The West’s Empty Promise of Palestinian Statehood

There appears no way to redeem this promise

Lawrence would be disgusted. Painting by Augustus John

So the UK government now recognizes the existence of a Palestinian state. How kind. This comes almost exactly 110 years after 1915, when Britain’s Sir Henry McMahon, in a series of letters between him and Hussein, Sharif of Mecca and King of Hijaz, pledged post-war Arab independence in return for the Arab revolt against their Ottoman overlords. The territory clearly included all of Syria except for the coastal region, and most of what was later deemed Palestine but then divided into several Ottoman administrative districts, including Jerusalem.

The Arab revolt, in which the British officer T.E Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia) played a major role, began the following year, 1916, just after the British were to conclude a separate deal with wartime ally France. The Sykes-Picot deal carved up this very same region into their respective spheres of imperial influence, the French to get Syria, the British Palestine, and what became Iraq.

This stab in the back by the British only became known in late 1917 when it was published by the new revolutionary government in Russia, naturally angering the Arabs who were supposed to be liberated. But by then, the Arabs, notably the Palestinians occupying the relatively fertile land between the sea and the Jordan River, had an equally big worry. In an effort to get support from the Jewish diaspora in, and at the urging of the Jewish elite in the UK, Britain issued the so-called Balfour Declaration promising to create, in post-Ottoman Palestine, a “National Home for the Jewish people.”

Before that, many Jews, including a young David Ben Gurion (later first prime minister of Israel), leaned towards support for Germany and the Ottomans against the notoriously anti-Semitic Russian Empire).

Although in 1917 Jews constituted only about 10 percent of the Palestine population, the goal of a national home was subsequently enshrined in the so-called Mandate – a colonial fig leaf – over Palestine given to the British by a wholly western-dominated League of Nations.

In October 1918, British and Arab forces had barely pushed the Ottomans out of Syria before the shame of breaking its promises to the Arabs was underlined by Lawrence himself. Invited to Buckingham Palace, he rejected the king’s award of a knighthood. Arab leader Prince Faisal, son of Hussein, rejected the subsequent carve-up of the Middle East agreed by the major powers at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919-20.

The one power which could have provided balance did not. Woodrow Wilson had arrived with the much-praised Fourteen Points, a liberal, democratic agenda, and the goal of a League of Nations. He appointed the King-Crane Commission to investigate Palestine issues. It consulted widely but its conclusions were inconvenient and hastily buried. Likewise, the US rejected the Treaty of Versailles and did not join the League.

Between 1918 and 1948, the Jewish population rose from about 10 percent to about 35 percent, mostly through migration from eastern and central Europe which continued, despite some restrictions imposed by the British and in the face of an Arab revolt against the scale of Jewish immigration which saw the deaths of about 5,000 Arabs, 500 Jews, and 260 British troops killed. Immigration surged again after the Holocaust and the defeat of Hitler.

Yet despite the continued migration of Jews, including from North Africa and Iran and diaspora outliers such as India and Ethiopia, and later a huge influx from Russia after before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the percentage of Palestinian Arabs within the original Palestine Mandate territory remains close to that of Jews in Israel – 3 million in the West Bank, and two million each in Gaza and Israel itself. Yet all the land is, one way or another, under Israeli control whether as a result of the 1967 war, the 1973 war, the gradual Jewish settlement of West Bank land, or the current Gaza war. (In addition, there are about 2.5 million Palestinians in Jordan, mostly descendants of refugees from their former land).

Israel’s de facto expansion has come with the open support of the United States and the passive support of most of Europe, which has long put an emphasis on Israel’s defense, not withstanding its vast military and technological superiority, a legacy of its European roots and US links It has been ably assisted by the weakness of Arab neighboring states dependent on US money or religious and ethnic divisions deriving from the post-Ottoman carve-up.

The west, in general, has spent the past years decrying the evils of Hamas while saying next to nothing about Jewish colonization of the West Bank, or indeed the horrors of an isolated Gaza even before the current war. Hamas is exceptionally nasty, but it exists for a reason, which is clear. Meanwhile, the west has propped up a corrupt, feeble, and undemocratic Palestine Authority under 89-year-old Mahmoud Abbas.

Quite why the UK – and France, Canada, Australia etc, – think that recognizing Palestine 100 years late is going to make much of a dent in Israel’s expansion ambitions is open to question. The Netanyahu government rejects a two-state solution, and US President Donald Trump appears to go along with this. So how is it to come about? As of now, it seems that UK and Co are merely making a gesture which is no more meaningful than McMahon’s promise to Hussein in 1915. Yet unless they do something substantial to reverse Israeli expansion, they will be complicit either of two crimes against humanity.

Either the five million Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza will be quasi-slave communities beholden to Israel with even fewer rights than the Palestinian minority in Israel itself, or they are going to be the subject of mass deportation, cleansing the Land of Israel of the sons of Ishmael and of the Philistines.

That is easier said than done. Mostly desert Jordan already has 11 million, swelled by Syrian and Iraqi refugees as well as Palestinians. Egypt, with 115 million, could absorb the Gazans if sufficiently bribed but the Palestinian resistance would be fierce. It would also be perilous for any Egyptian government.

The bottom line is that having given the National Home so much scope to colonize and expand for 110 years to the point where it has military domination of a whole region, the UK and its allies are in no position to redeem this latest promise of a real Palestinian state. That is a state in control of its own destiny and with the normal attributes of independence – control of trade, immigration, laws, its own borders, and means of defense.

Failure to do will add to the deep resentment that the former Ottoman-ruled lands feel towards the humiliations and depredations forced on them over the past hundred years by a now-declining West.