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Private Notes
This story starts in 1799, outside the walls of Acre in Ottoman-controlled Palestine, when an army under Napoleon Bonaparte besieged the city. It was all part of a campaign to defeat the Ottomans and establish a French presence in the region.
In search of allies, Napoleon issued a letter offering Palestine as a homeland to the Jews under French protection. He called on the Jews to ‘rise up’ against what he called their oppressors.
Napoleon’s appeal was widely publicised. But he was ultimately defeated. In Acre today, the only memory of him is a statue atop a hill overlooking the city.
Yet Napoleon’s project for a Jewish homeland in the region under a colonial protectorate did not die, 40 years later, the plan was revived but by the British.
A national strike by Palestinians to protest mass Jewish immigration was met with violence by British authorities. Despite the British killing over 190 Palestinians and wounding more than 800 between April and October 1936, it was pressure from Arab heads of state that convinced Palestinian leaders to end the strike and join an inquiry headed by Lord Peel. In 1937 the Peel Commission recommended partition of Palestine: one-third for a Jewish state and two-thirds for an Arab state to be merged with Transjordan. A corridor from Jerusalem to Jaffa would remain under British mandate. The Commission also recommended relocating Palestinians where necessary.
In late 1947 the United Nations devised a new plan for the partition of Palestine. Resolution 181 divided Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state, with Jerusalem as an internationalised city. The Jewish state was granted 56 percent of the land; the city of Jaffa was included as an enclave of the Arab state; and the land known today as the Gaza Strip was split from its surrounding agricultural regions. Many Palestinians viewed the proposed Arab state as impractical. When the draft resolution was presented for voting, Arab newspapers 'named and shamed' the countries that voted for it, and Arab protesters took to the streets. Following the resolution's passage, Britain announced it would end its mandate in Palestine.
The historic struggle for Palestine is characterised as the claims and counter-claims of Arabs and Jews, but one factor that is often overlooked behind the Palestinian 'Nakba' or 'catastrophe' of 1948, is the part played by an old imperial power, Britain.
So, whose interests were best served by the British in Palestine? How did it honour its mandated duty of care? and what were the calculations and miscalculations it made in redrawing the map of Palestine, and reshaping its history?
The 65 years of the Israeli statehood, continue to cause conflict and controversy.
The history is written by the victors, who are the rewriters of history as new information, new documents, and new historians, come to light. It is time to examine how history itself is the battleground for the hearts and minds of new generations today.
To discuss the historic events that led to the Nakba, the birth of Israel, and the making of history, we are joined by Rosemary Hollis, former head of the Middle east programme at the Royal Insitute of International Affairs; James Renton,senior lecturer in History at Edge Hill University and author of The Zionist Masquerade: The birth of the Anglo-Zionist alliance 1914-1918 ; and Avi Shalam, professor of International Relations at Oxford University and author of the Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, The Zionist Movement, and the Partition Of Palestine .
