Due to its imperial past in Palestine, Britain has a moral obligation to help solve the current war in Gaza. But as in numerous other wars, from Iraq to Afghanistan and from Libya to Ireland, it’s contributing to the abuses.
The UN secretary general was vilified in Israel for saying, after criticising Hamas’ horrific onslaught that left 1,400 people dead, that it was important to recognise the massacre on 7 October did not take place in a “vacuum”.
He said the Palestinian people had been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.
Antonio Guterres was right. And that vacuum was left by Britain when it abruptly terminated its mandate for Palestine in 1948.
This led to the expulsion by Jewish militia of at least 700,000 Palestinians from their homeland, an estimated 85 percent of those living in what became the new state of Israel — what Palestinians call the Nakba, “catastrophe”.
In a devastating admission cited in his acclaimed book, One Palestine Complete, Tom Segev quotes a senior British official at the time confessing: “The British had never in fact had a policy for Palestine…No policy at all”.
It is perhaps the worst of many examples of Britain’s abuse of power, of its political and military adventures, the product of exceptionalism, and a combination of arrogance and ignorance, that has cost countless lives, mainly in the Middle East.
As many more thousands continue to die, Britain has a lot to answer for.
