Israel-Palestine and British Nationalism

The Goulburn Evening Post, Tuesday, November 12^th, 1946.

The following is a commentary on Israel-Palestine with an emphasis on a critique of the attitudes of self-described British nationalists, patriots and white identitarians to the conflict in Gaza; one which is shaped by an antipathy to Islam and Muslim migrants rather than by a rigorous application of the principles of the universal moral order.

1. Israel-Palestine is about land dispossession.

The Israel-Palestine conflict is fundamentally rooted in the land dispossession and population transfer insisted upon by Political Zionism and as Vladimir Jabotinsky, the formulator of "Zionist Revisionism" wrote in the "Iron Wall", Palestinians are a living people who like any other people will not voluntarily give up their land.

Zionist Israel lives by the sword NOT because Palestinians are Islamists but because as Lt. Gen. Moshe Dayan stated in his 1956 eulogy for Ro'i Rothberg, an Israeli settler killed near Gaza by Arabs, they, the Israelis, had taken their land by force and it was only natural that they would seek revenge for this. Dayan said that Rothberg's "mistake" was to take his eyes off his sword.

Meanwhile, Israel has conveniently never declared what its borders are in its constitution. Therefore its neighbours are justified in their suspicion and fear, given the power it has accumulated since its formation especially with the backing of the world's foremost superpower the United States.

Israelis and Diaspora Jewish Zionists believe in the concept of Eretz Yisrael, the "Land of Israel" which covers swathes of land outside of its 1967 borders. These people may be atheists or religious fundamentalists. They may be Ashkenazi or Mizrahi. They may believe in "Liberal Zionism" or "Zionist Revisionism,” but all have the same sense of entitlement to the "Land of Israel". They just differ in the means by which they will obtain it.

2. The Islam vs Judaism or Barbarism vs Western Values framing

As mentioned earlier, this conflict is fundamentally one about land dispossession. Israel is a colonial settler project. Each Zionist leader from Herzl to Ben Gurion to Jabotinsky wrote about "transfer". By this, it was meant that the indigenous Arab population had to be removed from Palestine in order to form a contiguous land mass which would become a Jewish-only state. "Transfer" was to be achieved by bribery, trickery or by force of arms.

The result has been the uprooting of Palestinian Muslims and Palestinian Christians were from their ancestral land.

The thesis that Israel was about democracy versus autocracy and Western values against Barbaric values in the Middle East, began to be propagated in earnest from the 1970s when Israel wanted the United States to directly intervene militarily on its behalf in the Middle East. Binyamin Netanyahu and his family were key to this by forming the Yonatan Institute (named for the commando killed in Entebbe) which held conferences like the Jerusalem Conference of 1979. Netanyahu also authored a series of books on this theme, claiming that if the West did not support Israel and fight for it, Arab terrorism would come to the West.

This was not true. It was a disingenous effort with the objective of camouflaging the central issue of the dispossession of Palestinians of their land.

And any form of Islamist terrorism which has come to the West (or affected the West in the Middle East) has been rooted in the US-led wars and US-sponsored insurgencies in the Middle East. Think about the US involvement in Lebanon in the early 1980s, the regime change wars promoted by the Israel lobby in Iraq, Syria and Libya, as well as the decades long attempt by Netanyahu to get the United States to attack Iran.

Any appraisal of terrorism emanating from the Middle East must acknowledge the role played by the United States and Israel in the cynical endeavour of covertly manipulating a range of Islamist movements and militias as the instrument of achieving certain geopolitical objectives. The Muslim Brotherhood was formed with the help of the British when they were dominant in the Middle East. British support was also crucial to the coming-to-power in Arabia of the Wahhabist House of Saud. Israel helped fund Hamas when it had a military government in Gaza. The idea was that the Muslim Brotherhood-influenced Hamas would function as a counter-weight to the secular Fatah, the body created by Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO). Israel aided ISIS, al-Qaeda and al-Nusra during the dirty war in Syria when it joined with NATO, Turkey, the Saudis and the Gulf Emirates in an attempt to overthrow the secular nationalist government of Syria. It supports terror groups in Iran including the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), which was removed from the State Department's "blacklist" of terrorist organisations after a concerted effort by the Israel lobby.

Given the aforementioned, it would be helpful to separate the "political Islam" of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah and Hamas from the head-chopping Sunni extremists of al-Qaeda and its offshoots ISIS and al-Nusra. The reasoning behind this is as follows:

. The ideology of the mainstream Muslim Brotherhood does not condone violence as a means to achieving power. 

. Hamas is a political party and a liberation movement that operates under occupation. It has the right under international law to violently resist occupation, but is of course not entitled to commit war crimes. 

