The historical context of the Israeli apartheid regime was given birth to by the European colonial powers in Palestine and the Middle East. It continues to inflict untold suffering on Palestinians and the Arab world. This feature aims to explore key events and political decisions that have shaped the Middle East for centuries to come.

Specifically, the British settler colonial project in Palestine that established the Zionist Apartheid ‘state’. It continues to inflict untold suffering on Palestinians and the region. This feature aims to give a brief overview of key events and documents that shaped Palestine and the Middle East for centuries to come.

During WWI, as it became clear to the Allied Powers that the Ottoman Empire was on the brink of collapse, they devised the Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916) to advance their imperial interests in the Middle East. The Arab states, which were considered ‘spoils of the war’, would be divided between Britain, France and Russia and thus secure control of the Suez Canal, and ensure a projection of their power in India and the Persian Gulf.

Simultaneously, to secure the Ottoman Empire’s demise, the British championed and supported Sharif Hussein’s revolt against the Ottomans for Arab self-determination. This marked the beginning of the ‘Arab Revolt’ against the Ottoman Empire. While Arabs fought for their independence within the security of British promises, Britain and France secretly divided the Middle East into spheres of influence through the Sykes-Picot Agreement, undermining Arab aspirations.

The Arab communities later uncovered the double dealings of the British; as European powers carved up their homelands, Britain’s promise to support the Arabs’ self-determination had been empty. 

In England, the British had been in negotiations with the Zionist federation to facilitate the establishment of a homeland for the Jews. It was a strategy to gain the support of the wealthy and influential Zionist communities of the United States and Europe, for the allied cause of WWI.

Zionism, a political ideology, and movement born in 19th-century central and Eastern Europe, had gained momentum in Europe. It argued that the creation of a Jewish homeland would be the only viable solution to the persecution of the European Jews. Theodor Herzl, Viennese journalist and Zionist pioneer, famously articulated this idea in his 1896 work ‘The Jewish State’.

Consequently, out of national interest, Britain pledged to facilitate Jewish immigration to Palestine and the establishment of the Jewish state in exchange for Zionist backing in Europe.

The initial negotiations on the future of Palestine were fostered by Colonel Sir David Sykes, namesake of the Sykes-Picot agreement. For the British government, the negotiations meant they could support the Zionist movement, as well as secure British interests in the region; a win-win.

The negotiations culminated with the 1917 Balfour Declaration, a secret letter at the time, that realized the Zionist aim of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine.

The 67-word letter from Britain’s then-foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, was addressed to Lionel Walter Rothschild, a Zionist leader and figurehead of the British Jewish community.

Known as the ‘original sin’, the Balfour Declaration was a written assurance by the British government, under Prime Minster Lloyd George, that was drafted in consultation with the Zionist lobby, of the belief that Britain ‘viewed with favour’ the establishment of ‘a national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine.

The Balfour Declaration committed the British government to ‘use its best endeavours to facilitate’ a ‘national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine.

The declaration was included in the terms of the British Mandate for Palestine that was set up under the League of Nations. Like all the League of Nations mandates, it purported itself as a temporary administration of seized territory from the Ottomans ‘until such time as they [the Arab states] are able to stand alone’. However, this mandate system, that was set up by the Allied Powers, was a thinly veiled form of colonisation and occupation of the region by the European colonial powers.

The late Palestinian-American academic Edward Said describes the Balfour Declaration: ‘made by a European power… about a non-European territory… in a flat disregard of both the presence and wishes of the native majority resident in that territory’. The declaration promised a land, only to the Jews, with no consideration to the natives that made up more than 90% of the population.  

The Declaration was rooted in British imperial ambitions and as the British Mandate in Palestine began, they intended to follow the Balfour Declaration as the guiding principle for it. In fact, the British Zionist politician, Sir Herbert Samuel, who had instituted the dialogue in the British Cabinet that led to the Balfour Declaration, was the first British High Commissioner in Mandatory Palestine. He oversaw the ‘administration of the territory’, which included the immigration of European Jews to Palestine. Between 1922-1935, the Jewish population grew from 9% to nearly 27% of the total population in Palestine. 

The growing Palestinian and Arab opposition of British and Zionist presence in Palestine and the Middle East was met with increasing systematic brutality by the British and Zionist militias to supress Palestinian and Arab resistance. Collective punishment, house demolitions and mass detention were among the brutal acts that British soldiers carried out. This was in conjunction with the ‘all-encompassing legal system’ that the British established, to enforce and legitimize the oppressive regime. 

The Zionist militias carried over the colonial methods learned from the British and waged a brutal and catastrophic campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians. Known as the Nakba of 1948 -The Catastrophe- Zionist militias massacred entire Palestinian cities, villages, and towns, wiping them off the map. They destroyed whole communities and expelled over 750,000 Palestinians, rendering them refugees outside of the borders of their own homeland. Today there are over 1 million Palestinian refugees living in refugee camps in Occupied Palestine and the Arab world, waiting to return.

The Nakba did not begin and end in 1948. Rather, it is a premeditated, organised, and most importantly, an on-going process of ethnic cleansing.  

The continued ethnic cleansing and colonisation of Palestinian and Arab territory brought more bloodshed. In the 1967 Naksa, more than 300,000 Palestinians were expelled. The Zionist militias continued notorious massacres of Palestinian villages. They occupied further land including the Syrian Golan Heights, the West Bank, which was under Jordanian rule and the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula. This further shaped the territorial and political landscape of the region, in the Six-Day War of 1967 left the Jewish nation in control of territory four times its previous size. Egypt lost the 23,500-square-mile Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip, Jordan lost the West Bank and East Jersulem, and Syria lost the strategic Golan Heights.

Subsequently, in 1973, in complete frustration, On October 6, 1973, hoping to win back territory lost to Israel during the third Arab-Israeli war, in 1967, Egyptian and Syrian forces launched a coordinated attack against Israel on Yom Kippur, the Arab armies launched a surprise attack on the US backed Israeli army, the 1973 Arab–Israeli War, or the Fourth Arab–Israeli War, was an armed conflict fought from 6 to 25 October 1973, between Israel and a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria. Taking the Israeli Defense Forces by surprise, Egyptian troops swept deep into the Sinai Peninsula, while Syria struggled to throw occupying Israeli troops out of the Golan Heights. Israel counterattacked and recaptured the Golan Heights. A cease-fire went into effect on October 25, 1973 which ultimately failed to retrieve control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

The framework for the Zionist ideology is clear for those who have lived under it for 75 years: a racist settler-colonial enterprise that is rooted in dispossession and ethnic cleansing.

Today’s Israeli Apartheid Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu’s quote ‘we will turn Gaza into an island of ruins’ mirrors the early pioneers of Zionism who did not sugar-coat their messaging either - David Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minster to the Apartheid state, said: ‘We must expel Arabs and take their place’.

The imperialist European Powers left a legacy of hate, agony and bloodshed that has determined the fate of Palestine and the Middle East for centuries to come.

LINKS: Parliament Petition - Pal Action - MAP - Petitions for Palestine