The latest conflict in Gaza has underlined the grim situation, extreme disappointment of Palestinians, virtual breakdown of the international order due to berserk attitude of the Jewish state, irresponsible attitude of some colonial Western powers and urgency to resolve the dispute in accordance with the UN resolutions and international law to ensure sustainable peace and security not just in the Middle-East but also beyond as continuation of the conflict poses serious threat to the whole world. Almost entire Gaza Strip has been rendered into a heap of rubble and debris as Israel dropped thousands of tons of bombs on the world’s one of the most densely populated area killing over twenty thousand people, mostly women and children.
The ongoing genocide of Palestinians, with the active connivance of the United States and Britain, has appalled the civilized world as reflected by the remarks made by Josep Borrel, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. He pointed out that the situation in Gaza is ‘catastrophic, apocalyptic’, with destruction proportionally ‘even greater’ than that which Germany experienced in World War-II. However, it is ironical that the world powers that were solely responsible for triggering of the unending conflict in the Middle-East through creation of an illegitimate state are still obstructing the path to peace and security for the sake of their own vested interests.
The root cause of the globe’s one of the longest disputes is the conspiracies hatched by imperialist powers that first grabbed the land of Palestinians, maintained occupation for thirty years and then unjustly and unfairly handed it over to Jews. The bad intentions of the imperialist force became known from what is now called “Balfour Declaration”. One hundred and six years back, on November 02, 2017, Britain’s then Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, wrote a letter addressed to Lionel Walter Rothschild, a figurehead of the British Jewish community expressing commitment of the British Government to “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” and to facilitating “the achievement of this object”. It is strange that a colonial power, which occupied land of Palestinians, was promising the Zionist movement of creation of their homeland, where Palestinian Arab natives constituted more than 90% of the population.
A British mandate was created in 1923 and lasedt till 1948. Britain, as per its commitment with the Zionist movement, facilitated mass Jewish immigration and settled Jews in Palestine as a precursor to lay foundations of a Jewish state in the heart of Arab world. Palestinians lodged protests as the British occupation forces confiscated their ancestral lands and handed them over to Jewish settlers. Escalating tension eventually led to the Arab Revolt from 1936 to 1939. In April 1936, the newly formed Arab National Committee called on Palestinians to launch a general strike, withhold tax payments and boycott Jewish products. The six-month peaceful strike was brutally repressed by the occupation forces, which launched a mass arrest campaign and carried out punitive home demolitions, a practice that Israel continues to implement even today.
The second phase of the movement against designs of the imperialist power was launched in 1937 and by the second half of 1939, Britain had amassed 30,000 troops in Palestine, bombed villages, imposed curfews, demolished homes and resorted to widespread detentions and summary killings as part of the strategy to suppress the legitimate movement and aspirations of the Palestinian people to pave the way for implementation of its agenda for creation of a Jewish state. 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 three years of protests, British forces and Jewish fighters killed 15.000 Palestinians, injured 20,000 others and 5,600 were imprisoned.
All this shows the Britain used its full might to fulfil the commitment it made to the Jewish community, implementing a multi-pronged strategy to ensure physical and economic elimination of Palestinians from their own lands. It was because of the machinations of the British Government that from merely six percent, the Jewish population surged to alarming 33% in 1947. The world powers manipulated the UN forum as the world body adopted infamous resolution 181, which called for partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. Understandably, Palestinians rejected the plan as it gave about 55% of their land to Jews despite the fact that Palestinians owned 94% of historic Palestine and comprised 67% of the population.
It is also a historic reality that even before the British Mandate expired in Palestine in May 1948, Zionist paramilitaries, formed, trained, equipped and funded by the Britain, embarked on a military operation to destroy Palestinian towns and villages to expand the borders of the Zionist state that was yet to emerge on the world map. In two years, from 1947 to 1949, more than five hundred Palestinian cities, towns and villages were destroyed in what Palestinians refer to as ‘Nakba’ (catastrophe), which has become their fate, after regular intervals, till now.
The Zionist Movement, backed by colonial powers, captured 78% of the historic Palestine even in violation of the UN resolution that was heavily tilted in favour of Jews, who were promised 55% of the land. The remaining 22% was divided into what are now the occupied West Bank and the ill-fated Gaza Strip. The Jews, who were scattered throughout the world, were brought and settled in Arab lands but the plight of Palestinians can be judged by the fact that 750,000 of them were forced out of their homeland and now six million of their descendants live in 58 camps throughout Palestine (which have also been bombed intensely by Israeli forces in the ongoing war) and in neighbouring countries of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt. The UN and the world community have been calling for the right of the Palestinians to return but these calls have fallen on deaf ears.
The Zionist state was established on May 15, 1948 and the following day the first Arab-Israeli war began and ended in January 1949 after an armistice between Israel and Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.—PR