. Hezbollah is a movement which germinated under the circumstances of Israel's illegal occupation of south Lebanon, much of which is coveted by Israel. It also has the responsibility of governing Lebanon in concert with other Lebanese political parties. The accusation that it is a "proxy" of Iran that exists only to menace Israel on its northern border is a gross distortion of reality. The leaders of Hezbollah are fully aware of Israel's longstanding claim to Lebanese territory up to the River Litani, one which predates Israel's formal establishment as a state. David Ben Gurion, who made these claims on Lebanese territory at the time of the Paris Peace Conference, laid the foundations for Israel's role in fomenting strife between Lebanon's different faiths and denominations in the 1950s with the then army chief of staff Lieutenant General Moshe Dayan. 

. The indictment by certain Western governments and the mainstream media of Hamas and Hezbollah as being "terrorist" entities while ignoring the enduring doctrine of the use of terror Israeli Defence Force (IDF) smacks of crass hypocrisy. Historically an amalgam of the Haganah and the terror groups Irgun and Lehi, the IDF has consistently struck at civilian targets since its inception. The tone for this "sacred terrorism", as early Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharrett referred to it, was set by Ben Gurion who wrote in his Independence War Diary that Israel must “strike mercilessly, women and children included. Otherwise the action is inefficient. At the place of action there is no need to distinguish between guilty and innocent.” This terroristic policy has been acknowledged by Israel's subsequent political and military leaders including Menachem Begin, Lieutenant General Mordechai Gur, Abba Eban and even Yitzhak Rabin. Today, the policy of collective punishment is applied to Lebanon in the form of the Dahiya doctrine and to the Palestinians of Gaza as "mowing the grass."

3. The marches.

Many find it an objectionable technique to conflate the protest as being "support" for Hamas when a large segment of the UK and global public are justifiably revolted by the massacres presently being perpetrated on Gaza by the Israeli armed forces.

There is an attempt to label it as a "Muslim cause", something which a number of Muslim activists are keen to do. But if certain Muslims are angered only because Palestinians are majoritively Muslim, then their conception of injustice is much too particularistic. It should not take an issue involving a majority Muslim people to wake Islam up to an injustice. The proponents of Gaza being a Muslim cause ought to know that a substantial percentage of Palestinians are Christians, and if Islam is imbued with universalistic precepts of justice, then Muslims should unite with concern and compassion for any cause regardless of the faith of the victims.

The marches have been generally peaceful - a remarkable thing given the huge numbers involved. Many "white" Britons, persons of Jewish heritage and "non-Muslims" have participated in such marches.

4. British nationalists and the marches.

The attempt by the so-called political right and white identitarians to link the marches with "the spread of Islam in Britain,” as one of the negative fruits of mass immigration and a manifestation of "antisemitism" is one which many find not to be founded on logic. Indeed, it can be strongly argued that the question of Palestine is the great moral issue of this age. Evidence of this can be found in the failed attempts to delegitimise those engaged in protest movements in each continent.

Those who remain impervious to the widespread global revulsion are identifiably those in politics and the media who are in the thrall of Israel lobbies, the believers in the heretical cult of "Christian Zionism", the historically unaware and nationalists who would rather tap into their instinctive prejudices against Muslims and darker-skinned people.

These categories of persons are not unknown in Britain. 

The financial connections to Zionist funded groups in the cases of persons such as the self-professed nationalist "Tommy Robinson" and the mainstream annointed "public intellectual" Douglas Murray have long been exposed. Robinson is of course a problematic personality such that while his supporters cried foul at his being banned from the so-called "March Against Antisemitism" in London, they were brought down to earth by the revelation that it was in fact the organisers who informed the police that Robinson was not welcome to join in their march.

Israel and its lobbies sponsor a range of nationalist groups in Europe and North America -even extreme ones, with the proviso that they focus on Islam and Muslim immigration. It is an extension the enduring Zionist policy of demonising Islam in order to camouflage the injustice behind the ideology and practice of Political Zionism.

But there is evidence that the facade behind the roles of Robinson and Murray is beginning to crack among some of their support base given that over the last seven months, they  have on occasion appeared to be more concerned about Israel than they are with Britain. They can see through Murray when he is at pains to stage IDF fundraisers in London, and through Robinson when he was pointedly dismissive about the gruesome fate of British ex-servicemen aid workers who were deliberately targeted and murdered by the IDF in Gaza

Some are now able to surmise that both Robinson and Murray do not work for Albion. They work for Zion.

