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| [Palestine Refugees Nakba 1948] Photo by CPA Media/Alamy |
They were driven out with napalm and machine guns and machetes, and forced to flee from their groves of olive trees on to the barren dunes of Gaza where they remain. By the end of 1948, less than 15 per cent of Palestinians remained where they had always lived. More than 85 per cent had been ethnically cleansed, despite the promises of Arthur Balfour in his declaration that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”.
The Nakba – Arabic for “catastrophe” – happened because the politicians of this country enabled it. They enabled it with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which supported the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. They also enabled it with 30 years of British colonial rule in Palestine during which the indigenous inhabitants were disarmed and their leaders arrested and sent to prison camps in the Seychelles and Cyprus. The black and tans, notorious for their violence, were brought in on Churchill’s orders and unleashed on those Palestinians who tried to stand up against the erosion of their land.
The British, determined to suppress the revolt militarily, dispatched 25,000 soldiers and policemen to Palestine in 1938 – the largest deployment of British forces abroad since the end of the First World War. They established military courts, operating under “emergency regulations” that gave the British Mandate the legal trappings of a military dictatorship. The best account of what we unleashed on the Palestinians can be found in Caroline Elkins’s Legacy of Violence, a chilling study of British anti-insurgency techniques in our imperial colonies. Elkins shows how the British destroyed the houses of all those involved in attacks under the legal authority of the emergency regulations. An estimated 2,000 houses were destroyed from 1936 to 1940.
Combatants and innocent civilians alike were interned in concentration camps – by 1939, more than 9,000 Palestinians were held in overcrowded facilities; many endured violent interrogation or torture. Younger offenders, between the ages of seven and 16, were flogged. Over 100 Arabs were sentenced to death in 1938 and 1939, and more than 30 were executed. By the time the revolt was crushed in 1939, the Palestinian leadership had been so badly intimidated they were in no position to fight for their survival when the British finally pulled out in 1948, leaving the Palestinians to their fate... READ MORE https://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2025/09/britain-must-help-establish-a-palestinian-state