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

The Palestine conflict has divided Britain. Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

The Palestine conflict has divided Britain. Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images


October 5, 2024   8 mins

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 Palestine conflict is surely the greatest single historical disaster wrought by Whitehall governance so far.”

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.


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

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David McKee
David McKee
2 months ago

Roussinos flirts with conspiracy theory here: by comparing modern-day Britain with mandated Palestine, he implicitly sides with holders of the Great Replacement Theory – that immigrants with alien values will swamp the indigenous peoples.

I don’t believe that for a moment. The Jews from Europe sought refuge from endemic antisemitism in a state they themselves would rule. Only a handful of extremist migrants seek that in Britain. The overwhelming majority seek to live in peace with their neighbours in their new home. Unfortunately, it’s the extremists who make the most noise and collar the attention.

Fafa Fafa
Fafa Fafa
2 months ago
Reply to  David McKee

The problem with this “new home” is that it was not purchased in an open market, based on a mutually agreed upon transaction between seller and buyer. So let’s do away with these euphemisms. It was based on a many thousand year old religious belief, exploited by the crafty rulers of the newly victorious powers of Western Europe, who wanted to finish Hitler’s project of getting the Jews out of Europe.

Gorka Sillero
Gorka Sillero
2 months ago
Reply to  Fafa Fafa

You also believe Palestine belong to Islam because of some flying donkey? You can go do one too

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
2 months ago
Reply to  Gorka Sillero

Is it any less believable than a bloke parting a sea, building a boat big enough to hold every animal or living to over 800 years old?

Mike Dearing
Mike Dearing
2 months ago
Reply to  Fafa Fafa

Utter tosh, from start to finish, without any consideration of the explicit Jew-hatred that is enshrined in Islamic teaching.

John Riordan
John Riordan
2 months ago
Reply to  Fafa Fafa

“It was based on a many thousand year old religious belief, exploited by the crafty rulers of the newly victorious powers of Western Europe, who wanted to finish Hitler’s project of getting the Jews out of Europe.”

Well if that really was the plan, it can hardly be claimed to have worked, given that not only was the state of Israel created in 1948, but that Jews became safe once again to live in the West following the defeat of the Axis powers.

Your comment is rather daft.

D Walsh
D Walsh
2 months ago
Reply to  David McKee

David, don’t forget to take your next booster

Jim C
Jim C
2 months ago
Reply to  D Walsh

What’s the takeup of mRNA “vaccines” amongst Israeli Jews?

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
2 months ago

100% true. However, the other governances are worse. Want some examples. Hmm, how about Germany and its Jewish citizens. Another, all the Arab countries and their Jewish citizens. Those are probably the most germane.

Milton Gibbon
Milton Gibbon
2 months ago

The link on ethnic conflict is interesting but focuses on Africa to make its point. In the case of the Middle East I don’t think the French (Lebanon and Syria – both awful) would fare so well against the British (Holy Land, Iraq – terrible vs. Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf – much better).

John Murray
John Murray
2 months ago
Reply to  Milton Gibbon

Based on the abstract, it seems like the argument is that the French left a more centralized administration which allowed whomever took over government to keep a thumb down harder on any other parties, hence less ethnic conflict afterwards (allegedly). Francophone Africa is not particularly harmonious though, so I’m a bit skeptical.

Bruce Rodger
Bruce Rodger
2 months ago
Reply to  John Murray

Lebanon was doing very well, until the Assad dictatorship in Syria started meddling in its internal affairs. They realised it would be very difficult to dislodge the Israelis from the Golan Heights and it would be much easier to attack Israel from Lebanon. And so Hezbollah came into being and Lebanese governance was undermined at every opportunity. The Lebanese must be cheering for the destruction of Hezbollah right now!.

Martin Brumby
Martin Brumby
2 months ago
Reply to  Bruce Rodger

Indeed they have been.
News suppressed vigorously by the Grauniad, BBC etc. etc.

John Murray
John Murray
2 months ago

Loyalist areas displaying Israeli flags and Republican areas displaying Palestinian flags is nothing new, that’s been done for ages. Current events may have given people a reason to put out some new bunting, but they didn’t start that.
Also this: “The Palestine conflict, and its destabilisation of the entire Middle East, is surely the greatest single historical disaster wrought by Whitehall governance so far” betrays some current year myopia. I mean, hello, the Partition of India happened around the same time period, yes? And how you live in Northern Ireland, apparently, but don’t see that losing a chunk of the country itself in a shooting war, which then rumbles on for decades afterwards internally was a bit of spectacular c**k-up, I don’t know.

Chris Whybrow
Chris Whybrow
2 months ago

Perhaps the attacks of groups like the Stern Gang and the Irgun on British officials and soldiers should have been an indicator to Whitehall that the whole Balfour project was better off being shelved.

jane baker
jane baker
2 months ago
Reply to  Chris Whybrow

They couldn’t. They had taken the money and it was pay back time.

Caradog Wiliams
Caradog Wiliams
2 months ago

My first thought was an image of Ado*f Hi*t*ler looking down on us with a big smile on his face. He managed to control the world, after all.
After that the story of the article became clear. Politicians, mainly British, did, as you would expect – they fudged and fumbled hoping to pass on the problem to someone new. For them it was just a job. Writers in universities produced thousands of words to show how clever they were. But David Ben-Gurion, at the sharp end, knew exactly what was going on – the Zionists were pushing the Palestinians out of their own lands. The Zionists were colonisers, taking land from the native people – just like in America, Australia, Canada and parts of Africa. The difference is that the Zionists today don’t have guilt complexes about it. The Europeans are the ones with feelings of guilt about what happened in WW2.
So, when threats appear saying that the Israelis must be pushed out of the land, it’s the original native population trying to push back against the colonists.
What is the answer? There isn’t an answer, of course. But to push towards something resembling a long-term peace the Europeans have to ditch their collective guilt, so that they can think about today rather than something that happened 80 years ago. A way must be found to set up a Palestinian group who can negotiate without being overruled by Muslim clerics. Just as Northern Ireland is no longer a religious problem but one of history, then the calming of the Middle East cannot be a religious issue.

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
2 months ago

The present problem with Iran is a problem with Khomeini. Until Iran ditches Khomein’s legacy there will be problems.
The Arabs have made fundamental mistakes- selling land to Jews; not rising up against the Turks in WW1;supporting the Husseini Clan – The Grand Mufti was friend of Himmler; to attacking Jewish settlements in the 1930s leading O Wingate to create the Special Night squads who taught the Jews to figtht;The Grand Mufti fomenting pro Nazi violence in Iraq in 1941; not fighting with Allies in WW2 and learning fighting skills; ; Grand Mufti raising Muslim Bosnian section of Waffen SS in Jugoslavia; asking people to leave their homes in 1948, threatening to destroy Israel in 1948 and failing to do so; not learning to figth like the Israelis who have copied British Commando/Special Forces and precision low level flying skills ( success of 6 Day War ), expelling Jews from countries post 1948 so providing excellent recruits for Mossad; Arafat and Palestinians alienating Kuwait in 1950s, Jordan in 1960s, Lebanon in 1970s to 1980s, GCC countries in 1990 , Muslims in Pakistanis by being friendly with India, Killing Sadat, killing King Addullah in 1951 and multiple attempts on King Hussein. The Jordanians were the only Arab nation to defeat Israel so killing their king and forcing the expulsion of John Glubb who trained the Jordanians was a mistake.
As Abba Eban said
div > p:nth-of-type(4) > a”>Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Baron Hives who ran Rolls Royce in WW2 who the engines for planes was asked why the company was so good , he replied
“I suppose it’s because we are a little better at putting our mistakes right than most of the other people.” div > p:nth-of-type(6) > a”>[18]
div > p:nth-of-type(5) > a”>Lest Arab governments be tempted out of sheer routine to rush into impulsive rejection, let me suggest that tragedy is not what men suffer but what they miss.
The Arabs and Palestinians have failed to produce a leader of the calibre of Abba Eban , hence their problems.
div > p:nth-of-type(8) > a”>Queens’ College, Cambridge, where he achieved a very rare  div > p:nth-of-type(8) > a:nth-of-type(2)”>triple first, studying Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian; these were three of the ten languages he would reportedly master div > p:nth-of-type(8) > a:nth-of-type(3)”>[8] (he enjoyed translating newspapers into Ancient Greek). div > p:nth-of-type(8) > a:nth-of-type(4)”>[4] 
He served in the British Army in Egypt and Mandate Palestine, becoming an intelligence officer in Jerusalem, where he coordinated and trained volunteers for resistance in the event of a German invasion.
Eban had almost perfect skills for the 1948 War and he was not alone. How many Arabs had skills close to Eban?
Alexander said ” I would rather fight an army of lions led by a sheep than an army of sheep led by a lion “.

Caradog Wiliams
Caradog Wiliams
2 months ago
Reply to  Charles Hedges

Mr Hedges, thanks for that detailed answer which I have read over several times. First my conclusion : I neither agree nor disagree with you.
I am sure that you have the correct overall knowledge of the history, whereas I am just an engineer and a dabbler in history. I started to investigate the history when, 15 years ago, I twice visited a kibbutz as part of my work and I was impressed with the people I met. My history came from Elie Kedourie’s books.
As an engineer, I am a problem solver. You can talk about the problem for so long and then you have to do something about it. Kedourie’s opinion, which is logical to me, is that you can’t debate with a religion – he was particularly concerned with Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood.
I am also old enough to see that younger people side with the apparent underdogs, the Palestinians, whereas the older people remember vividly what happened in WW2. Hence my conclusion : we have to forget what happened in Europe and find a way of getting non-religious people to represent the Palestinians.

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
2 months ago

Good points. The issue which Western Governments ignore is the rise of Islamic fundmentalism largely due to Sayyid Qutb, Abul Maududi and Khomeini since the late 1940s. This means rejection of the West because of the emancipatin and education of women.
It is not the rejection of religion but of QMK. Pre 1948, there were extensive cosmopolitan Levantine, Malaysian and Pakistani cultures and up to the early 1970s women in Cairo, Beirut, even Kabul wore miniskirts.

