Britain has learned nothing from Palestine The Gaza war has deepened British sectarianism

When I walk to my local supermarket in north Belfast, the journey takes me through a Catholic, Nationalist area, marked by Palestinian flags, to the edge of a Protestant, Loyalist area, where Israeli flags flutter, alongside Union flags, from the terraced houses. The 10-minute walk takes me from an area where the British state is an alien imposition to one where it is the wellspring of ethnic self-definition: for both communities, the Israel-Palestine conflict serves as a useful symbolic proxy for this suppressed ethnic rivalry. The supermarket itself is on neutral ground: it sits on what was once Victorian terraced housing, whose rezoning as a retail park “definitively separated and segregated [the] two areas whilst also decisively prohibiting any further future expansion of Catholic territory”. On a local level, as well as a national one, demographic change, and the shifting power relationships it betokens, is one of the central drivers of ethnic conflict.

While this dynamic may seem exotically Irish to mainland British eyes, it shouldn’t. The discourse surrounding the Gaza war has, over the past year, become markedly unmoored from the causes and conduct of the war itself, instead becoming a safe, symbolic means for a newly multiethnic British polity to express its own domestic demographic anxieties and aspirations. For the Conservative influencer Bella Wallersteiner, pro-Palestine demonstrations sparked her Damascene conversion from advocacy for mass immigration to the view that “multiculturalism has failed” and “migrant numbers will need to come down”. When Kemi Badenoch wished to stake her claim as the champion of newly sensible immigration policy, remarking that “we cannot be naïve and assume immigrants will automatically abandon ancestral ethnic hostilities at the border”, the example she chose to make her case, rather than anything centred on Britain, was “the number of recent immigrants to the UK who hate Israel”.

Conversely, Labour MPs electorally threatened by the pro-Gaza vote among ethnic Mirpuri constituents emphasise their pro-Palestinian credentials, to the extent that Jess Phillips made the remarkable, if improbable, claim that an ethnic Palestinian NHS doctor gave her preferential treatment to reward her stance. Baroness Warsi’s self-expulsion from the Conservative Party was the consequence of calling Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman “coconuts” — that is, race traitors — for supporting Israel. While the cultural logic of her claim is incomprehensible, it is another striking example of the sorting of British party politics along ethnic and sectarian lines in which the Palestine conflict, for reasons that remain stubbornly unarticulated, has become a major dividing line.

There is a natural tribal logic for British Muslims to feel aggrieved by the suffering of their co-religionists in Gaza, just as there is for the Chief Rabbi to condemn the halting of Britain’s arms sales to Israel: whether the increased domestic salience of Middle Eastern wars is healthy for British politics or the British people generally is now beside the point. In a culturally diverse democracy, the forms of party organisation inevitably take on an ethnic or confessional cast, as groups compete to maximise their collective advantage, and parties compete to cater to the rival voter blocs. In the United States, this dynamic is more or less formalised, despite the official “melting pot” rhetoric: if anything, it is most pronounced in Washington’s “natsec” sphere, as members of diaspora groups compete to wield the empire’s military power in pursuit of their own group interests.

In Britain, the ongoing sorting along ethnic and sectarian lines rather than the racial categories of popular discourse — with Hindus and Nigerians leaning towards the Conservatives and Muslims and West Indians to Labour (both reflected in Cabinet choices and policy decisions) — remains only tacitly recognised. As the renowned sociologist of ethnic conflict Donald L. Horowitz put it, in a divided society “the election is a census, and the census is an election”, just as we see in Northern Ireland. Britain is not so dissimilar to Northern Ireland after all — nor are Palestine flags hanging from lampposts in Stepney markedly different, in their symbolic meaning, to Israeli ones flying on the Shankill.

There is a dark historical irony, then, in Conservative critics of mass immigration simultaneously presenting themselves as Israel’s strongest supporters. The process by which most of Mandate Palestine became the State of Israel was after all the direct consequence of immigration policies enabled by Westminster officials, who set in train, as the Israeli historian Benny Morris observes, “a demographic-geographic contest the Arabs were destined to lose”. From a tenth of Palestine’s population when Britain assumed the Mandate in 1918, Jews made up a fifth by 1931 due to immigration from Europe. By the time of the 1948 war, and the forced expulsion of the Palestinians, Jews comprised a third of Palestine’s population, and owned 5% of the country’s land. “Palestinians now saw themselves inexorably turning into strangers in their own land”, the Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi records, but were given no democratic recourse to opposing this vast and irreversible upheaval, carried out over just 30 years: “This was still the high age of colonialism, when such things being done to native societies by Westerners were normalized and described as ‘progress.’”

Yet even as the Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion observed that “immigration at the rate of 60,000 a year means a Jewish state in all Palestine”, British officials soothed angry and worried Palestinian leaders with false claims that mass immigration would not harm their collective interests, but would instead boost Palestine’s economy. Responding to Emir Abdullah of Transjordan’s complaint that British officials “appeared to think men could be cut down and transplanted in the same way as trees”, then Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill assured him that only “a very slow process” of immigration was envisaged. “There really is nothing for the Arabs to be frightened about,” Churchill would tell Parliament after violent Palestinian riots in 1921. The Zionists themselves were more realistic. As David Ben-Gurion observed, the Palestinian rioters were “fighting dispossession… [their] fear is not of losing land, but of losing the homeland of the Arab people, which others want to turn into the homeland of the Jewish people”. As the Revisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky dispassionately remarked of Palestinian rioting: “every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised.”

