Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
By the mid-30s with the Arab Palestinian revolt now we have
a British white paper that speaks of perhaps two states
on Palestine or in parts of Palestine does that mean that the British started
by then regretting some of the stuff that they were making
in the early part of the century I think in 1937 when you have the report that the
Palestine Royal Commission
that was sent to Palestine to figure out what's going wrong
and what should be the future direction. I think it is hugely significant
that this is the first time that the British start to think about what the end game might be.
Now the Commission plumps for the solution,
the two-state solution, given that the declaration, the "Balfour Declaration"
was issued in 1917
and the British government only seriously considers
where all of this is heading in the long term, in 1937, begs a lot of questions.
Well in between wars the "Balfour Declaration" has been written
into the League of Nations Mandate so under the terms of the Mandate.
The British are supposed to implement it that carry through on the Balfour Declaration
one of the other things they're supposed to do, and didn't do, is to set up
assemblies of the population in
Mandate Palestine for them to participate in the of running their own
affairs and they neglected to do so
Briefly Avi. The British wrote the "Balfour Declaration"
into the terms of the League of Nations Mandate
over Palestine and then it became a legal commitment
but the British realizing in the interwar period that they had made a mistake
they're saddled with these incompatible promises
and they had to some how manage the two conflicting communities
that they had encouraged during the First World War
and there was no solution there was
one land and two people and this was the conflict was about.
The British philosopher Isaiah Berlin compared the British Mandate over Palestine
to a minor British public school where there was a High Commissioner
who was high-minded and fair-minded and wanted
justice for everybody but the assistant masters
were much more sympathetic to
the Arabs then they were to the Jewish
boys who had the irritating habit
of writing letters to their influential
relatives from around the world complaining about everything from the quality of food
to the quality of the teaching. Well they, they may have been
marginally more sympathetic to the Arabs but they were arrogant
towards both. I think that the key thing here is it brings us back to the "Balfour Declaration".
The fact that the British did not define,
did not define what a national home was
and there's a reason for that, the reason being is that first of all
the "Balfour Declaration" was issued primarily
for concerns outside of Palestine during the war but
also the British assumed that they could easily manage what they ~decide~,
what they thought was mainstream Zionism which was non-statist Zionism
they also ~thought~, they made another significant error,
in that they thought that the Palestinians were not a nation and would eventually
accept Zionism, because they thought that the Zionist and the Jews were Quasi-Europeans, not real Europeans, Quasi-Europeans, almost white, but not quite.
They became more European when they went to Palestine I guess.
More European but never quite. Before we end I just need to finish
finish up with 1947. Avi, so here we have recently a new
classified information or documents released and I think
here the Guardian in April 26 says that the British government
knew from the moment it planned to withdraw its forces from Palestine
more than 60 years ago in 1947, that partition of the territory and the
founding of the State of Israel would lead to war
and the defeat of the Arabs as a secret documents revealed
So actually their departure was as controversial as their arrival in Palestine.
Yes and as dishonest
as their arrival in Palestine because
during the twilight of the British
Mandate they also played a double game
officially they disengaged. There was a UN
partition plan to partition Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish state and
an Arab state
and the British refused to implement
this UN resolution so they stood back
but they knew full-well as the documents reveal
that there would be a war and that the Arabs would lose
and that the Jews will come out on top. But we shouldn't leave the impression
that they wanted that war
Hold that thought Rosemary.
These were the Days of Empire as it were, we will take a news break
and when we come back
will discuss more about the British and Israeli narratives.
Israeli narrative Avi, So here we have a narrative that says look
This is a persecuted people who came back to the
home of their forefathers, they were attacked by
huge number of Arabs and armies
and they miraculoulys won their independence
what is right and what is wrong with this narrative.
This is the standard Zionist narrative
about the origins and the course of
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and
it portrays the Jews as the victims
of this conflict but in the final outcome
it was the Palestinians who were the victims
there is a large
Zionist historiography about this conflict
which elaborates on this narrative
but in the late-1980s
a new group of Israeli historians emerge
Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, And you are one of them ?
and myself, I'm one of them, and with the help of
Israeli and British and American and UN documents
we mounted a frontal assault on all the legends
that have come to surround the 1948 war
and the birth of Israel. So why do the old historians
refer to you as not new and not historians
Because they don't like the conclusions
that we have reached in our rewriting of the history of 1948
on the basis of the new evidence. So let's take for example the idea that
Israel was attacked by a number of Arab armies
and they have miraculously won the war of independence against them.