Graham Cunningham
Graham Cunningham
2 months ago

The gist of this article seems to be a proposition that – but for the British civil service – all would have been forever well and harmonious in the lives of the peoples of the 25% of the planet where they at sometime held sway. Have I got that right?

Matthew Freedman
Matthew Freedman
2 months ago

A lot to unpack here, but on the subject of Israel/Palestine there’s more differences to the colonisation of Australia and the Americas. As you pointed out already many Jewish immigrants were refugees and would have faced a high chance of not surviving if they hadn’t moved and the world was not an open door to them. They wanted to set up a homeland from the position of not having one and often being persecuted, not a colony of an existing country seeking to extend its power or territory. The land wasn’t just some place only just discovered but a land they had originated in historically. Jews in Israel speak Hebrew which is a native language of the middle east. The arabs in Palestine aren’t total minorities everywhere unlike native Americans & aboriginals as other levantine arab-muslim majority countries still exist in all the neighbouring countries. Unlike native Americans who were reduced greatly in number after contact with Europeans, palestinian arabs have increased hugely in number in the last 100 years. And of course pretty soon after Israel was established Israel was filled with Jews from north africa and middle eastern countries, which removes the racial aspect which many are falsely associating with the conflict.

Anna Bramwell
Anna Bramwell
2 months ago

Because Jews from N Africa don’t count as white? All those I have met are.

D Walsh
D Walsh
2 months ago
Reply to  Anna Bramwell

Jews don’t identify as white, how you see them doesn’t matter one bit, its how they think about it that counts. if you don’t know that much, you have a lot to learn

j watson
j watson
2 months ago

Certainly a thought provoking perspective, but veered into too much hyperbole and the doom-mongering about British ethnic tensions well overplayed.
Slightly remarkable Author chose to minimise the obvious reference to the plantation of NI. Wonder why?
As regards Israel, the historical background is a good bit more complex than the Author prepared to admit. There is an religious and historical basis, debatable yes but it exists, for a Jewish homeland. Palestine was never a Country. It was at best a province of another, more suppressive Empire. Palestinian Arabs got a Country for the first time, but it wasn’t enough for them. They wanted it all.
Author’s link to the summer riots v selective. Did he not notice the counter demos turned out to be much larger and pretty peaceful. Using a bunch of drunken, looting yobs to try and make your article linkage maybe not the best.
UK been absorbing migration for centuries. There is some good common sense that does need to be applied in the 21stC but actually those coming here are much more changed by us than the reverse

Citizen Diversity
Citizen Diversity
2 months ago
Reply to  j watson

It’s ‘very selective’ to use counter demonstrators bearing placards printed by the Socialist Workers Party as evidence that concern about immigration is confined to small numbers of looters.
Mr Roussinos notes that the Arab riots against immigration in the Palestine Mandate was dismissed by British officials as being provoked by malign agitators (in the Summer riots, by the Russians) and carried out by poorly-educated people (in the Summer riots, the tattooed ‘primitives’, not the self-restrained lovers of democracy praised by Starmer).
What has only recently become the UK ‘absorbed’ tiny numbers of immigrants over the last fifteen centuries. The great wave of Germanic tribes who transformed Britain made the native Britons – the ‘Welsh’ – into foreigners in their own land, discriminating against them, for example, in Mercian law codes; and inspiring the Welsh Great Prophesy of Britain, the Armes Prydein.
The latter work being a story of how a coalition of other peoples native to the British Isles violently drove the English colonisers from the Britons’ ancestral lands back to the continent. Fortunately, this scenario, somewhat similar to the situation today in the territory at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, was never realised.
If those coming to the UK today are more changed by us than we by them, why is the UK a community of communities? Have the newcomers become less religious, as the previously existing population has? Do the latter practice FGM, honour killings, or arrange marriages? Did the previously existing population in what has become the London Borough of Tower Hamlets speak over ninety different languages? Before at least the sixth century, did the latter worship a multiplicity of gods? In the last millennium did an English king seek the blessing of the representatives of a multiplicity of religions?

Adam Bartlett
Adam Bartlett
2 months ago

Excellent & brave article. Blinded perhaps by their relative lack of racism, and especially by complacency arising from historical success, the English became one of the primary causes of racial violence, around the world & at home. This article should be required reading by the governing classes and at all good prep schools.

Tony Price
Tony Price
2 months ago

A couple of points:

Baroness Wars did NOT call Sunak and Braverman ‘coconuts’ – she supported the woman who did so, which is not the same thing – I would also support her not because of what she said but because the attempted prosecution was ridiculous.

Re the Chagos Islands, it is an interesting point that the natives did not get a referendum on the subject unlike those of Gibraltar and the Falklands, but to say definitively that they would not want the transfer of power to Mauritius is false, as there is no way of knowing that (the statement on Twitter by one group is not definitive). That’s not to say that it MAY be true.

Richard Calhoun
Richard Calhoun
2 months ago

Excellent article and one which makes one reflect that perhaps the biggest mistake we have made in the UK is to have the ‘Big’ State.
It confers too much power on people who are unable to handle it.
How much better to have a ‘Small’ State where people are able to make more decisions for themselves.

Bruce Rodger
Bruce Rodger
2 months ago

The ‘Big State’ is broken everywhere and the rebuilding will have to come from the grassroots upwards.

Graham Cunningham
Graham Cunningham
2 months ago

See comment above.

Gordon Black
Gordon Black
2 months ago

“British sectarianism” has not “deepened”, it’s the same as it has been since the 17th century English Civil War … roundheads and cavaliers.
Here in the UK, I have nice neighbours who fly a foreign republican flag and now march with a Palestinian flag: other nice neighbours who fly a union jack and are marching with an Israeli flag … still Republicans and Royalists after 400 years.
This phenomenon is evident throughout the white English speaking world, so it may well have a genetic cause.

Bruce Rodger
Bruce Rodger
2 months ago
Reply to  Gordon Black

At least there’s one point we can probably agree on – we all hate Cromwell!

s d
s d
2 months ago

It is astonishing that the author in his analysis relies so heavily on  Khalidi — hardly a neutral observe of this conflict. Aris, try going beyond reading one or two books and summarizing their arguments, or at the very least try balance it out with equal weight given to the argument of Israelis, who hardly see themselves as foreign to that soil, and indeed with ancestors in that land hundreds to thousands of years before other groups now claiming that land.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
2 months ago

Anybody disagree with this?

Matthew Freedman
Matthew Freedman
2 months ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

This article is putting a lot in one article!

Russell Sharpe
Russell Sharpe
2 months ago

“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””
It is very odd that Roussinos appears not to be aware that the term ‘Palestinian’ throughout the British Mandate period referred indiscriminately to the inhabitants of Mandate Palestine. There were Palestinian Jews and Palestinian Arabs. The use of the term to refer solely to the Arabs who lived there is a post-independence phenomenon.
Rashid Kalidi must know this however, and, armed with that knowledge, to complain that a word whose meaning has changed over a century was not used a century ago in the way it is now, in order to insinuate discrimination or contempt, is just plain dishonest.

james goater
james goater
2 months ago
Reply to  Russell Sharpe

Regarding your concluding paragraph, this could simply be Khalidi employing the time-honoured Islamic tradition of “Taqiyya” — permissible lying to gain a perceived advantage.

Zachary Schwartzman
Zachary Schwartzman
2 months ago

Aris, you award too much credit / blame to the British for the current situation in Israel. Jews have continuously lived in Israel for millennia, and, as you know, were treated as second-class dhimmis across the Middle East and North Africa under these lands colonised by Islamic Caliphates. Perhaps the onus lies on Islamic Fundamentalism, Nazism, Pogroms, and the Christian Crusades for pushing the Jews back to their homeland in pursuit of self-sufficiency and generational safety. Moreover, the blatant anti-Semitism displayed in the streets and the media sweeping across the UK, Europe, and America (led by certain Muslim migrants, largely funded by affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood) are only accelerating the immigration of more Jews to Israel. – written by a Jew who is leaving London for Israel

jane baker
jane baker
2 months ago

Whose land are you stealing them?

Andrew Sweeney
Andrew Sweeney
2 months ago

Good luck and God speed.

Philip Stott
Philip Stott
2 months ago

The people of the UK really need to ask ourselves whether this is what we want to allow our country to become – a place that Jews feel safer fleeing from, to a country already at war. A very sad state of affairs.

Zachary Schwartzman
Zachary Schwartzman
2 months ago
Reply to  Philip Stott

Indeed. It is not I who is worried; I fear more for the trajectory of the UK over the next 50+ years than Israel. Jews are merely the canary in the coal mine; heightened anti-Semitism has foreshadowed our host countries’ ensuing societal destruction throughout the course of millennia. It is the British and certain European countries who will face the implications of their near-sighted decisions over the coming century. Godspeed to you.

Zachary Schwartzman
Zachary Schwartzman
2 months ago
Reply to  Philip Stott

Indeed. It is not I who is worried; I fear more for the trajectory of the UK over the next 50+ years than Israel. Jews are merely the canary in the coal mine; heightened anti-Semitism has foreshadowed our host countries’ ensuing societal destruction throughout the course of millennia. It is the British and certain European countries who will face the implications of their near-sighted decisions over the coming century. Godspeed to you.

Zachary Schwartzman
Zachary Schwartzman
2 months ago
Reply to  Philip Stott

Indeed. It is not I who is worried; I fear more for the trajectory of the UK over the next 50+ years than Israel. Jews are merely the canary in the coal mine; heightened anti-Semitism has foreshadowed our host countries’ ensuing societal destruction throughout the course of millennia. It is the British and certain European countries who will face the implications of their near-sighted decisions over the coming century. Godspeed to you.

