of the Arab Liberation Army – that attacked the newly founded state of Israel in 1948.

General Sir Richard Gale was commander of the British Army’s First Infantry Division in the Middle East from the beginning of 1946 and throughout the so-called Palestine Emergency, when Zionist forces took the British on. In his 1968 autobiography, Gale made no bones about where his sympathies lay: ‘I was not a Jew and never a Zionist.’ Gale loathed the Jewish settlers, writing that ‘there was a hardiness about the men and women that was almost repellent’ (2). No doubt, his prejudices had been reinforced by the actions of the militants of the Zionist underground, dominated by the paramilitaries of Irgun and the Stern Gang. They ‘had only one object’, recalled Gale, ‘which was by acts of terrorism to undermine British authority and by these methods to gain a Jewish state in Palestine’. Gale described the Jewish settlers as ‘a grim, determined people, working on the soil, training in secret with their arms, sullen and resentful’ (3).

By contrast, Gale wrote that the Arabs ‘seemed happy’, their ‘philosophy was an easy-going one’ and ‘their good manners and their natural hospitality made them attractive and charming people to deal with’ (4). Gale’s generous view of the Arabs, like his loathing for the Jews, was likely informed by the facts on the ground during his posting. After all, at that point, the Jews were in rebellion and the Arabs were working with the British. ‘It’s the way the pendulum swings’, said one British officer at the time: ‘In the first years the Jews were our friends and the Arabs our enemies.’ (5)

This historical reality is lost on today’s so-called anti-imperialists. They never acknowledge that in the mid-1940s – up until 1948 – it was the Zionists who were challenging the British Empire, not the Palestinians. The Jewish underground fought an intense war of attrition against Britain, which responded with fierce repression. In 1947, 20,000 troops from the Sixth Airborne Division were sent to reinforce the British presence in Palestine, increasing its number to fully 100,000 (6).

On 22 July 1946, the Irgun group bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, whose upper stories housed the British Army headquarters. Ninety-one people were killed. The ‘time had come to stop talking and resort to action’, recalled Gale. Mass arrests followed, many Zionists were put in concentration camps, ‘for screening purposes’, and hundreds of Jews were exiled to camps in East Africa (7).

Under Gale, the British Army also blockaded Tel Aviv, which was placed under martial law in an attempt to force Jews to give up their leaders. In July 1947, three Irgun fighters were sentenced to death. In retaliation, the Jewish underground abducted two British sergeants and hung them from a tree – their bodies were booby-trapped so that another officer was injured cutting them down. At the same time, Gale put the city of Natanya under martial law.

The violence in the Middle East even spilled over into Britain as anti-Jewish mobs attacked synagogues and homes in Liverpool and Manchester. Early in 1947, the Stern Gang blew up the Colonial Club in central London. Back in Israel, in May, Irgun broke 250 prisoners out of the supposedly impregnable Acre prison. Tory MP and former colonial secretary Oliver Stanley demanded that the government take action against the Zionist militias.

But by then, the writing was on the wall for Britain’s imperial ambitions in the Middle East. The Zionist insurgency had shaken the British Empire to its foundations. And so, reluctantly, the British government announced that it would give up the mandate on 15 May 1948. Senior military figures like Gale and Glubb viewed it as a colossal mistake. One made worse by the fact that Britain’s geopolitical rival, Soviet Russia, was backing Israeli independence.

By early 1948, the catastrophe that was about to overtake the Arabs of Palestine was coming into view. Jordan’s prime minister, Tawfik Abu al-Huda, warned Britain’s foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, in the spring of 1948 that while ‘the Jews had prepared a government which would be able to take power as soon as the mandate was terminated… the Palestine Arabs had made no preparations to govern themselves’. Huda told Bevin that the Jordanian Arab Legion, an army built up as a local militia of the British under lieutenant general Glubb, and part of the Arab Liberation Army, would cross over into Palestine and ‘occupy that part of Palestine awarded to the Arabs’. Bevin replied that ‘it seems the obvious thing to do’, but urged the Arab Legion ‘not to invade the areas allotted to the Jews’. In effect, the British foreign secretary was giving his blessing to Arab States to invade Palestine as Britain left, so as to ensure the province remained divided. Britain’s ambassador to Jordan, Alec Kirkbride, said that Jordan annexing Nablus and Hebron ‘was the logical solution’ (8).

The Arab Legion planned to attack the Jews once the British had left. Britain resupplied the Arab Legion’s munitions just before the attack on the Jews, with eight 25-pounder guns arriving in February 1948. ‘Each battery was commanded by a British officer’, joining those already seconded or directly serving in the Arab Legion, like brigadier Norman Lash and Glubb himself. Glubb thought that ‘the British regular officers were the keystone of the whole edifice’ (9). Britain had also armed the Egyptian and Iraqi forces and used British facilities to refuel the Egyptian aircraft, but with less enthusiasm (10). Britain also flew reconnaissance flights and risked being drawn into the war directly when the Israeli air force downed a Mosquito aircraft over Israel in November 1948. By contrast, the Zionists could only get their guns from the Soviet bloc – and even then, not directly from the USSR, but surreptitiously supplied through Czechoslovakia, or on the black market.

When the Arab Liberation Army attacked in May 1948, Glubb’s Arab Legion had a decisive impact on the fighting. On 18 May, the legion entered Jerusalem where 100,000 Jews were fighting their Arab neighbours. By 28 May, the Jews had surrendered their foothold in the Old Town. The rest of the Arab Liberation Army, including the Egyptian, Iraqi and Syrian forces, fought badly. ‘Seven Arab States declare war in Palestine, stop impotent before it, and then turn on their heels’, wrote Syrian diplomat Constantine Zurayk, in The Meaning of the Disaster (11).

The Arab Legion itself was undone when the British government, under pressure from the United Nations and the United States, ordered British officers seconded to it to step down. Renewed fighting saw the Israel Defence Forces, formed in 1948, reverse the Arab Legion’s successes in Judea and Samaria (as the West Bank was known then). When the fighting stopped in March 1949, Israel held more territory than had been allotted it in either the British or the UN partition plans, including West Jerusalem – but not the Old City, where Jews were excluded and synagogues desecrated, until Israel took it back in 1967.

Before 1948, Zionist attacks had mostly been directed against the British Army and police. After the Arab Liberation Army attacks in 1948, the Israelis succumbed to sectarianism, attacking Arab villages and driving out their residents. This was the peak of the Nakba, the disaster. At Deir Yassin, the worst massacre, Irgun guerillas killed 140 villagers. At the time, it was thought 400,000 were expelled. By 1956 the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) put the figure at 900,000.

Today, the estimates are even higher. The Nakba has been foregrounded by Palestinian nationalists and their supporters over the past couple of decades, a self-conscious attempt to both demonise Israel and to rival the Jewish State’s commemoration of the Holocaust. The disaster of 1948 is used primarily to suggest that Israel was founded in an act of violence against the Arabs of Palestine.

Yet, despite the frequent invocation of the Nakba, it is clearly not very well understood. The reason that there is an Israel and not a Palestine is not that Jews defeated the Palestinians. It is because the Jews defeated the British Empire in a war of national liberation, between 1946 and 1947. It was British imperialism that faced disaster in 1947, but it was the Arabs who paid for it in 1948, when Britain backed the Arabs, with arms and British officers.

Anti-Israel activists may today try to present Israel as a ‘settler-colonial state’. But its founding, forged in the heat of anti-colonial struggle, shows it was anything but.