Britain has recognised a Palestinian state—a state which does not exist.

It was Britain itself that made certain that the Palestinian state—which it now ‘recognises’—does not exist as an actual object of recognition.  And it was particularly the Labour Party, within British politics, which ensured that the Palestinian state that Britain now ‘recognises’ does not exist.

The British Liberal/Tory/Labour War Coalition of 1917 made an agreement with organised Jewry to colonise Palestine with Jews, with a view to establishing a Jewish State in Palestine as a frontier state of the Empire.

The Liberal/Tory Peace Coalition of 1919 set about building up a Jewish population in Palestine that would be capable of maintaining a state, but gave guarantees to the native section of the Palestinian population that it would not be subjected to Jewish tyranny.  The Jews would be kept under control by the Empire:  they would accept Imperial guidance because they were dependents of the Empire—owing their significant presence in Palestine to it.

The Labour Party became the master of Britain and its Empire in 1945.  It had a large overall majority in Parliament.  The Tories were demoralised, and the Liberals only had a toehold on effective political existence.  Labour could do what it pleased.

What it pleased to do in Palestine was disown British responsibility for controlling the Jewish population it had built up there.

Its responsibility was to protect the native population from the Jewish force it had built up in Palestine.  When that Jewish force demanded freedom of action, and backed up that demand with a few terrorist atrocities, the Labour Government surrendered to terrorism instead of policing it.

The immediate consequence was the Nakba—the ethnic cleansing of three-quarters of a million Palestinians out of the territory mapped out for a Jewish State, and out of some adjacent territory allocated for a Palestinian State.

The ‘Israeli war of independence’ of 1948 was nominally a war against Britain but was actually a war on the native population of Palestine.  The material content of the Jewish nationalist war of independence was the Nakba.

Britain did not fight.  If it had fought, it would have been in defence of the Palestinian population rather than itself—and the non-existent Palestinian State, which it now ‘recognises’, would be an existing state.

What is the explanation of that great act of moral and physical cowardice, duplicity, and betrayal—whose consequences keep rumbling on?

A realistic explanation draws on two very different sources.  The primary source is the strange idealism of the Labour Party.  The other is military necessity.

British Labour became Imperialist around 1900.  The influential groups, which became a united Parliament Party during the Great War of 1914-18, all recognised that the standard of living of the industrial working class had come to depend on the vast quantities of food,  material and profit brought in daily from the Empire.  The Committee of Imperial Defencehad informed the Government in 1905 that the state would collapse if imports were stopped for a fortnight.

Socialist leaders, who dealt in facts rather than phrases—Bradlaugh, Hyndman etc.—took the point and became Imperialists, demanding an even stronger Navy.  The various factions were unified as a Party of the Empire in the first War on Germany.  

When the Party was put in Office by the Liberals as a learning experience in 1924, it became clear that it was idealistically bankrupt in everything to do with actual government under the actual circumstances of British existence.  So it adopted an exotic ideal:  Jerusalem!  Its membership was largely drawn from a background of Biblical (Old Testament) Christianity.  The ideal of Jerusalem came easily to it.  And William Blake’s poem of that name was set to music by a Welsh composer in 1916, when defeat in the War was threatening, and it became a national hymn.

The Labour Party, lacking a viable native socialist ideology, adopted Zionism as an ideal in the 1920s and 1930s—a feature which remained for several generations after that.  It gave no thought to the circumstances of the case in Palestine.  And, when Zionists began shooting (and hanging) English soldiers in Palestine in 1947, and the Foreign Secretary began to apply administrative law to them, the paradoxical psyche of British Socialism wouldn’t stand for it.

The Foreign Secretary [Ernest Bevin], feeling domestic ground breaking up under him, pleaded military necessity as a reason for winding up the British administration there, and letting things go rip.

(Britain had exhausted itself militarily in a second World War it had launched without having the will to fight it, and had ended up reducing itself to a third-class Power.  It had no choice but to walk away from its Palestinian responsibilities.  But, when the Malayan anti-fascists declared independence, Britain was able to summon up the energy and resources to make war on the independence movement and its supporters—a dirty war—because it just could not do without Malayan resources.)

If the Labour Party presented its present gesture towards the ideal of a Palestinian State as a first step towards compensating for its betrayal of 1948, it could be taken in earnest.  But the last thing it has in mind is to admit any historic responsibility for the present condition of the Palestinians, through having set the Jewish colonists free to make war on them in 1948—in a war that has never ended.

Even after ‘recognising’ as a ‘state’ the shattered fragments of what would be an actual state but for the Labour Party surrender to Terrorism in 19248, it is in denial about characterising what the Jewish nationalists are doing in their freedom as Genocide, although the two international Court systems have done so.

And the Government continues to imprison those who take direct action in protest against the slaughter of Palestinians.

The leadership is also fearful of the huge fortnightly Protest Marches which have continued for many months in Britain’s major cities.  These marches are widely representative in class, age and creed.

David Ben Gurion, the founding Prime Minister of the Jewish State, gave good advice:  “Take no heed of what the Gentiles say;  it’s only what they do that counts.”  He counted on them doing nothing.  Ernest Bevin did nothing.  It is unlikely that Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper will do something.  She owes her position to Keir Starmer, the Leader who said he saw nothing wrong with the Jewish State cutting off all food, fuel, water and medicine to what a Tory Prime Minister called “the biggest open prison in the world”.

It seems to be only Hamas that is not doing nothing.  And because Hamas is not doing nothing, it must be destroyed—even though it is so much part of the existence of the community of the prison camp that it can be destroyed only by destroying that community.

Ernest Bevin, the Labour Foreign Secretary of 1948, did more than doing nothing.  Professor John Bew is a political adviser to Sir Keir Starmer.  He records in his biography of Clement Attlee (Labour Prime Minister, 1945-51) that Bevin—when withdrawing British forces from Palestine, and leaving the Palestinians helpless—warned the neighbouring Arab States, which were weak creations of Britain and France, against intervening in support of the Palestinians:

“The British military had close ties with a number of Arab armies, and had warned them that an intervention in Palestine would be taken as an attack on Britain”  (Citizen Clem, p430).

  Plus ça change .  .  .