5. Britain and Zionism.

One of the most astounding things of which I have personally become aware of since the intensification of the Israel-Palestine conflict in October 2023 has been the implacable, slavish support being given to Zionist Israel by certain self-described British patriots. These include a few ex-military officers who are active on social media.

Britain bears some responsibility for the conflict in Palestine because of the issuance of the Balfour Declaration and its role during the Mandate era in Palestine. Yet, none of the pro-Israel advocates have been willing to grapple with the history of Zionist terrorism and Zionist antipathy which was directed against British statesmen and British military leaders.

The Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht who supported the anti-British terror groups wrote the following in May 1947:

Every time you blow up a British arsenal, or wreck a British jail, or send a British railroad train sky high, or rob a British bank, or let go with your guns and bombs at the British betrayers and invaders of your homeland, the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts.

The largely pro-Israel media in Britain used Remembrance Day in November 2023 to rail against the "insensitivity" of protesters organising marches in response to the developing Gaza genocide, while conveniently forgetting that it commemorates all fallen servicemen in Britain's major wars and British-directed counterinsurgencies, the latter of which include the hundreds of British security officials killed while on active duty in Palestine. The likes of Murray and Robinson evidently do not appreciate the irony of supporting a state which honours Irgun and Lehi terrorists who murdered British officials of state, soldiers and policemen in Palestine.

Among the more notorious acts of terror were the murder by Lehi assasins of Lord Moyne, Britain's Middle East Envoy, in Cairo in 1944; the bombing of the King David Hotel by the Irgun in Jerusalem in 1946; and the hanging by Irgun of the British intelligence NCO Sergeants Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice by Irgun in 1947. The last episode led to the last anti-Jewish riot in England.

The media failed to mention that 77 years previously, security had been bolstered at the state opening of Parliament because of threats made by the Zionist terror group Lehi to assassinate the British Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, War Minister, and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery who had resisted the calls from Zionists from Britain to remove General Evelyn Barker from his position as the General Officer Commanding British Forces in Palestine and Trans-Jordan because enraged by the King David Hotel atrocity, Barker had stated that Britain would punish the Jews by "striking at their pockets and showing our contempt of them."

Extra precautions were taken to protect King George VI. The headline of the Australian Goulburn Evening Post on Tuesday, November 12th, 1946 read as follows:

BIG PRECAUTIONS TAKEN TO

GUARD KING AND QUEEN

Threats of Jewish Violence

Prompt Security Measures

At various points during the Mandate, Lehi threatened to kill Ernest Bevin, Clement Attlee, Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden over British policy in Palestine. Letter bombs were earmarked to be sent to various figures and an attempt was made to blow up the Colonial Office in London. And an associate of the Stern Gang named Baruch Korff plotted to bomb London from an aircraft. 

This dark history is not remembered by two retired military figures who offer unquestioning support to Israel: Colonel Richard Kemp, a British Army infantry officer, and Rear Admiral Chris Parry, a naval warfare officer. Parry fought during the Falklands War but unsurprisingly has never acknowledged the fact that the State of Israel supplied Skyhawk fighter jets, weapons, spare parts and long range fuel tanks to Argentina during the Falklands War. The ex-Irgun Prime Minister Menachem Begin aimed to exact revenge for British clampdowns during the Mandate era in Palestine.

Kemp, whom many are unsurprised to find out is a Christian Zionist, serves as head of the UK Friends of the Association for the Wellbeing of Israel's Soldiers (UK-AWIS), an organisation that is managed by the IDF. He no doubt believes that he is doing the work of God as much as did Major General Orde Wingate who as a young British Army captain organised the counter-insugency strategy which quelled the revolt by Palestinian guerrillas between 1936 and 1939.

Both Kemp and Parry tweeted their disdain at the marches for Gaza and would no doubt have unhesitatingly appaluded the group of Israel sympathisers who gathered around the statue of Field Marshal Montgomery in a stunt designed to portray them as "protectors" of British heritage and as a gesture of the purported unity of culture and values between Israel and Britain without noting the irony that they support a state which honours the terrorists who threatened Montgomery with assassination. 

An irony which is further underlined by the fact that it cannot have been by accident that the late sovereign Queen Elizabeth II, the Commander-in-chief of the British armed forces when Kemp and Parry were servicemen, did not visit Israel for the entirety of her 70-year reign.

The overarching point is that concerns about Islam and Muslim migration to Britain must be separated from the abomination of a genocide being committed against a people, a gruesome episode which is the latest stanza of a longstanding project to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its indigenous inhabitants.

Those who merely see opposition to Israel's brutal onslaught as a "Muslim cause" are woefully short-sighted. And for this failing, they will be judged to be on the wrong side of history.

© Adeyinka Makinde (2024).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.