Words: Lottie Fountain
Pronouns: She/her
CW: war and genocide
As Israel continues its devastating assault in Gaza, many of us in the West remain unaware of how deeply our institutions are implicated in the history that led to the current genocide. Britain, France, and later the US, intervened in ways that not only fuelled violence through the 20th century, but laid the foundations for the ongoing brutality we are witnessing today. Understanding this history is crucial to recognising our own responsibility and dismantling the illusion that Palestinian suffering has no bearing on the West.
Britain’s Balfour Declaration in 1917 promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine with no regard for the indigenous Arab population. Two decades later, Britain shifted course to secure Arab support during the Second World War with the 1939 White Paper, which limited Jewish immigration and endorsed an independent Palestine – an abrupt reversal that fueled tensions. Zionist paramilitary groups, such as the Irgun, responded with the infamous King David Hotel bombing in 1946, killing 96 people.
Despite British restriction, over 30,000 Jewish people fled the Holocaust to Palestine, doubling its Jewish population. The situation reached a boiling point in 1947 when Britain, unable or unwilling (my money’s on the latter) to manage the escalating conflict, handed responsibility to the United Nations. Their solution, Resolution 181, proposed partitioning Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states, attributing 55% of Palestinian land to the Jewish community, even though they made up only 33% of the population and owned less than 10% of the land.
The resolution ignited civil war and led to the 1948 Nakba (which translates to catastrophe), during which over 700,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced – many into what is now Gaza.
World powers outside the Middle East not only exacerbated conflicts, but at times deliberately engineered them. In 1956, Britain found herself responsible for another conflict when she and France orchestrated a war between Israel and Egypt in an attempt to recapture the Suez Canal. When Egypt refused to withdraw 10 miles from the Canal, Britain and France bombed the city of Port Said – an act of imperial arrogance that resulted in thousands dead and reinforced Israel’s role as a militarised Western ally in the region.
11 years later, the USSR sent a false message to Egypt claiming that Israel was planning to attack Syria, triggering the Six Day War. The Egyptian leader, Nasser, immediately placed 100,000 troops in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, which borders Israel. In response, Israel launched a preemptive strike, proceeding to destroy the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian air forces in just four hours and captured Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and Sinai.
Western world leaders (and Russia, that means you too) have financed and armed Israel from the 1940s to the present day. Between 1949 and 1973, the US had provided Israel with over $3.1 billion, exacerbating the power imbalance between Palestine and Israel and making genuine peace impossible. Meanwhile, Israeli settlement expansion – also heavily funded by Western aid – fueled Palestinian resistance, including the First Intifada (1987-1993), which was met with brutal Israeli military force.
The 1993 Oslo Accords, hailed as a step toward peace, in reality allowed Israel to tighten its control over Palestinian territories. While they granted limited autonomy to the Palestinian Authority, the accords did nothing to halt settlement expansion or the military occupation. Instead, they paved the way for Israel’s 2007 blockade of Gaza, cementing its status as a besieged enclave.
This meddling extends beyond the suffering in Gaza, aggravating tensions in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Egypt, Lebanon, Iran…the list goes on. Echoes of ‘liberating’ colonialism reverberate into modern-day foreign intervention as Western powers perpetuate a deadly cycle of political failure in the Middle East, neglecting diplomatic engagement and local governance.
This has never been a distant conflict. Western world powers have manipulated conflicts to serve their own ends for generations. Our university’s investment into the arms trade isn’t just an abhorrent betrayal of humanity; it represents a continuation of Western profiteering from displacement, conflict, and genocide.
Sources
U.S Foreign Aid to Israel: History & Overview, Jewish Virtual Library
Israel-Palestine: the real reason there’s still no peace, Nathan Thrall, Guardian podcast, adapted extract from The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine, Jul 2019Henry A. Kissinger as Negotiator: Background and Key Accomplishments, James K. Sebenius L. Alexander Green Eugene B. Kogan, Harvard, 2014
