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.
