Britain
Updated 2024-02-23
2023-11-09 When Britain Aided Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine Mark Curtis looks at the current war in Gaza from the perspective of Britain’s imperial past in this edited extract from his book Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam.
After the Second World War British planners were confronted by the outbreak of a Jewish uprising in Palestine, which the U.K. had run since securing a “mandate” from the then League of Nations in 1922. This uprising led to a series of momentous events that shape the present-day Middle East: the British decision in February 1947 to withdraw from Palestine, the U.N.’s decree in November 1947 to partition the territory, the Jewish declaration of the state of Israel in May 1948 and the first Arab–Israeli war, in which Israeli forces annexed much of Palestine by December of that year.
A wave of terrorist attacks was conducted against British forces and Palestinian Arabs, in response to which the British declared martial law, enacted draconian emergency regulations and undertook brutal collective punishments on local Jewish communities. Jewish antagonism towards Britain was shaped partly by London’s policy on Jewish immigration from Germany and elsewhere which, in deference to Arab objections, Britain was now trying to restrict.
During the last three years of the mandate, 40,000 illegal immigrants succeeded in entering Palestine, but shiploads of Jewish refugees regarded as illegal were intercepted at sea. In 1946 the Royal Navy turned back 17 ships carrying refugees to their ports of origin, while MI6 [British foreign intelligence service] was instructed to sabotage some of the transport ships while in port. The policy continued throughout 1947, and by December of that year over 51,000 passengers on 35 ships had been intercepted and interned by the British in Cyprus.
By this time, Clement Attlee’s Labour government had decided to give up on finding its own solution to the rebellion and had resolved to relinquish the mandate and hand the problem over to the recently formed United Nations. Britain now began to promote the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, a policy supported by the Jewish leadership but which immediately undermined the interests of the Palestinians, who at the time made up around two-thirds of the population, compared to one-third of Jews. In November 1947, the U.N. passed General Assembly Resolution 181, partitioning Palestine and awarding the Jews a state that comprised over half the country, against the will of the indigenous, majority population. https://consortiumnews.com/2023/11/09/when-britain-aided-israels-ethnic-cleansing-of-palestine/
2014-10-15 British Parliament Votes Overwhelmingly In Favor Of Recognizing Palestine State, 274-12 Yesterday the British Parliament voted overwhelmingly (274-12) to recognize a Palestinian state, and if you listened to the debate, one theme above all else explains the crushing victory: The British public has been horrified by Gaza and its opinion of Israel has shifted. Even Conservative members of Parliament cited pressure from the public. As Labour’s Andy Slaughter said, Britain has witnessed a new “barbarism”:https://crooksandliars.com/2014/10/british-parliament-votes-overwhelmingly
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Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict
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