Palestine

The answer is simple. Britain bears historic responsibility for the dispossession of the Palestinian people. Our involvement began with the Balfour Declaration in 1917 when the British government promised to help establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The indigenous Palestinian Arabs, at that time 94% of the population, were neither consulted nor considered when their land was promised to another people. 

After WW1, Palestine was handed to Britain under a League of Nations Mandate and they began to foster the Zionist settler colonial project. From the very beginning, the Palestinians fought against their dispossession and between 1936-1939, they participated in a national uprising. This uprising was ruthlessly suppressed by the British, helped by the Zionist militias they trained, and by the end of the revolt, 10% of the adult male Palestinian Arab population had been killed, injured, imprisoned or sent into exile.  The British response to the uprising had far reaching consequences for the outcome of the 1948 war into which the Palestinians entered with a lack of trained men and arms.

Needing the support of the Arab and Islamic world in WWII, Britain restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine and the Zionist militias they had helped to train turned on them. The result was the very first modern terrorist campaign waged by Jewish armed groups against British mandate forces in Palestine between 1945 and 1948. Unable to deal with this new form of urban warfare, and with its imperial power on the wane, Britain threw in the towel and turned over administration of Palestine to the United Nations and left the Palestinian people to face the Zionist armed forces and terrorist gangs.

Approximately 750,000 Palestinians were subsequently ethnically cleansed and expelled from their homeland by the Zionists before and after the new State of Israel was established. Successive Israeli governments, in contravention of international law, have prevented those refugees from returning to their homes.  In 1967, Israel occupied what remained of historic Palestine (Gaza and the West Bank) and has, to date, moved 650,000 of its own population into settlements on Palestinian land, again in contravention of international law.   There are now more than 7 million Palestinian refugees in camps or living in exile around the world.  Their dispossession began with the Balfour Declaration and continues to this day.

In more recent times, British governments, both Labour and Conservative, have failed to hold the Israelis to account for their violations of international law and their illegal occupation of Palestinian land. Whilst claiming to support peace between Palestine and Israel, the British Government, since 2015, has licensed over £400m worth of military equipment to Israel. This includes aircraft, bombs, armoured vehicles and ammunition. These weapons are routinely used on unarmed Palestinian civilians living under siege in the Gaza Strip and under a brutal military occupation in the West Bank. Our government is arming and colluding with a regime which according to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Israel’s biggest human rights organisation B’tselem, enforces a system of apartheid against the Palestinian people.

The current British government also intends to pass controversial legislation to prevent public bodies from supporting the BDS movement. BDS aims to peacefully pressure Israel to comply with international law and end its illegal occupation through the promotion of boycotts and sanctions. Crystal Palace Friends of Palestine was established to raise awareness about, and challenge, the historic injustice committed by Britain and its continuing collusion in the dispossession of the Palestinian people, the ongoing illegal occupation of their land and Israeli settler-colonialism and apartheid.