Excerpt : Britain created the State of Israel contrary to UN and Lausanne Treaty
The land of Palestine was under the control of various empires, such as the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, and eventually the Islamic Caliphate and the Ottoman Empire. Gaza city is over 4,000 years old. In 1516, the Ottoman Turks invaded and occupied Palestine, an occupation that lasted for 402 years (1516-1918). In 1914, Palestinian Ottoman citizenship was recognized all over the world, and during the Ottoman period no other state claimed sovereign rights over Palestine. The Treaty of Lausanne, July 24, 1923, that ended World War I between the Allied governments and Turkey provided that all Ottoman subjects habitually resident in Palestine on August 1, 1925, were to automatically become Palestine citizens. Around 800,000 Palestinians became citizens of Palestine under this provion. Both the status of Palestine and the nationality of its inhabitants was settled by the treaty in terms of international law. And the British government itself recognized and proclaimed that under that treaty, Palestinians were to obtain a separate nationality, meaning a separate nation..
Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, Palestine, like much of the Arab nations, was placed under British Mandate. After Britain took over Palestine at the end of 1917, it had made agreements to gain support from various groups in the Middle East. These included the British government agreeing to recognize independence of Arab countries in exchange for Husayn ibn Ali, King of Hejaz (c. 1853-1931) launching the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire; and the Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916), which divided the Middle East into British and French spheres of influence; and the 1917 Balfour Declaration (see below), in which the British government committed itself to a “national home” for the Jewish people. The British had circumvented the Lausanne agreement and was now keen on not giving independence to Palestine. To echo the Zionist Jews slogan of ‘a land without people for a people without land’, the British Cabinet was determined to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine . It argued that “England … would have in the Jews the best possible friends, who would be the best national interpreters of ideas in the eastern countries and would serve as a bridge between the two civilizations”.
As the British colonial power began implementing its plan of creating a Jewish state on Palestinian land, the Zionist movement was lobbying Western powers to support the mass migration of Jews to Palestine and recognise a Jewish claim to the land. The British facilitated mass Jewish immigration – many of the new residents were fleeing Nazism in Europe. The purchases of land by Jews for Zionist settlement displaced tens of thousands of Palestinians from their homes. The entire process was facilitated by the British. By the second half of 1939, Britain had massed 30,000 troops in Palestine. Villages were bombed by air, curfews imposed, homes demolished, and administrative detentions and summary killings were widespread. In tandem, the British collaborated with the Jewish settler community and formed armed groups and a British-led “counterinsurgency force” of Jewish fighters named the Special Night Squads.Within the Yishuv, the pre-state settler community, arms were secretly imported and weapons factories established to expand the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary that later became the core of the Israeli army.
In November 1947, the UN General Assembly proposed a plan to partition Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab one. By 1947, the Jewish population had ballooned to 33 percent of Palestine, but they owned only 6 percent of the land. At the time, the Palestinians owned 94 percent of historic Palestine and comprised 67 percent of its population. Yet under the UN proposal, the Jews were allocated 55 percent of the land. The Palestinians and their Arab allies rejected the proposal to no avail. By early 1948, Zionist forces had captured dozens of villages and cities, displacing thousands of Palestinians, with the support of the British. In April 1948, the Zionists captured Haifa, one of the biggest Palestinian cities, and subsequently set their eyes on Jaffa. On the same day British forces formally withdrew, David Ben-Gurion, then-head of the Zionist Agency, proclaimed the establishment of the state of Israel. After May 1948, overnight, the Palestinians became stateless. The world’s two great powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, immediately recognised Israel.
Between 1947 to 1949, more than 500 Palestinian villages, towns and cities were destroyed in what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, or “catastrophe” in Arabic. An estimated 15,000 Palestinians were killed, including in dozens of massacres. The Zionist movement captured 78 percent of historic Palestine. The remaining 22 percent was divided into what are now the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip. An estimated 750,000 Palestinians were forced out of their homes as refugee.
Arab nations were unhappy and tried to set up an -all-Palestine government within the Arab Triangle in Palestine (Nablus, Tulkarm, Jenin) and that it will not recognize the partition resolution of 1947.Some didn’t agree and Palestinians remained excluded from participating in the formulation of decisions related to Palestine.. Jordan, for instance, declared their strong opposition to declaring an independent Palestinian and considered itself more worthy of Palestine and its people than the Palestinian government.
The Balfour Declaration
“Foreign Office,
2 November 1917
“Dear Lord Rothschild,
I have much pleasure in conveying to you on behalf of His Majesty’s Government the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations, which has been submitted to and approved by the Cabinet:
‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’ I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.
Yours
Arthur James Balfour”.
When the debate of the Balfour Declaration was held in Parliament, the House of Lords rejected it but the House of Commons approved, and the declaration was decided. In the Upper House, Lord Sydenham in reply to Lord Balfour:“… the harm done by dumping down an alien population upon an Arab country – Arab all around in the hinterland – may never be remedied … what we have done is, by concessions, not to the Jewish people but to a Zionist extreme section, to start a running sore in the East, and no one can tell how far that sore will extend.”
Historian Arnold J. Toynbee observed: “the reason why the State of Israel exists today and why today 1,500,000 Palestinian Arabs are refugees is that, for 30 years, Jewish immigration was imposed on the Palestinian Arabs by British military power until the immigrants were sufficiently numerous and sufficiently well-armed to be able to fend for themselves with tanks and planes of their own. The tragedy in Palestine is not just a local one; it is a tragedy for the world, because it is an injustice that is a menace to the world’s peace.”
After November 1945, The United States got involved in Israel. And the rest is history!
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