Liam O'Mahony
Liam O'Mahony
1 month ago
Reply to  Philip Stott

Please list all the British Jews murdered, or attacked.. I’ll give you a ostage stamp do you can write on the reverse side if you like!
Just because babies cry doesn’t mean they are under attack; isually the greedy little behgars are just looking for notice!..

Eric Solomon
Eric Solomon
1 month ago

Sadly Israel is the only place a Jew can feel safe wearing a kippah (skullcap) on his head in the open. Jews were expelled from Jerusalem to Babylon circa 560 B.C., so much for the Jews colonising the area. It’s all there in the history books if you’ll only take the trouble to read, and while about it pick up a Bible for completeness sake .

Dumetrius
Dumetrius
1 month ago
Reply to  Eric Solomon

Not even in Tottenham then?

Liam O'Mahony
Liam O'Mahony
1 month ago

Please stop using that worn out old trope ‘antisemitism’ for the following reasons..
▪︎ Israelis are 97% NON Semitic; they are of Turkic origin.. so days history and DNA.. they ‘modernised’ Hewbrew by adopting a large number of Arabic words and Arabic grammar.
▪︎ Palestinians ARE 97% Semitic as are the vast majority of Syrians, Egyptians, Iraqis, Jordanian and Arabians..
▪︎ To be anti Israeli, anti Zionist, anti IDF, anti warcrime and anti genocide is NOT anti Jewish in the slightest.. otherwise we have 50% of the world’s Jews who are antisemitic!! How idiotic is that??

Anna Clare Bryson
Anna Clare Bryson
2 months ago

A very occluded, modish article. The first part, by foregrounding the rather curious phenomenon of the Irish taking up the Israel-Palestine conflict, especially flags, as a proxy for their own domestic conflicts, then by implication suggests that in Britain/rest of the UK, actual and latent ethnic conflicts with an international dimension are similarly proxy in nature. But the proxiness of the use of flags in NI is clearly (given that neither enthusiastic “supporters” side is actually ethno-religiously at all involved in the faraway conflict) of a different order to the situation in the rest of Britain, where religious and sometimes ethno-religious identification is real enough on the communalist Muslim side, at least.
Halfway through the article it changes gear, to embrace the utterly simplistic and de-contextualised notion that the awful British Empire and colonialism was wholly responsible for the Israeli-Arab conflict (seemingly, right up to today), having stirred up ethnic strife (as always!) where there was “none before”…Whatever the mistakes of Britain and the British in this context, this is a kind of Dave Spartish notion quite unworthy of Roussinos, who blithely erases most of the historical picture of the ME, the wider post-Ottoman issues, the agency of various Arab and other forces involved, the nature of Zionism in relation to myriad other nationalisms of the time, the fact that the Arabs of Palestine (whom he keeps back-projecting anachronistically as a distinctive nation on its nascent nation state of Palestine), were acting in larger ethno-religious currents…etc etc… so that the cartoon we are left with is just of naughty British colonial attitudes making previously non-existent trouble, and poor old betrayed “Palestinians”…
The fact of the matter, is that this cartoon can explain neither the problems of religious and ethnic competition/conflict in the UK nor the actual conflict in the ME. Admittedly, poor old Palestinians and nasty British colonialism are flavours-of-the-month at the moment, but I really expected better.

Diane Krieger
Diane Krieger
2 months ago

Well said. Why does UnHerd keep publishing Roussinos? I think we’ve “herd” enough from him. Let him peddle his radical chic wares at Huffpo.

james goater
james goater
2 months ago
Reply to  Diane Krieger

Possibly, but by publishing Roussinos’s article Unherd has provoked an excellent array of well-informed, balanced and erudite contributions. The comment to which you have responded is a prime example. Had Anna C.B. read an article with which she was in full agreement, she would have had no need to compose her splendid rejoinder. The same goes for many other contributors to this thread.

Norfolk Sceptic
Norfolk Sceptic
2 months ago

I am beginning to not expect better from UnHerd. The posters here have a greater depth of knowledge than many columnists here.

Liam O'Mahony
Liam O'Mahony
1 month ago

Nice try, eloquently expressed but sorry, ‘doesn’t wash even with you adding ‘complexities’ as a whitener all we get is a whitewash, by you. The fact is Roussinos’s take is accurate, valid and balanced and no amount of queering the pitch invalidates it. If you have concrete corrections rather than bland condemnation, let’s hear them.

Stephen Barnard
Stephen Barnard
1 month ago

Expected better, Anna? Really?

Fred Bloggs
Fred Bloggs
2 months ago

Who are these Palestinians of whom you speak?

Gorka Sillero
Gorka Sillero
2 months ago
Reply to  Fred Bloggs

Mainly (but not only) of Egyptian, Sudanese and Syrian origin

Anna Bramwell
Anna Bramwell
2 months ago
Reply to  Gorka Sillero

Certainly not Sudanese.

Caradog Wiliams
Caradog Wiliams
2 months ago

My earlier comment talking about collective European guilt (CEG) was removed. Presumably, another example of CEG. Also another demonstration that we don’t have free speech.

P Branagan
P Branagan
2 months ago

In an otherwise excellent article, there was one ‘typo’. The Labour UK government handed sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius not the Maldives.

PAUL SMITH
PAUL SMITH
2 months ago

We are being colonised but that doesn’t seem to matter

Jim Glass
Jim Glass
2 months ago

Another partial history which puts the bad old British at the heart of it: “British officials vainly attempted to stem the migration wave they had initiated”
So when Ben-Gurion arrived in Judea in the Ottoman Empire in the early years of the 1900s from Central Europe after several decades of Jewish immigration driven by pogroms and the search for a safe homeland, the British were to blame, right?
Wrong.

Gayle Rosenthal
Gayle Rosenthal
2 months ago
Reply to  Jim Glass

Exactly ! The British proffered a solution and a salvation to the Jewish People – Am Israel – to create a Jewish nation state in its ancestral homeland partially occupied by Arab Muslims. Risk-taking is a Judeo Christian and western personality trait that offers a chance for progress. Arabs, who have for centuries “submitted” to Allah rather than “partnered” with God, which is the prominent Judeo Christian value, have no concept of an evolutionary society that seeks self-improvement. They are stuck in primitive time.
The British offered a solution to the backward Europeans who were seduced by Hitler. It was a risk which was rewarded in a time of golden age optimism. Since then the darkness of Jew hatred, Muslim-style, has overtaken this optimism and ruined it.
If there is one thing (well two things) America is good for it is risk taking and free thinking. The British tradition is alive and well in America and this Palestinian state of mind will be defeated. The death culture of Islam is a curse to the world. It hasn’t completely ruined Persian culture, British culture, and European culture, but it is getting close to that point. It can come back but only if there is a decided rejection of Islam.

Anna Bramwell
Anna Bramwell
2 months ago
Reply to  Jim Glass

No mention of Theodore Herzl.

Philip Stott
Philip Stott
2 months ago

Great, thought provoking article, as always from Aris.
One point though, we didn’t ruin all our ex-colonies.
USA, Canada, Australia and NZ are all doing rather well for themselves.

Jim C
Jim C
2 months ago
Reply to  Philip Stott

The US thrived after it seceded in 1776 and expanded South and West, – eradicating most of the natives as they went – so that the more technologically sophisticated European colonists could exploit its natural resources more effectively.

European cultural power in North America peaked (arguably) decades ago and is now on the wane with the “Reconquista” of the South and West of the US by South American “undocumented” migrants ignoring border laws, and in Canada, Australia & NZ with pro-immigration policies.

Whether you think this is a good thing probably depends on the degree to which you prefer non-European cultural attributes to European ones, and how optimistic you are† about how well these cultures will rub along in future and not start mirroring the conflicts everywhere else that polities have different groups vying for power and resources.

One of the great ironies of modern English nationalism is that they seem to have far less sympathy for the indigenous Arabs than the Zionists who displaced them via Whitehall’s immigration policies.

†unless you’re someone in power getting backhanders for it. The Zionists had extremely influential and wealthy backers; if you doubt this, reflect upon whom the Balfour Agreement was addressed to.

jane baker
jane baker
2 months ago
Reply to  Jim C

Exactly,let’s have a tv documentary on tv naming all the names.

Jerry Carroll
Jerry Carroll
2 months ago
Reply to  Jim C

The Red Indians — yes, I know, racisss –) were in the way and like other obstacles in every other lands throughout written history and long before were conquered and dispersed. This leaves modern folks the opportunity and leisure to tsk-tsk.

Anna Bramwell
Anna Bramwell
2 months ago
Reply to  Jim C

Wasnt it an attempt to get Chaim Weizmann in Britain’s side during WW1?

Alexander Harper
Alexander Harper
2 months ago
Reply to  Philip Stott

So is India .

Bruce Rodger
Bruce Rodger
2 months ago
Reply to  Philip Stott

We didn’t ruin the others either. For those who study the historical developments of the last couple of centuries, one can see that in many cases the local people were better off under British rule than they have been since independence. A prime example is Zimbabwe, which used to be the bread basket of Africa but under Mugabe became the basket case of Africa. And the UK often gets blamed unjustly, as in the case of Partition. Both Gandhi and the British were strongly against it, wanting the different sects to live together in harmony (as they did in Yugoslavia before the country broke up in disarray). It was the Muslim extremists who insisted on Partition. Jinnah was happy to go along with it, as he knew he had little time to live and wouldn’t have to face the consequences, and his support swung it – so blame him, not the British!

Jerry Carroll
Jerry Carroll
2 months ago
Reply to  Bruce Rodger

People under a certain age know no history because it was either not taught or was distorted by idealogues on the left.

Gayle Rosenthal
Gayle Rosenthal
2 months ago
Reply to  Bruce Rodger

In case this has been overlooked … “Muslim Partition” is a tool of Political Jihad. First they ruin their own countries with sectarian violence or totalitarianism, then they cozy up to a sympathetic nation and seek asylum, then they migrate like an infestation, and then they want Partition. Will it be Leeds, Dewsbury, Bradford, Luton, Blackburn, Birmingham, or London herself ? Or will it be the entire heart of Britain from the northwest to the southeast ?
Just wait … they will take it all.

