How Britain had Entrenched Zionist impunity in Palestine.

December 2025: Is humanity witnessing the final dismemberment of Palestine and the end of the Palestinian struggle for freedom? It is a distinct possibility, and if it happens it will be the culmination of a long and cruel colonial journey that was imposed on the Palestinians from the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 until today.

[That pernicious and ill-advised decision to create a ‘national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine led inexorably to the current genocidal war on Gaza and Israel’s multiple human rights abuses against the Palestinians, ongoing since Israel’s establishment].

Balfour’s great crime in 1917 was not just to cede control of Palestine (which Britain did not own) to foreign colonists, but to do so specifically and, of all people, to a group of tormented, complex Jewish European Zionists with an acute sense of grievance about their historic persecution. The deep animus they held against a world, which had allowed it to happen, fed their belief that the world owed them recompense for their sufferings, and Britain’s offer of a ‘national home’ in Palestine was only their due.

It gave them a sense of entitlement to the country which bred an arrogant conviction that it belonged exclusively to them. Such ideas, never questioned or rejected by Israel’s western supporters, but on the contrary indulged and accepted as valid, have led to the systematic depredations of Palestine and its people.

Today, Gaza lies in ruins, that UN experts estimate will take decades and billions of dollars to repair. Its people, already reduced by Israel’s deadly assaults, may not long survive a lethal combination of famine, disease, a harsh winter, relentless Israeli violence, and ethnic cleansing. On the West Bank, relentless settler attacks backed by Israel’s army have led to over 1000 Palestinian deaths since 2023, and caused mass displacements, destruction of Palestinian villages and the evacuation of refugee camps. East Jerusalem has been steadily absorbed into Israel, and the Palestinians inside Israel’s 1948 borders are persecuted and intimidated.

As if all that were not enough, a new colonial-style imposition on Palestine has just been presented to the UN. Donald Trump’s 20-point ‘peace plan’ in the shape of UN Security Council Resolution 2803, was unanimously passed on 17th November. This makes Trump the head of a so-called Board of Peace, whose task is to oversee an ‘International Stabilisation Force’ of peace keepers for Gaza, an interim Palestinian technocratic administration, and a local police force, all code for the re-colonisation of Gaza by outside forces.

If the guns had fallen silent as a result of the UN resolution, Trump’s initiative might have gained some support on those grounds alone. But Israel’s daily killing of Palestinians has not abated for a single day since the ceasefire announced on 13 October. And the idea that the “Funder and Chief Enabler” of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, who could have ended it long ago with a snap of his fingers, should now pose as Gaza’s saviour, is simply grotesque.

A long history of British complicity –

The truth is that from early on in this conflict British government officials were well aware of Zionist sentiments, and they knew precisely who they were letting into Palestine. In 1920, just three years after the Balfour Declaration, a House of Lords debate on security for the Arabs of Palestine in the face of Zionism reveals a remarkable degree of insight about the Zionist project at the highest level.

The lords reported on the demands of a self-constituted ‘Zionist Commission’ based in Jerusalem under British military protection to have a say in all British policy decisions. The Zionists also wanted concessions over public works in an ‘arrogant, and extraordinarily impolitic’ manner.

Some lords thought the troubles in Palestine were due to the actions and behaviour of Zionists, many of whom were ‘extremists’ and behaved as if they owned Palestine. The Jews who had come to Palestine as immigrants from Russia, Poland, and Rumania, had ‘raked up an ancient name with which they have nothing whatever to do’.

The lords insisted that Britain must not smooth the way for these Jews to take over ‘The Promised Land’, or make it a dumping ground for all the Zionist ‘rowdies of Europe’. Nothing should be done against the wishes of the Palestinian population to ‘pamper the expectations of people spread all over the world’. The Palin Commission of the same year strongly echoed these views. It accused the Zionists of ‘impatience, indiscretion and attempts to force the hand of the British Administration’ into giving them a Jewish state.

Many British administrators in Palestine resigned or were dismissed for questioning the conduct of the Zionists at this time, their complaints to the authorities in London ignored. Not long after in 1929, the High Commissioner of Palestine, Sir John Chancellor, anticipated the ‘extremes of arrogance’ of the Jews if they were ever to become a majority in Palestine.

However, none of this deflected the government in London from continuing to support the Zionists project right up to Israel’s establishment in 1948. In the final years of British rule over Palestine, the Zionists were even more high-handed and defiant in their dealings with the authorities, carrying out acts of terrorism against the British.

Yet it was thanks to British support that the Zionists attained their Jewish state, although it never diminished their appetite for acquiring more, or their view of themselves as a special people who, on account of their history, could not be judged like others.

This self-assigned impunity, nurtured by Israel’s Western backers, has characterised Israeli actions ever since. The Gaza genocide, its savagery, sadism and depravity, is not a product of Israel’s ‘right-wing’ government alone. It is also underpinned by a majority of the Israeli Jewish public who have similar attitudes of entitlement.

A long history of Jewish exceptionalism brought us here. The true reckoning for Palestine’s tragic fate lies squarely with the western patrons of a Zionist project they knew would inflict a people with preposterous pretensions and an arrogant disregard for others onto a settled, cohesive and peaceable Arab society, innocent of any crime against Jews.

Predictably, they destroyed that society and replaced it with an aggressive, expansionist and violent entity that has brought danger and instability to the whole Middle East and the world beyond. It was a blunder of historic proportions, for which they can never be forgiven.

The manifestation of the British institutionalised hatred is not limited within Israel, but has been proven to be abundant in other developed countries with special emphasis to France, specially assaults on free speech and academic freedom, especially when it comes to Palestine, continue to mount, in France as elsewhere. Last week, they escalated again, when an international symposium entitled ‘Palestine and Europe: the weight of the past and contemporary dynamics’ that was to be held at the Collège de France (CdF), was cancelled by Thomas Römer, the CdF’s administrator.

The contemporary resurgence of fascism in the West cannot be understood without acknowledging its deep entanglement with imperialism and colonial violence. Yet, while calls for vigilance against fascism remain commonplace within mainstream discourse, the repression of pro-Palestinian activism reveals the limits of these liberal warnings.

Arrests, pre-emptive bans, and surveillance practices have targeted students and staff who express solidarity with Palestinians or who produce critical scholarship on Israel’s policies. The issue is not merely geopolitical: it reveals how deeply academic freedom is shaped by colonial legacies and racial hierarchies. Racialised populations, particularly Arabs and Muslims, are framed as internal enemies, and critical discourse on Israel’s genocidal war – always coded as a Muslim or Arab concern – is framed as a threat to public order or national unity.

Universities that promote open debate frequently abandon this commitment when the subject is Palestine, demonstrating that academic freedom is contingent and politically regulated.

Team Maverick.