Yet British officials disagreed. Palestinian objections were merely the result, as the Balfour Declaration had it, of Arab “prejudices” and antisemitism. Riots, when they occurred, as they began to with increasing frequency and violence, were stoked by malign agitators, and did not reflect popular Palestinian sentiment. Following the bloody 1929 riots, Whitehall’s Shaw Commission blamed “excited and intemperate articles” and “propaganda among the less-educated Arab people of a character calculated to incite them” for the violence, while urging that “machinery should be devised through which non-Jewish interests could be consulted on the subject of immigration”. This was a partial sop to Palestinian opinion, though as Rashid Khalidi notes, throughout the British mandate the Palestinians were never referred to as such in official discourse — they “were not even thought of as a people per se” instead merely termed “communities” or “the non-Jewish population”, the better to detach them from any claim to their own ancestral land. Even so, in a dissent to the Shaw Commission’s report, the British Fabian Henry Snell asserted that Palestinian “fears are exaggerated and that on any long view of the situation the Arab people stand to gain rather than to lose from Jewish enterprise”, proposing that Palestinian and Jewish community leaders come together, over sporting events and other government-backed initiatives,“to unite Arab and Jew in the task of building up a happy and prosperous land”.

History was to prove Snell and Whitehall wrong, and Palestinian fears correct. World events outside Britain’s control, coupled with America and Britain’s closure of borders to Jewish immigration directed a vast wave of Jewish refugees from Nazism towards Palestine, accelerating the process, as Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann had it, of making Palestine “as Jewish as England is English”. As Rashid Khalidi observes, “the flood of tens of thousands of new Jewish immigrants yearly in the wake of Hitler’s rise to power transformed the fundamental dynamics of the demographic battle, to the deepening disadvantage of the Palestinians.” Following the Arab Revolt from 1936 onwards, British officials vainly attempted to stem the migration wave they had initiated, realising they had lost control of the situation; by 1948 Britain was forced to withdraw, and the modern Israel-Palestine conflict, which at the time of writing threatens a third wider Middle Eastern war, had begun.

No-one can argue that the flood of Jews fleeing Hitler were not genuine refugees: the greatest justification for the Zionist project is that the millions of European Jews who did not make it to Palestine were almost immediately murdered. As the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe remarks, “unlike conventional colonial projects conducted in the service of an empire or a mother country, settler colonialists were refugees of a kind seeking not just a home, but a homeland. The problem was that the new ‘homelands’ were already inhabited by other people.” Both Jews and Palestinians in Mandate Palestine were acting rationally, in pursuit of their own best interests: the problem was, and is, that those interests were inherently opposed.

Throughout this baleful saga, entirely a product of 30 years of British governance, as Rashid Khalidi notes, “the preferred posture of the greatest power of the age was to pose as the impartial external actor, doing its levelheaded, rational, civilized best to restrain the savage passions of the wild and brutish locals”. Indeed, he continues, “one cannot read the memoirs or many of the official reports of British officials in mandatory Palestine… without being repeatedly struck by this tone of innocent wonderment at a bizarre and often tragic sequence of events for which these officials rarely if ever acknowledged the slightest responsibility.”

But then, Khalidi observes, “such radical social engineering at the expense of the indigenous population is the way of all colonial settler movements”, which “always claim that they will leave the native population better off as a result of their rule”. For all the progressive and humanitarian discourse British officials employed in their demographic experiment in Palestine, it is impossible for Palestinians to view British rule as anything other than “a colonial war waged against the indigenous population” to  “force them to relinquish their homeland to another people against their will”.

The Palestine conflict, and its destabilisation of the entire Middle East, is surely the greatest single historical disaster wrought by Whitehall governance so far. British conservatives aggrieved at the domestic culture war over British imperialism — in which their own barely expressed demographic fears underlie much of the discontent — would do well to recognise that there was a darker side to the imperial experience than railways and parliamentary democracy. British Conservative opponents of mass immigration ought surely to show more empathy for the Palestinians whose society British civil servants destroyed. Equally, now that Britain’s experiments with demographic engineering and management of ethnic tensions have turned inwards, domestic advocates of mass immigration should reflect on the historical precedents, and the dismissive contemporary discourse surrounding Palestinians’ ineffective and sporadically violent resistance to their displacement.

The symbolic centrality of the Israel-Palestine conflict in this new British discourse is surely fitting. The very existence of the conflict is the product of Westminster governance, and decisions made in London a century ago which, Woodrow Wilson’s aide warned at the time, were certain to make the Middle East “a breeding place for future war”. It is not heartening, given the ethnic riots which spread across England and Northern Ireland this summer, to reflect that, according to the academic literature, both Westminster state’s management of differing ethnic groups within Britain is a direct descendent of its colonial policies, nor that a legacy of British colonial rule is famously one of the greatest statistical predictors for current ethnic conflict.

Whitehall has a long tradition of creating ethnic conflicts where none previously existed, through its movement of populations for reasons both idealistic and cynical, its privileging of chosen ethnic groups over rivals for reasons of political utility, and its proven inability to manage the inevitable consequences. In Northern Ireland, the consequences remain unresolved, and may always remain so. In Palestine, they seem to be leading to their final, grim conclusion. As shown by Labour’s transfer of the Chagos islands to Maldivian sovereignty, over the heads and against the desires of the Chagossians themselves, Whitehall’s attitude to the rights of the peoples it rules to remain masters of their destinies in their own lands remains slipshod. Perhaps the greatest historical lesson of the Palestine Mandate is that faith in the wisdom and competence of the British governing class could be disastrous for those fated to be ruled by it.

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Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.

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