Dorothy More
Dorothy More
2 months ago
Reply to  Bruce Rodger

Please reconsider your opinion about Yugoslavia. Had the different nations lived together in harmony, the country would not have broken up. There was no harmony, but the communist regime silenced any dissonant activity while it suited them (before the collapse of the Berlin Wall).

Luke S
Luke S
2 months ago
Reply to  Philip Stott

Be nice if a non-genocidal colony manages to succeed. I guess the Maori, with their treaty, have arguably fared better than the indigenous peopls of the other three countries you refer to.

Paddy Taylor
Paddy Taylor
2 months ago
Reply to  Luke S

The Māori are not the indigenous people of New Zealand either.

On arrival they fought, killed and cannibalised the people they found there.

Say what you like about thd British Empire, but we never ate the people we colonised!

Martin Brumby
Martin Brumby
2 months ago
Reply to  Luke S

They certainly did better than NZ’s original Aboriginals, that the Māori ate.
I have to admit that I have met some really great Māoris in NZ. But also a few of the other kind.

Gayle Rosenthal
Gayle Rosenthal
2 months ago
Reply to  Luke S

The political power of a minority definitely is stronger if the community isn’t white. The Maori would still be in huts without the British.

james goater
james goater
2 months ago

Had it not been Britain which colonized NZ it would have been France or the US. The Maoris really stood no chance.

Jerry Carroll
Jerry Carroll
2 months ago
Reply to  Philip Stott

Australia, Canada and NZ are left-wing facist states and unless Trump is elected more of the same is in store for the USA.

Helen Stoddard
Helen Stoddard
2 months ago
Reply to  Jerry Carroll

NZ not so much, since voting Labour out in 2023. Still a lot of damage to undo since Ardern did her best to destroy the country.

Jonathan Story
Jonathan Story
2 months ago

Note that the UK is the only major power mentioned. Nothing there about the rise of nationalism; nothing a bout the US; nothing about the Soviet Union. Here indeed was a piece of social engineering, initiated by the founders of Israel, who after the Dreyfus affair in France, feared that without a homeland, Jews would be highly vulnerable.The article also assumes the pre-existence of Palestinians, Arab peoples, both Christian and Moselm, who came to the area in the 1890s. The British intent was to create an area of conviviality between Arabs and Jews-no foolish project because this was the norm in Syria. Falling under british rule would have been a godsend to all peoples, as was widely recognised at the time. Not in the Soviet Union. Nor in the US. The British Empire both believed had to be destroyed. One of the places it was was in Palestine-Israel. Well done US and USSR. And of course, thanks for the contribution from Adolph;

daan dijk
daan dijk
2 months ago

Daniel Dijk
British policies in Palestine were surely driven by imperial interests . But Roussinos uncritical reading of Rashid Khalidi’s version of the history of the Palestinian struggle for statehood ( in his not mentioned “Iron Cage” ) becomes manifest when he writes that most of mandate Palestine became the state of Israel. In fact some 75% of the territory for which Britain was responsible under the Mandate given by the League of Nations after World War I and the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire, was ceded at the Cairo Conference in 1921 to the Hashemite dynastic ( Emir Abdullah) by Winston Churchil the then secretary of state for the colonies. This manoever was retroactively legally justified by the inclusion of article 25 in the mandate. This of course underlines the power politics of Whitehall but it also shows that British decisions were not always against the interest of the local Arabs as Roussinos seems to think. Later, when it became clear what intentions of the Nazi’s with respect to European Jewry were, the British severely limited Jewish immigration to Palestine. But this part of the dark history of Whitehall is not Roussinos’ concern. Instead he urges British conservatives “to show more empathy for the the Palestinans whose society British civil servants destroyed” and be less dismissive of the “Palestinians’ ineffective and sporadically violent resistance to their displacement.” So far for half baked journalism.

Gayle Rosenthal
Gayle Rosenthal
2 months ago
Reply to  daan dijk

Except that there never was a “Palestine” and the “Palestinians” are simply garden variety Arabs who immigrated from Egypt and Saudi Arabia for work created by Jews in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Or they were Arabized Levantines and Greeks who comprised the Syrian, Greek and Lebanese Christian populations of the area. When are the talking heads going to factor in the centuries old colonial, imperialist aggression by the Islamic caliphates of the 7th-21st centuries. The UK and Europe are in a second wave of Islamic imperialism. The first was the conquest of southern Spain and Europe which was beaten back in the Crusades. Don’t be fooled by the “Palestine” brainwash.

Chauncey Gardiner
Chauncey Gardiner
2 months ago
Reply to  daan dijk

Serious question: What imperial interests?
I ask, because it’s so easy to toss around terms like “empire” and “imperialism” without folks explaining what we mean. What do we mean?

Francis Turner
Francis Turner
2 months ago

Of course now we are not allowed to say that Indian Hindu and Jewish people rightly come top of every single achievement and performance list in our country, and at the bottom of every crime data: why are we no longer allowed to praise and celebrate this.. wait for it… fact.?

Martin Brumby
Martin Brumby
2 months ago
Reply to  Francis Turner

Well, I guess it does help if you came from a Society that doesn’t generally believes that only one book is worth reading, (as was told to me in whispers by an old shop owner in Southern Turkey).
You can still find some bookshops in Istanbul. Elsewhere, it is a challenge to find anything other than full colour “books” of photographs for foreign tourists.
Compare and contrast with the bookshops in Israel.

Anna Bramwell
Anna Bramwell
2 months ago
Reply to  Martin Brumby

Istanbul and Ankara were full of bookshops when ZI was last there in 2011. And people reading books and newspapers in cafes, a sight seldom seen in the West today.

Pedro Livreiro
Pedro Livreiro
2 months ago

Maldivian? Shome mishtake, surely?
While happy to point the finger and adopt a sneering attitude, this Article lazily makes no attempt to suggest a reason for the British state to act as it did. Like should it allow those Jews seeking statehood to continue to seek it? Should the Balfour Declaration never have occurred – what was the alternative? And should Britain and USA have accepted masses of Jewish emigrés in the 1930s? Like the six million who were reportedly massacred in the concentration camps? And if Britain and US were to accept Jewish emigrés forced out of Germany, what about all the other groups who were similarly targeted by the Nazis?
“A long tradition of creating ethnic conflicts……”; go on then, give details of what you mean, and explain why they happened.

jane baker
jane baker
2 months ago
Reply to  Pedro Livreiro

Britain did it’s very best to limit Jewish emigration to here in the 1930s. Numerous laws were passed to stop Jewish escapees from Hitlers regime staying here. Many went on to America that was much more welcoming. Britain,the land where Ally Sloper and his pal Ikey Mo were popular figures of contemptuous fun was highly anti-Semitic at the bottom end and top end of the social scale. It was the educated middle class,and upper at that AND mostly Quakers who cared.about the Jews. The British upper.class loved the money and culture the Jewish ones provided but.spoke.about them in a contemptuous way and the working class the same

Bullfrog Brown
Bullfrog Brown
2 months ago

Fact number one that is wrong .. “most of Mandate Palestine became the State of Israel”.
Transjordan / Jordan is around 72% of what was British Mandated Palestine.

Gayle Rosenthal
Gayle Rosenthal
2 months ago
Reply to  Bullfrog Brown

Correct – Jordan is the real Palestine. It was intended for the Arabs and Arabized people of the area.

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
2 months ago

The very existence of the conflict is the product of Westminster governance
This is nonsense. This conflict began in the seventh century when there was no ‘British governing class’ to speak of. It’s driven by superstition.

Bullfrog Brown
Bullfrog Brown
2 months ago

Fact number 2 – “The1948 war, and the forced expulsion of the Palestinians” .. sadly wars lead to refugees. The Arab nations that attacked the new state of Israel told the Arabs to leave .. so it was a combination.
This Palestinian Christian tells his story
https://youtu.be/8m6ux-IeNo4?si=S1VIJenXEwyI484f

Bullfrog Brown
Bullfrog Brown
2 months ago

‘The Palestine conflict, and its destabilisation of the entire Middle East, is surely the greatest single historical disaster wrought by Whitehall governance so far’ .. WRONG
The 1948 partition of India resulted in the creation of Pakistan as Muslim, and India as Hindu, with 2 million dead and 11 million refugees.
In the demise of the levant region of the Ottoman Empire, modern day Lebanon, Syria, Iraq & Jordan (72% of mandated Palestine) were created, together with the 1947 UN vote to partition the remaining 28% in to a Jewish and an Arab nation.
The Arabs refused, yet it should be argued that Jordan is the ‘second state of the now, so called two state solution’
The TRAGEDY has been that the UN, and world organisations have allowed the refugees created in the wars of 1948 & 1967 to perpetuate their refugee status to subsequent generations.
In the early 1950s, around 700,000 Jews were expelled from Arab lands, thankfully having Israel where they could seek refuge.

Gayle Rosenthal
Gayle Rosenthal
2 months ago
Reply to  Bullfrog Brown

I agree with you that permanent refugee status was a gross mistake. But if British mandate Palestine meants a whit then Abdullah’s Jordan is Palestine.

