L: The British mandate of Palestine. R: From a British recruitment booklet.
Elsewhere in my internet life, a discussion of the whiteness–or not–of Ashkenazi Jews arose. Specifically, the idea being debunked was that Britain granted Jews a place in Palestine on the basis of Jews’ whiteness, in a racist-colonial desire to see white people ruling over people of color in more places in the world. The discussion expanded to cover antisemitism, right of return, and whether Jewish settlement of Palestine could be considered colonial in the usual sense. I won’t reprint the broader discussion here, since I try not to reproduce others’ writing without their permission, but my contribution stands alone pretty well.
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As long as we’re talking about history, let’s consider a few other things from the beginnings of a Jewish state under British Mandate.
Britain agreed to help the Jews establish a national home (the Balfour Declaration, again) out of its own geopolitical interests. In 1914, WWI was on. Britain was deadlocked, in a stalemate because the balance of power was basically perfect. Adding even a little bit of force to one side or another could make the difference, and Balfour presented them with an opportunity to chip away at the Ottomans on the Eastern front in the form of taking Palestine. This was the main motivator in creating the Declaration. So yes, indeed, it was not an altruistic choice, nor was it about wanting supposedly-white people to rule in Palestine. (“White” Jews are only very recently considered white, and that extension of whiteness is far more true in the US than it is in Europe.)
Interestingly, even then Britain was using the fig leaf of Jewish nationalism to justify its choices: read the Future of Palestine memo. They combined that with the classic “not yet” school of oppression through their belief that the “squalid Arabs” would inevitably overwhelm a Jewish State, were one to be established, and concluded it was their solemn duty to annex Palestine in trust for the Jews. Britain! *hands* (That memo is such a cesspit of colonial racism, teleological thinking, and paternalism it’s vomit-worthy, so brace yourself. It also bears eerie similarities to the language around the 2003 invasion of Iraq.)
The Declaration was made in 1917. Two years before, The Jewish Legion, which was composed of Jewish volunteers, formed itself, on its own, in order to assist the British conquest of Palestine. They were initially turned down because the British didn’t allow foreign nationals in the army, and also it wasn’t clear there was going to be anything like an Israel yet. Some other stuff happened in between (see the Zion Mule Corps, if you want to know), but come 1917, the Jewish Legion was there, assisting the British in conquering Palestine. While earlier—as far back as 1492—groups of Jews did arrive and settle down to farming peacefully, at this point, the Jewish presence was inextricably connected to violence and colonization because Jews and Jewish settlers were actively assisting the British in colonizing Palestine and benefiting from it directly. (Are we going to argue that the British weren’t colonizing? Because if we are, then I have better ways of wasting my time.) Not all Jews, of course not, but the fact is there was a quid pro quo happening: the British got help/an excuse for expanding their empire, and the Jews got a few steps closer to achieving the political Zionist dream. Haganah, which would eventually become the IDF, was initially formed in response to Palestinian revolts and riots against this colonization.
So we can see from this two things. First, the British were not interested in or concerned with Jewish whiteness or lack thereof; while they I’m sure were happy to get rid of some Jews, their primary interest was geopolitical. Second, while there had been centuries of small-scale Jewish immigration/return, and of course later there would be waves of Holocaust refugees, during WWI and before WWII Jewish immigration and the annexing of significant amounts of land to Jews in Palestine was inextricable from Britain’s colonization. The one could not have happened without the other.
Another important parable: as waves of Jewish refugees began flooding to Israel during and after the Holocaust, the Arabs revolted in 1936-39 in the face of the following: chipping away at their land (~600,000 Arabs were living off of roughly the same amount of land as ~50,000 Jews), the consequent displacement of the majority-agrarian population into urban life and poverty, the setting of the minimum wage for Arabs below the minimum wage for Jews leading to exploitation of Arabs for cheap labor, and a number of investment and infrastructure-building policies by the Yishuv that explicitly favored Jews. Arab Palestine had already been impoverished during and after after WWI due to high taxes by, yes, the British. For years, the new phenomenon of major Jewish influx and British rule had mobilized a Palestinian nationalist and cultural consciousness connected to the effort of preserving traditional culture that had not existed prior to the British Mandate, which in turn could only feed into mutual ethnic-nationalist hatreds and chauvinism.
It’s important to note that this revolt started as a civil-political movement, following the example of labor strikes against the French Mandate in Syria. When that failed, the Palestinian Arabs turned to violence, and by the end of the revolt over 10 percent of the Arab adult male population was killed, exiled, imprisoned, or wounded. (source) The Jews suffered too with deaths and displacement, but in the end it benefited the Yeshuv structurally since the labor strikes justified their favoring of Jewish labor and, of course, the Arabs ultimately failed. After that, Britain refused to let more Jews in because they knew it would make the Arabs harder to control—so again, this is about British colonial power, not about Jews’ interests or whiteness. The British rounded up Jewish refugees and put them in detention camps (whoops) in Cyprus, as well as in Atlit which is now in Israel but at the time was a sort of non-state area; keeping Jews there meant they hadn’t entered Palestine. Let me repeat: the British took Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, rounded them up, and put them in camps.
What I’m trying to show with the story of the revolt is this: the Jews absolutely were colonizing Palestine under the aegis of British colonization. The shape and effect of what was happening was colonial, and the Jews and British were doing it jointly in a mutually beneficial relationship. The policies of the British Mandate and of the Yishuv deliberately and effectively impoverished and disenfranchised Palestinian Arabs. At the same time, the Jews did face very real antisemitism, existential threats, and continued racism and oppression by the British themselves inside Palestine and out when it came to refugees: they did not, ultimately, have control over their own immigration, rather being treated as a commodity or influence that had to be regulated like any other import. They were unquestionably under British rule.
The paradoxes and wrenching miseries that torture all of us over Israel/Palestine today go all the way back to 1914, and that the geography and state structures were set up the way they were is the fault of the British and the League of Nations. With such a beginning, it’s hard to imagine how things could have fallen out better. Jews and Arabs in Palestine (because let’s not forget that not all Jews are Israelis and supposed Palestinian solidarity aside, not all Arabs are Palestinian or devoted to the Palestinian cause) remain responsible for their own acts of violence, discrimination, and oppression, but from the beginning, Jewish colonization, colonial violence, and economic advantage were explicitly sponsored by the British. Right of return matters, but the manner of return matters too. I’m not here to say the Zionist Jews should have waited for some better way of doing things, or accepted the land they were offered in Uganda (which would certainly have been a nightmare as well without even the pretext of a right of return); they were under existential threat that would increase exponentially in the next few decades. But the fact that their return was facilitated by the British with colonial techniques can’t help but color the shape of all the history that has followed, and that can’t be ignored.