Okay, well the Israeli narrative says
that the whole of the Arab world was united
behind a clear war aim, which is
to throw the Jews into the sea
and to strangle the infant Jewish state
at birth but if you look at the Arab coalition
that invaded Palestine on the 5th of May 1948
which consisted of five Arabs, the regular armies of five
Arab states plus irregular Palestinian forces
you'll see that it's the most bitterly divided
disorganized and ramshackle coalition in the history of warfare
and there was no united Arab war aim.
Certainly the Syrians and the Jordanians weren't united. They were actually afraid of one another.
Yes, There was a rivalry between
Egypt and the Hashemite countries ruled by
Hashemite rulers in
Iraq and trans-Jordan. Lebanon
and Syria were afraid of King
Abdullah's project and ambition for Greater Syria
to incorporate Lebanon and Syria in his kingdom.
So the very very different agendas in this conflict.
What about a people without a land
going to a land without a people. I think its perhaps worth dwelling on for a
moment on the profound connection of what we were talking about before which
is the British connection
to the evolution of the conflict and Zionist mythology and also Palestinian
mythology.
The mainstream
idea sense of things
is that actually that the British betrayed Zionism
and on the other hand of mainstream
Palestinian view and Arab view is that the
the British colluded with the Zionist but I think its very important
nonetheless
that we don't fall into this trap of going one side or another
that we acknowledge that there was also profound ambivalence
amongst the British about the Zionist project
right up until the end of the Mandate I think there's a continuity between
Ernest Bevin the British Foreign Secretary who was directing Palestine
policy
at the end of the mandate and his fear that a Jewish state would become a
satellite for the Soviet Union
and feared Jewish communism and I think its
important that we avoid the trap of falling into
two very straightforward nice and simple narratives that really derive from
the beginnings of the mandate in the 1920s
onwards about the British were the good guys or the British were the bad guys.
Well the British themselves obviously have their narrative and it's different
from the other two
and it it basically
as with all national narratives is about vindicating the establishment
especially the establishment of the day and today it's too embarrassing
by half to acknowledge that the British may have had
a profound role in creating the mess
that has continued as a conflict ever since
but its very difficult for
all of us to identify any one moment
at which you could say that that
this is the moment for which they must make the biggest apology
because. So shall we hold our breaths or is it coming
the apology. Well once they apologize for one little piece
of the story then what happens to the whole of the rest of the story are
they supposed to apologize for Empire
are they supposed to apologize for what they thought was trying to keep the
two sides apart
in a civil war they described Israeli-Palestinian
or Jewish Arab conflict as
a war between the locals and they
gave up trying to separate them and I think to this day
the tendency has been not only in London but also
in other European capitals to to put
the major onus on both the Israelis and the Palestinians for the continuation of
the conflict
they don't want to go back into history for a variety of reasons. I would like to put
Isn't it up to the case
that ruling of the High Court in October 2012 about the case being brought
against the British government in relation
to the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya which is opened a can of worms its no coincidence
that since then
But its also this compensation Yes and they now have
the right to bring a case against the government its no coincidence that we also now
also have
a campaign that's been put forward by the Palestinian Refugee Center in London
for
an apology for the Balfour Declaration and British
colonial rule in Palestine. I would like to
assign to Britain a share of the responsibility
for the Nakba and James mentioned
Ernest Bevin the Labor's Foreign Secretary
Bevin once said that the Balfour Declaration
was the worst mistake in
Western foreign policy in the first half
of the 20th century
but he was in power after the war
after the Second World War and he was not moved by any sentiments
he was an imperial policy
maker and there is
a debate one of the main bones of contention between
the old historians and the new historians
is British policy towards the end of the
Mandate, the old historians say that the British,
Britain was activated inspired
by strong anti-Zionist and even anti-Semitic
sentiments and that Britain's policy
was to arm and to encourage
its Arab allies to invade Palestine
and put an end to the Zionist
project. The
new historians perspective
on British policy is rather different Ilan Pappé was
the first to challenge the Zionist account
and he claimed
that the key to British policy
towards the end of the Mandate was not
pro-Israeli or-pro Arab it was
pro-British. British imperial interests
and the key was Greater trans-Jordan
in 1947--1948 there was a tacit agreement
between King Abdullah of trans-Jordan and the Zionist leaders
to partition Palestine between themselves at the expense
of the Palestinians and this is what happened
in the end and a subsidiary argument
is that Britain knew and approved
of this collusion across the Jordan
because the British saw a Palestinian state
is synonymous with the Mufti state and the Mufti was a renegade
and hostility to the Mufti and a Palestinian state
was a constant factor in British policy throughout this period.