Ramon Bloomberg
Ramon Bloomberg
2 months ago

Roussinos is an excellent analyst. I always find his work useful. I think he’s relying a little too heavily on Rashidi here. He would do better to lean slightly more on Benny Morris. The proposition that the Israel / Palestine problem is “entirely a product of 30 years of British governance” doesn’t hold for me. Only one of the many issues for the Palestinians was the fact that their society has never been culturally ordered towards state sovereignty. As Rashidi shows, the other regional “notables” received statehood from the mandates, while the Arab “notables” of Palestine waited for the gift which never came. In various dumb moves they destroyed their already limited capacity for preparing themselves to sovereignty. 
Sitting here in 2024, looking at the disintegrated condition of Arab sovereignty, we cannot exactly call it a success. Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Jordan. Would Palestine have been the black swan of incredible success?
The responsible move for the ex-colonial powers of France and the UK would be to move in and restructure the arbitrary frontiers that they imposed on Arab societies still in a mode of tribal and sectarian affiliation, rather than any notion of a sovereign state. Give the Israelis room to breath.
How they do that is anyone’s guess, but it’s the right direction to travel.

Bruce Rodger
Bruce Rodger
2 months ago

Jordan is actually quite well run. Lebanon used to be until the Assad dictatorship of Syria began interfering in its affairs and established Hezbollah in the border region – an easier place to attack Israel from than trying to retake the Golan Heights.

Russell Hamilton
Russell Hamilton
2 months ago

Isn’t Aris being a little unfair to the British? He seems very keen to establish that (“Throughout this baleful saga, entirely a product of 30 years of British governance”) everything was planned and directed by Britain, yet he also notes that “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”.

So, Britain was to some extent just trying to cope with ‘events’. Sometimes there are situations where no decision creates a perfect solution.

ralph bell
ralph bell
2 months ago

Fascinating and insightful essay, albeit damming. My only question is where does the view of the Islamists of wanting all none Muslims dead especially Jewish people in Israel come from in this conflict. How are Protestant Irish treated in the island of Ireland by the Catholics?

Martin Brumby
Martin Brumby
2 months ago

I fear that Mr.Roussinos seems unaware of the absurdity of his claim that Israel is the “ancestral homeland” of Arab & Bedouin nomads. And that the Arab armies trying to clear “from the River to the Sea” in 1948 instructed the Arabs who had, in fact, settled there to move out to make things easier for the invading armies to exterminate Jews.
Despite the best efforts of the Ottomans (not to mention previous efforts of Saracens, Persians etc.), Jews have continuously lived (agreed – as a minority) in The Holy Land, for Millenia.
Did Mr. Roussinos ever wonder why the books of The Old Testament and, indeed, The Dead Sea Scrolls were almost all written in various versions of Hebrew? Long before the RoP’s “Prophet” was a twinkle in his Great Grandfather’s eye?
So far as those naughty British colonists are concerned, they at least attempted to civilise the area of Israel (and Transjordan, and Iraq). True they were undermined by the Foreign & Colonial Office mandarins who leaned against the hard working and entrepreneurial Jews, through old fashioned antisemitism and the TE Lawrence – style “admiration” of the Arabs. They even appointed Haj Amin al Husseini as “Grand Mufti of Jerusalem”.
Husseini returned the favour by travelling to Germany in 1941, where he was fêted by the hierarchy and met with the little Austrian Corporal on 28 November 1941, personally promising him that, once Adolf had won the war, Husseini would be certain to exterminate all Jews in the Middle East. No wonder he is still a great hero with the PLA, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Mad Mullahs.
Maybe also with all the “pro- Palestinian” scum in our streets as well. Although I suspect few of them ever read anything except their Social Media and don’t even understand which river or which sea.

Dee Harris
Dee Harris
2 months ago

“British officials soothed angry and worried Palestinian leaders with false claims that mass immigration would not harm their collective interests, but would instead boost [the] economy. ”
Now swap ‘Palestinian leaders’ for ‘English voters’ in 2024…

Dana G
Dana G
2 months ago
Reply to  Dee Harris

Fact: Jews in the land of Palestine boost the economy of the land when they arrived. Your swap doesn’t work

Citizen Diversity
Citizen Diversity
2 months ago
Reply to  Dee Harris

This is the main thrust of Mr Roussinos’s article. What is the prospect for the UK now that it has been transformed into a ‘community of communities’ – that is, sectarianised – given the example of a particular piece of formerly Ottoman territory. The high-temperature critical comments appended to his article fail to realise this.
Henry Snell’s advice that Palestinian Arabs and Palestinian Jews could get along together by playing football is what would now be called ‘anaesthetic for the communities’. Anaesthetic is neither medicine nor food. But it is applied by Whitehall as both, as seen in the aftermath of the Summer riots in the UK and at other times.
Just as Mr R observes that this piece of formerly Ottoman territory was transformed by mass immigration in a mere 30 years, it should be astonishing to anyone to realise that the UK has been similarly transformed. If not more markedly so, since a mixed ethnic population previously existed in that piece of formerly Ottoman territory whereas it never did in the British Isles for the last fifteen centuries.
In all the high-temperature critical comments of Mr R’s article it’s a wonder the writers don’t add into the factors the shifting of the tectonic plates that created the continents joining at that point on the world’s surface. In trying to divine the ultimate origins of this conflict in this piece of territory at the eastern end of a large body of salt water, the writers of the high-temperature critical articles might as well name Jehovah who called Abram out of the Babylonian civilisation.

tamritz blog
tamritz blog
2 months ago

A repulsive article that takes for granted the claim that the Muslim colonial occupation can deprive the Jews of their land, where they have always lived. It focuses on British guilt, but the main point here is that, besides Israel, there is no other country in the world that speaks the same language, worships the same God, and bears the same name it did 3,000 years ago. Israel is the ultimate example of anti-colonialism.

In contrast to people like the writer, who have disconnected from their heritage and thus doomed their civilization, those responsible for the Balfour Declaration were connected to the Bible and therefore instinctively supported Zionism. Since the Bible is the foundation of Western civilization, Britain’s detachment from supporting Zionism is its detachment from its own civilization. And we see the results in Britain’s sad decline.

jane baker
jane baker
2 months ago
Reply to  tamritz blog

Those who created The Balfour Declaration wanted Jewish money in order to win WW1as by 1916 by all traditional,conventional standards Germany had won. The Balfour Declaration was a bribe to get American Jewish money into WW1 and it worked. But when you make a deal with The Devil you have to keep your side of the bargain.

Moshe Simon
Moshe Simon
2 months ago
Reply to  jane baker

The Balfour Declaration was made several months after the US entered WW1. And American Jewish money played little if any part in the war. Chaim Weizmann’s development, while working in Manchester, of an efficient manufacturing process for acetone, an essential chemical needed in the fabrication of explosives, was however an important contribution to the Allied victory.

hasim veliju
hasim veliju
2 months ago
Reply to  tamritz blog

The comments on this website are truly amazing. Britain’s decline is because they aren’t Zionist enough, in the sense of reading the King James Bible and deducing that they need to support the state of Israel more. Just amazing.

Caradog Wiliams
Caradog Wiliams
2 months ago
Reply to  hasim veliju

How convenient for you. All solved now!!

Caradog Wiliams
Caradog Wiliams
2 months ago
Reply to  hasim veliju

It is not enough to have a smug answer to a problem. You have to actually do something about it.

Gayle Rosenthal
Gayle Rosenthal
2 months ago
Reply to  tamritz blog

Well said ….

Chris Van Schoor
Chris Van Schoor
2 months ago

Aris lost me when he starts promoting the “dispossession” trope, completely ignoring in the process Jewish history of occupation of that area that goes way back..

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
2 months ago

How does a group occupy an area in which it has a 3,000 year history?

Alexander Harper
Alexander Harper
2 months ago

This is an excellent article, which nails the problem pretty well. Far from being an unprovoked attack by a savage, incorrigible people, as it has been painted by Israel, 7 October 2023 was just another, inevitable slave rebellion, the seeds of which were sown in 1917. This article is a great starter for anyone wishing to understand the tragic and deplorable (from the UK’s pov) background to current events in the Fertile Crescent. It should be required reading. Thank you.

Gorka Sillero
Gorka Sillero
2 months ago

Nah, it’s just another example of Muslim Arabs murdering Jews as seen many times before in that region. Almost as if Jihad is literally part of their religion/ideology

Mike Dearing
Mike Dearing
2 months ago

Yep, see how they slaughtered their supposed oppressors: the peaceniks and music lovers! The only ones enslaving Gazans are the Muslim fundamentalists .

Ol Rappaport
Ol Rappaport
2 months ago

But the Palestinian population are Arab colonists who took their name from the existing name of the land when they settled it following the conquest of Jerusalem by the Caliphate in 638 CE, when many of the indigenous people, Christian and Jewish, were driven out. Their only link with the land is etymological, they are not lineal descendants of Philistines, Canaanites or Jebusites..

jane baker
jane baker
2 months ago
Reply to  Ol Rappaport

David Ben Gurion and a colleague in the early 1920s did an extensive research project and concluded that the Palestinian residents in the land with their title deeds,charters and other legal proofs of land ownership going back hundreds of years were the descendants of the Jews, the working peasants of ancient Judea who were not taken away to Babylon or Rome. They thought these people were their cousins but on finding out the cousins didn’t want to house share they buried the research in the archives of Tel Aviv University.

Campbell P
Campbell P
2 months ago
Reply to  Ol Rappaport

Read Deuteronomy and think again. The promise is conditional upon obedience and certain lands are excluded in it. The current secular atheists running the State have not kept their side of the bargain.

Gayle Rosenthal
Gayle Rosenthal
2 months ago
Reply to  Ol Rappaport

It’s worthwhile for the Arabized populations of Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria … and even Turkey … to check their DNA. Many will find that their original ethnicities are still in tact. Many will find they have Jewish DNA. Even today we are witness to the Arabization and Islamization of Persia and Lebanon-Syria, as well as UK and Europe. It’s worthwhile because while being Arab is not a negative trait, submission to Islamic identity is a real soul-killer. First is the insistence on mastery of Arabic, which the Islamized African countries like Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia and Sudan have already succumbed to. Next is the total elimination of the features of the original culture.
Can anyone tell me if the Coptic Christians remaining in Egypt are still required to pay the Jizya ?

Anna Bramwell
Anna Bramwell
2 months ago

Neither Turkey nor Persia were Arabised. Muslim ised yes.

Andrew Vanbarner
Andrew Vanbarner
2 months ago

In other words, Muslims were opposed to Jewish emigration to their “homeland,” which includes Jerusalem and the Al Asqa mosque, the latter being built on top of a Jewish temple.
But, today, they have every right to emigrate to the West, and insist on the right to maintain some very disturbing traditions – FGM, polygamy, honor killings, blasphemy laws – in their new home.
Sorry, but no. I’m afraid they’ll have to either get along with their neighbors, both at home and abroad, or fight a war that they will likely lose.

Jerry Carroll
Jerry Carroll
2 months ago

This will require some stiffening of the spine before it’s too late.

General Store
General Store
2 months ago

no such place as Palestine. And no Palestinians.

Gorka Sillero
Gorka Sillero
2 months ago

Surprised to see the author has omitted completely the demographic composition of the region throughout the centuries the Ottoman empire lasted, and the forced movement of people such empire engineered. Also missing something about the migrations of Arabs to Palestine during the British Mandate in search of work, from places like Egypt. It’s almost as if this was nothing but Arab colonisalist propaganda. Waste of time.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
2 months ago

Strange how pro-Palestinian sentiment only arises when the Israelis are involved. Otherwise, most of the Arab Muslim world wants nothing to do with Palestinians. The Jordanians don’t, the Egyptians don’t. When Muslims kill Muslims by the boatload, as has happened for years in Syria, as happened in Yemen, as happens almost anywhere large groups of Muslims live, the people protesting now are nowhere to be found. These people are quite comfortable with Palestinian deaths because it allows them to focus their collective hatred on one entity.

LindaMB
LindaMB
2 months ago
Reply to  Alex Lekas

The Jordanians were foolish enough to offer sanctuary to the Palestinians, they repaid this with assassinating the Jordanian PM and trying to assassinate the King (see Black September). When the inevitable happened and they were forced out of Jordan, they fled (and were welcomed) to Lebanon which was at the time predominantly Christian and known as Paris on the Mediterranean. They thanked the Lebanese by teaming up with the local muslims and launched a civil war. They, as Hezbollah, now occupy Lebanese territory. They are a colonial force.

Peter Spurrier
Peter Spurrier
2 months ago

The overall situation looks like a moral mess to me. One group have been displaced from the land where they have lived for centuries. The other group have arrived to avoid being killed.
I would question anyone from either side who says this whole situation is morally straightforward.

Bruce Rodger
Bruce Rodger
2 months ago
Reply to  Peter Spurrier

Proposed solutions:
1) Palestinians on the West Bank get their act together and demonstrate the capacity to administer a healthy and peaceful Palestinian state. Israel gives former Gaza citizens the West Bank settlements, with all infrastructure intact, and helps its new neighbouring state to develop economically and socially.
2) Israel absorbs the Gaza strip and rebuilds it to house the former West Bank settlers and anybody else who wants to live there peacefully as part of the slightly enlarged state of Israel.
3) Israel helps Lebanon to resestablish control over its southern borderlands and to rebuild in the wake of the destruction of Hezbollah. Lebanon and Israel establish peaceful relations and trade links geared to restoring the prosperity and stability formerly enjoyed by that country prior to Syrian interference.
4) Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States reaffirm their peaceful coexistence with Israel and develop political and commercial ties.
5) Saudi Arabia absorbs Yemen and rebuilds the region in the wake of the destruction of the Houthi, bringing political, economic and social stability to that strategically important region.
6) Syria, Iraq and Iran are placed on international probation, subject to good behaviour (inc. considerably reduced armed forces and no nuclear weapons).

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
2 months ago
Reply to  Bruce Rodger

Good points but 5 wishful thinking. Persia ruled Yemen prior to Islam and Zaydis Shia Fivers and have been conflict with Sunnis for 1200 years. Saudi has given land to Yemen but to no avail.

Chuck Burns
Chuck Burns
2 months ago

Britain is responsible for the situation in the Middle East. They promised both sides, the Arabs and the Jews, the same land but made it possible for the Jews to immigrate into the area while giving the Arabs nothing. “Britain’s experiments with demographic engineering and management of ethnic tensions have turned inwards” Now immigration has been turned inwards to occupy all of the UK, Europe, and the USA. It is just a matter of time before the European genome is non-exixtent.

Bruce Rodger
Bruce Rodger
2 months ago
Reply to  Chuck Burns

The Arabs got Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan and the Gulf States. They would’ve got Syria and Lebanon too if it hadn’t been for France insisting on a share of the spoils from the defeat of the Ottoman Empire (despite having contributed nothing to that effort). Worse still, it forced the UK to renege on its promise that the Arabs would control Damascus. They got it eventually, but under a dictatorship that has been even worse than French rule.

Chuck Burns
Chuck Burns
2 months ago

If the non-Europeans can be patient and look to the future they will realize they will inherit the Earth and the Europeans will become extinct.

Kent Ausburn
Kent Ausburn
2 months ago
Reply to  Chuck Burns

Glad I won’t be around to have to live in that dystopian world.

Bruce Rodger
Bruce Rodger
2 months ago

Despite its posturing as a ‘reasonable’ analysis of the situation in the Middle East, I find Roussinos’ article to be woke historical revisionism aimed at pushing the anti-colonial evil British viewpoint. The people of the region were not ‘Palestinians’, but the defeated population of the former Ottoman Empire. And unlike US colonialism, whereby they perpetrated genocide on the indigenous population as they expanded their empire westward, the British government sought to impose British rule over the region in an effort to westernize the local values. The recent adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq show just how difficult – and possibly even pointless – a task that is.
    We got off to a bad start by allowing France – which had played no part whatsoever in defeating the Ottomans – to insist on grabbing Syria and Lebanon, thereby forcing us to break our promise to our Arab allies that they would rule Damascus, as well as Mecca. Nevertheless, they got Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the Gulf States, which was a huge improvement on being ruled by the Turks.
    I don’t think anybody can reasonably criticise the movement of Jews back into the region, in the light of the horrifying move for total extermination practised by nazi Germany and its allies. It does also reflect a reluctance to accept such large numbers elsewhere, much as Arab states don’t want a large influx of ‘Palestinians’ today (exacerbated by the trouble they have caused previously in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt Kuwait and Tunisia). But the author omits to mention that Zionist terrorism was another factor that forced Britain to withdraw from the region.   
    But this is all in the chequered past. What the division today that the author mentions is starkly revealing is the chasm between those who would defend western values and those who would like to bring it all crashing down – through terrorism ‘if necessary’. There is a clash between incompatible cultural values that most certainly does not undermine diversity arguments and freedom of expression but does make it very clear that all cultural values are not equal nor worthy of respect – which is why past cultural values such as human sacrifice, cannibalism, slavery and others have been rejected as our civilization matured and efforts were made to eliminate them altogether.
    Nevertheless, Israel was making significant progress in developing harmonious relations with several Arab countries, which were realizing that Iran’s religious fanaticism and promotion of terrorism were the biggest threat to the region. That is why Hamas decided to attack and made a point of filming their heinous acts. They have always viewed murdering Israelis as a bonus, but the underlying intention was to provoke Israel into a reaction that would completely alienate them in the region and possibly even precipitate another massed attempt to wipe Israel off the map. To that intent, the full weight of Hamas propaganda had already been mustered, to depict the murdering and crippling of women and children (with pictures taken from other times and even other countries, such as Syria).
    Fortunately, they miscalculated. The Israeli response has been as surgical as possible – even to the point of losing their own troops by bending over backwards to avoid civilian deaths (they all dress alike, some women and ‘children’ wield weapons and bombs and the terrorists use civilians as shields, so who is to tell). And Arab neighbours are wise to the Hamas wiles, so they are not only standing by but are refusing to accept Palestinian migrants. And I would even venture to say that most Lebanese, after years of seeing Hezbollah run its own separate state inside its southern borderlands, are probably cheering for the destruction of Hezbollah, making room for peaceful and prosperous relations with Israel – just so long as the Assad dictatorship stops interfering in Lebanon’s internal affairs. As for the Houthis, no doubt Israeli and US intelligence will help Saudi Arabia eliminate that terrorist threat on its southern border.
    The big challenge facing the region is to provide decent governance for the people. Hamas and the Houthi may be sponsored by Iran, but the governments of the West Bank and Yemen have offered little in the way of healthy alternatives, riddled as they are with corruption and tribal rivalries. Nevertheless, the new realignment of the region offers hopeful prospects for a new start. I just hope outsiders are helpful and don’t seek to prolong the instability in support of their own dubious interests.   

Mark M Breza
Mark M Breza
2 months ago

God is not a real estate agent !

jane baker
jane baker
2 months ago
Reply to  Mark M Breza

And The Bible is not Title Deeds.

Paul Caswell
Paul Caswell
2 months ago

I stopped reading when the Chief Rabbi (traditionally having a seat in the Lords and representing a people who have given so much to this country) was mentioned in the same breath as Islamics. Disgusting

Mark Miles
Mark Miles
2 months ago

At the end of WWI the British office in Cairo and British officers serving in Palestine advocated for Arab rule over Palestine. Essentially professional Arabists, they were intimately familiar with the politics and culture of the region, and recognized that the people in former Ottoman lands would not submit to non-Muslim rule— not British, not French, and not Zionist.  Already in 1920 an Arab delegation in Palestine petitioned the British military governor to become part of an independent Syria, explicitly opposing Zionism. 
It was the Christian Zionist contingent in London, led by Lloyd George, who advocated on Biblical grounds for a Jewish polity in Palestine.  This contingent eventually won the day, when Winston Churchill as Colonial Secretary in 1921 decided to honor the Balfour Declaration, even though Churchill estimated that 90 percent of the British serving in Palestine were against it*.
*Gilbert, Churchill: Companion Volume 4.  

Herb Saperstein
Herb Saperstein
2 months ago

Using the narrative told by the likes of Khalidi and Ilan Pappe is immediately suspect. These are two extremely anti-Israel and, some would say, antisemitic sources. Khalidi has certainly played a part in the antisemitic events at Columbia. Even 20 years ago, Columbia students were complaining about his biased classes that were stirring up antisemitism.

Will D. Mann
Will D. Mann
2 months ago

Britain’s role in this was put succinctly by Jewish writer Arthur Koestler. With it, he stated eloquently, “one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third.”

jane baker
jane baker
2 months ago

What if,What if. I love historical What Ifs. What if some VERY RICH JEWS,the ones with international government influencing wealth,there were quite a few of them about in the early 1900s. What if they decided to create a Pretext,a Pretext so utterly incredible and shocking that no request they might make in the light of this pretext.could be denied the Giant Cuckoo by its tiny uncomprehending parents. Don’t say thats unthinkable. We are seeing it done right now. The Yahoo interprets everything as a pretext for Genocide and as they are Gods Chosen People they are given special dispensation. What a ridiculous idea. A consortium.of wealthy,super wealthy Jews decide.to throw all the poor Jews under the bus so they find a weirdo loser with six followers in a beer cellar and fund said loser and all.of a sudden his followers are wearing designer uniforms and he’s driving a swanky car and no ones asking /”how d’ya get so rich”.

Guy Peled
Guy Peled
2 months ago

This is, disappointingly, not a serious article; it only pretends to be one. Roussinos chooses only two very sectarian, defamed “historians” (ideologues that fabricated some of their works) – Pappe and Khalidi – as grounds for this amateurish, one-sided opinion piece. This one-sidedness is based on a few cherry-picked half-truths and quite a considerable amount of historical revisionism. This does not inform the readers but obfuscates and indoctrinates a specific narrative that happens to be based on a very loose resemblance to the fuller picture. Roussinos doesn’t even try to bring another angle to challenge his weak argument. This can only fool the misinformed, who would not notice the omissions and manipulation of facts.
On Pappe, for example – “At best, Ilan Pappe must be one of the world’s sloppiest historians; at worst, one of the most dishonest. In truth, he probably merits a place somewhere between the two.” (https://newrepublic.com/article/85344/ilan-pappe-sloppy-dishonest-historian)
On Khalidi – “Khalidi today demands scholarly work from authors on Palestine/Israel but does not offer one himself. Instead, this Palestinian-American historian mixes a personal memoir with a roadmap for Palestinian activism recommended to destroy Israel. When narrating historical events, Khalidi leaves out key details. Khalidi is not an objective academic, but an activist who was on the official Palestinian negotiating team with Israel and who had ties to Palestinian leaders.” (https://hussainabdulhussain.substack.com/p/can-palestinians-be-wrong)
When these are your only two foundations for a very bold main claim, you will inevitably write a mediocre partisan piece that is unsuitable IMHO to UnHerd standards.

Jim C
Jim C
2 months ago
Reply to  Guy Peled

Which “expert” isn’t partisan when it comes to this subject?

Guy Peled
Guy Peled
2 months ago
Reply to  Jim C

Some are more balanced than others, and some are far better disciplined and adhere to the facts than Pappe and Khalidi. The main point that you seem to have missed is that you can’t claim to analyse a historical conflict and bring only two sources that happen to be both vehemently anti-Israel and lack any professional credibility among historians. Aris could have been more honest and brought at least one source with another viewpoint, such as Morris. Otherwise, this is closer to low-level propaganda.

Steve Greaves
Steve Greaves
2 months ago

There is no sectarianism. There are a minority, with disproportionate access to the media complaining. They don’t hold British values or views.

rick stubbs
rick stubbs
2 months ago

I think this post colonial blame game is a bridge way too far. The British did not occupy Palestine very long after the Ottoman defeat, unlike the Raj where the occupation was long standing and the end game immediately disastrous. Plus French, with a mandate in Syria Lebanon, and especially the US, also supported the creation of a Jewish state. What is the point? The British released the snake into the garden of Eden in 1948? Seriously? It is a great example of how a moment of reflection on the way to grocers store should not have spawned a grand theory of history …

Jerry Carroll
Jerry Carroll
2 months ago

Very long story short, it was wrong to flood the country with Muslims hostile to Western values.

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
2 months ago

The Jewish people have learnt knew skills and put then into practice far quicker than their opponents whether it be training a modern army ( Orde Wingate ), agriculture and the most modern of technologies and made use of them far quicker than their opponents.
Proverbs !” The proverbs of Solomon , son of David, King of Israel by which men will come to wisdom and instruction .”
The fundamental basics of all civilisations are how does one acquire technology and use it to benefit one’s group and how does one prevent oneself becoming effete and being unable to defend oneself from groups who wish to take it away.
Israel is doiung a far better job than their opponents.
The Arabs sold sold to Jewish settlers at up to ten time it’s value and failed to take Jerusalem in WW1. If the Arabs had not sold their land and had risen up in 1914 and taken today what is Gaza, Israel, West Bank and Jordan, there would be no Israel. Much of present day Middle East was ruled by the Turks up to 1918. Eastern Europe had to rise up and take it’s land back from the Turks and Portugal and Span Reconquer their land from the Arabs.
Blaming one’s opponents for one’s mistakes is unlikely to bring one victory.

Andrew Sweeney
Andrew Sweeney
2 months ago

I am so sick of people harping on about historical grievances. Let’s just pick a side and then fight for it. I know what my side is – white British, but not the limp dk liberal sort.

Ralph Faris
Ralph Faris
2 months ago

.

David Butler
David Butler
2 months ago

Allow me to summarise this article in a short sentence: Multiculturalism is a busted flush.

Samuel Ross
Samuel Ross
2 months ago

The term “West Bank” is a modern designation that lacks historical precedent or validity. This region is historically known as Judea, a name deeply rooted in Jewish history and heritage. The name “West Bank” was coined by Jordan following its armed and hostile invasion of the area in 1948 until the end of its occupation in 1967. However, this land has been intrinsically linked to the Jewish people for millennia.

Judea is the land from which the Jews (i.e. Judeans) originate, a region where the Judean mountains form the backbone of the landscape. It is the territory historically allotted to the Tribe of Judah, one of the twelve tribes of Israel. The Judeans, or Jews, have lived in this area for many centuries, establishing a rich historical legacy. The cultural significance of Judea to the Jewish people cannot be overstated, making the term “West Bank” a misnomer that overlooks the profound connection between the land and its ancient inhabitants.

Samuel Ross
Samuel Ross
2 months ago

Prior to 1948, there were Palestinian Jews, Druze, Christians, Muslims, Bedouins, etc. It was the name of a region, not a state.

Samuel Ross
Samuel Ross
2 months ago

I’ll also note that Britain’s empire has an excellent record when compared with the Spanish or Ottoman empires.

James Russel Fisher
James Russel Fisher
2 months ago
Reply to  Samuel Ross

Or indeed the Russian, American, Belgian, German… or ANY other Empire in history!

Dana G
Dana G
2 months ago

When countries think that Israel shouldn’t exist- they call it antizionist. Israel—one of the smallest countries in the world, with a diverse population that includes Jews who identify by their country of origin, such as Yemeni, Moroccan, Russian, Polish, etc and 18% Muslim who identify as Palestinians, Arabs Bedouins, or Druze and more —is blamed for many of the world’s problems. Jewish people in the West face two options: convert, which means denouncing Israel and claiming they’re not truly Jewish, the good jew, or hiding or downplaying their lineage, or moving—specifically, moving to Israel. This rhetoric has been particularly strong in France over the last 15 years, leading to the emergence of large French communities in Israel. American Jews are also moving more and more. Moreover, 30% of the Israelis who moved to Berlin 10-15 years ago, predominantly artists and progressive elites, have returned to Israel. I wonder if similar cleansing by choice of course are happening in other communities in the West.

Bruce Rodger
Bruce Rodger
2 months ago

A couple of contributors have attributed the Partitioning of India to the UK. That is false anti-colonial propaganda and simply not true. The UK was aligned with Gandhi in wanting to maintain the country intact, with the different sects learning to live peacefully alongside one another. It was the Moslem extremists who insisted on Partitioning and coerced Jinnah to go along with it (he knew he was dying and wouldn’t have to live with the consequences).
The consequences were dire, with millions of refugees flowing in both directions and bitter fighting all around the country that resulted in many thousands of deaths.

Dana G
Dana G
2 months ago

I wonder if this article is published close to October the 7th as a justification. You had the entire year to publish it. By all mean necessary

alexander Tomsky
alexander Tomsky
2 months ago

A bit confusing.
Yes, the British helped to re-establish an ancient Jewish homeland. They have underestimated the conflict with the Arabs and reduced the immigration flow in the 30’s. The conflict is fundamentally religious and goes back to Mohammed. It can never be resolved. However if Israel maintains its military prowess, it can survive. Hopefully fanatical islamism will evemntually decline. What more is there to know?

james goater
james goater
2 months ago

Succinct indeed. “Hopefully fanatical Islamism will eventually decline.” Sadly, that will only be feasible when the Holy texts upon which it is based are wholly re-appraised, re-interpreted or revised. In other words, an Islamic Reformation. At present, the chances of that appear to be zero, absolutely zero.

Kiddo Cook
Kiddo Cook
2 months ago

Whenever I see so called “Palestian flags” I see supporters of terrorism and genocide. I see a symbol of incalculable evil, of Hamas, Hezboll**ks and a proxy of a violent backward religion. A symbol of terrorism that ought to be outlawed and torn down from wherever it flies and those responsible tried for crimes against humanity and treason. A symbol equivalent to the swastika, a symbol of the eradication of, the Jewish people and Christians. The symbol of a force that has brought untold misery to vast numbers of people. It must be destroyed, razed and prosecuted wherever it rears it’s murderous head.

james goater
james goater
2 months ago
Reply to  Kiddo Cook

When the first pro-Palestine mobs began rampaging around various Western capitals it was common to see, painted on these flags in bold black letters, “From the river to the see, Palestine shall be free” — an obvious call for the destruction of Israel. Interestingly, this phenomenon has completely disappeared, at least from London and New York demonstrations; now only the colours are allowed. This, hopefully, means that Hate Speech laws are finally being applied. In the context of your comment, small beer, yes, but progress, surely?

Chauncey Gardiner
Chauncey Gardiner
2 months ago

Hmm. Ottoman authority over the Levant and Arabian peninsula, such as it was, dissolved by 1917. Who was going to fill the void?
On the Arabian peninsula, the House of Saud managed to assert itself most effectively. Saudi Arabia formally came into being in 1932.
In the Levant: Who knows what violence and dislocations would have occurred absent the British presence. Did the Brits really mess things up? Or, to put it differently, we have to ask “Compared to What?”:
“The Palestine conflict, and its destabilisation of the entire Middle East, is surely the greatest single historical disaster wrought by Whitehall governance so far.” Compared to what?

Gordon Arta
Gordon Arta
2 months ago

Absolutely, Aris. It’s a well know fact that the annihilation of the Jewish Banu Quraysa by the ‘prophet’ and his army in 627 CE was, in fact, a false flag operation carried out by Mossad, trained by the CIA, armed by British arms manufacturers, and ordered by Thatcher. And that the Islamic texts calling on Muslims to kill every last Jew ‘hiding behind a rock or tree’ are forgeries produced by the British imperialist colonialist capitalist industrial political patriarchal complex. Innit?

Matthew Freedman
Matthew Freedman
2 months ago
Reply to  Gordon Arta

Let’s not collectively blame all modern Arab-Muslims for it. Most of them were victims of islamic-colonisation. It shows how strongly arabised and islamised the caliphate was when you have people going to marches chanting about that massacre. Their ancestors were likely victims of similar acts at the same time. Ironically many of original gulf arabs are chill about israel.

Ralph Faris
Ralph Faris
2 months ago

posted in error

Deb Grant
Deb Grant
2 months ago

No. The area, but not country, called Palestine, or the Holy Land, was a desert, mostly inhabited by nomadic arab tribes. Displaced, persecuted Jews built a thriving, successful, democratic nation in less than half a century by their sheer hard work and industry. Palestinian Arabs have had the right to share in that prosperity – and many choose to do do.

On the other hand, their so-called saviours and terrorist leaders have made Palestinians cannon fodder, continued to impoverish their people to buy arms, and refused to negotiate anything. They’ve been egged on and financed by the radical, theocratic Islamic extremist governors of Iran. It is Iran which has chosen to create and foster these divisions. Other conservative Arab nations like Saudi and the Gulf States have been pragmatic and have chosen not to follow this path, and to trade with the West for the future benefit of their peoples when demand for oil ceases.

Extremist Islamic terrorists use violence, not diplomacy. Since 9/11/2001 it has thrown the world into fear, distrust and huge, continuing expense, when the West has no desire for war or violence.

Do what works. Israel works, but Palestinian terrorism hasn’t.

mac mahmood
mac mahmood
2 months ago

Author has deftly demonstrated why there can be no ethical, moral or rational ground for demonising the Palestinians for harrying the zionists on the one hand and continuing to root for the said zionists on the other. But there are people who do, and they do so on emotional grounds based on racism, a desire not to call into question British imperial actions as a sine qua non of patriotism, and a desire to see Muslims discomfited in the mistaken belief that all Palestinians are adherents of Islam. To hide their base emotions they tend to shroud their stance in an woke guise of standing up for the poor little Jewish minority while invoking the holocaust ignoring the fact that the zionist project began much long before that. In the process the whole thing has become a right versus left affair. As the Left appear to be pro-Palestinian, the Right feel impelled to be pro-zionist. Those in the zionist corner tend to be Right wing, generally Protestant, members of the establishment or politicians enjoying the munificence of zionist lobbies. Northern Irish Protestants are an interesting case. In addition to the traditional theology that considers it desirable that Jews should be returned to the Levant, they have an added incentive to regard their enemy’s friend’s enemies as their friends.

Ralph Faris
Ralph Faris
2 months ago

Sorry about the double posting.

B. Timothy S.
B. Timothy S.
2 months ago

Reading this you’d almost think the millions of Muslims sweeping into Europe over the last decade were fleeing Israel and not Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. You’d almost think ISIS was spawned fighting Israel and not birthed after (another) Western invasion destroyed the region in more ways than Israel ever has.

More Arabs have died in Syria in the last decade than have ever been killed by Israel since its modern founding.

But to get to the bottom of that might force the Arabs to look in a mirror.

Ralph Faris
Ralph Faris
2 months ago

To: Graham Cunningham:   
I think you’ve got the author’s account of the rise of sectarianism in a nutshell! Aroussinos’ take on the developing sectarianism has become a common refrain of those who see nothing but evil in the entire history of the British empire, and pay literally no attention to other preexisting types of conflicts in the ME, nor do they, like Aroussinos, see the historical formation of very different Arab peoples as not really important in making the case of where their territories began or ended, or whether they were essentially wandering tribes which would raise questions about ethnic boundaries that would complicate the question of where one group’s homeland began–ownership questions being the truly difficult question to determine.
When you ignore the historical facts of the original home of Jews, I suppose you can mistakenly find the plight of the “Palestinians” compelling. But paying any attention to the thickness of the ideological cloud that envelops the whole issue of land ownership in the region should move you away from the standard and greatly mistaken move of using one and only one explanation for the situation confronting the inhabitants of the Arabs there. Serious conflicts are rarely monocausal.
And of course, you would also have to ignore the multiple attempts of Israel to make peace with various ethnic groups there, the ruthless and nazi-like jihadis consistently rejecting any such peace-seeking overtures, instead calling for the elimination of Israel and all Jews. The center of the dispute between Israel and the extremist Muslims in the region is rooted in an anti-Jewish, anti-West, and anti-Western civilizational quest–one which can only be defeated if we acknowledge and oppose those political currents that the author manages to avoid noticing. 
While I find some features of the history he provides as helpful in describing the origins of the current conflicts, ignoring the more salient historical and political details would suggest the root causes have not been identified in his account. In essence by relying on the tiresome and partial presentation of the historical dynamics of British colonialism, the author misses the larger reality of a conflict of civilizations so well documented in Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations. When we ignore those other features of the rise of sectarianism, we do so in the face of great danger to our entire way of life in the West.

Douglas McNeish
Douglas McNeish
2 months ago

“Palestinians now saw themselves inexorably drawn into a situation where they became strangers in their own land.” Difficult nit to see the parallel with indigenous British and the mass immigration forced on them by deception on the part of their governments for 30 years. This is a well researched and thorough presentation of the Israeli-Palestimian conflict,.and the parallel suggests that violence awaits in Britain’s resolution of ethnic divisions.
It is worth pointing out that Roussinos’s analysis Britain’s failed mandate neglects to mention that it stepped in to try to resolve problems that had festered for centuries under Ottoman rule, and that failure would likely have awaited any government saddled with the task of picking up the pieces of an imploded empire.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
2 months ago

“the modern Israel-Palestine conflict, which at the time of writing threatens a third wider Middle Eastern war, had begun…” If you think Iran and its fellow Islamists are only interested in Israel being wiped out, you are as delusional as Chamberlin was about Hitler and Germany. Why did the guys shooting up the Mumbai train station scream that India is theirs? Because that’s what they think, from India to Spain, former Islamic territory is always theirs. And we dhimmis, non-believers, are to be subjugated worldwide.
This is a war not seen since the Turks almost took over Europe. A friend from Romania pointed out that no one asks, how did Moslems get settled into eastern Europe centuries ago? Because the Ottomans had a conscious policy of ethnic cleansing of non-Moslems and colonization.

Francis Turner
Francis Turner
1 month ago

In contract to the depth of the intellectual, political and detailed historical comments, let us look at some basics that affect, and of of interest to the ordinary people and voters in the great majority of Britain.

Islamic terrorism is arguably and statistically the greatest threat in and to the world today.

Whereas young white and black working class people have their pop music, and football heroes, their discos, their screen idols and their drinking and sex lives, and ” street cred”, equivalent young muslims have none, so becoming an extremist, is a short route to their equivalent of ” street cred”.

It does not take long when in any working class pub to hear the views that politicians do not: as to why those who come from totalitarian countries that persecute and ban, and even execute other religions, want freedoms and special rights here? The lack of integration, and a gradual feed into and take over of local politics and government that would be impossible in their countries of origin.

This problem is not going to go away.

General Store
General Store
1 month ago

No. Muslim immigration has brought middle eastern sectarianism to the UK. period

Liam O'Mahony
Liam O'Mahony
1 month ago

A fair summation of this unholy land’s endless conflict.. GB’s desire to wreak havoc whenever ot abandoned a colony seems petty at best; snd monstrous at worst.. NI snd India no exceptions either..

Michael Clarke
Michael Clarke
1 month ago

Apropos the last sentence, who is the author telling!

Richard Colman
Richard Colman
1 month ago

I have got to the point where to me all arguments or justifications based on the need for a God are deluded and by the twenty-first century immature. The belief that land was given to some by a God many years ago is a fictional story, pure fantasy and manipulative. The world does not need such superstitions and would be better off without it, leaving human beings to work together as humans, not agents of extraterrestrial powers, to learn how to live together. The world cannot afford to wait much longer. The people of the world need to grow up. I am sorry if some are hurt by these comments, but the intention is good. The idea of a God needs to be laid to rest so people can stop justifying fighting over it.RDC

Gary Taylor
Gary Taylor
1 month ago

“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”

How Straussian of you.

thomas dreyer
thomas dreyer
1 month ago

lol. Big deal. Gaza underwent gentrification. A shitty run down neighborhood with shitty houses just turned green and rich because the Jews moved in.