The falsehood at the heart of the claim that ‘Britain gave away Palestine’
The claim now circulating in Westminster is not merely wrong, but a deliberate distortion, part of a decades-long campaign to rewrite history
Forty-five MPs and peers have written to Keir Starmer demanding that Britain apologise for its actions in Palestine between 1917 and 1948. Their letter claims that “in 1947 Britain gave away Palestine, a land we had no right to give, even under the laws of the time.”
It’s quite a claim. Not because it uncovers some buried historical truth or injustice. No, it simply manages to compress an astonishing amount of distortion into so few words.
For the record, Britain did not “give away Palestine” in 1947. By then Britain was desperate to extricate itself from a situation, over which it was losing control. On February 18th, 1947, the British government referred the “problem” to the United Nations. The UN established the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine to investigate the situation. The committee concluded, the Mandate had become unworkable.
On November 29th, 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 181, the “Partition Plan for Palestine”. Thirty-three countries voted in favour, thirteen against and ten abstained. The resolution proposed two states, one Jewish and one Arab. Jerusalem would not be allocated to either state. It was to be designated a corpus separatum, a separate international entity to be administered by the United Nations.
The Jewish leadership accepted the international community’s decision. The Arab leadership rejected it. The corpus separatum was never implemented due to Arab rejection of the plan. Within hours of the resolution, Arab militias began attacking Jewish communities. Israel declared independence on May 14th, 1948. The very next day, armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon invaded. Then Arab League Secretary-General, Azzam Pasha promised the war would be “a war of extermination and a momentous massacre.”
Hence, the modern state of Israel was established as a result of the international community’s recognition the Jewish people’s right to self-determination and to re-establish sovereignty in their historic homeland. Israel exists today because the people of the fledgling state defended that decision and paid for their independence in blood and guts, as they stood defiant, against those determined to destroy it at birth.
The war in 1948 was not fought to establish a Palestinian state. The Palestinian project was yet to be invented. The Arab governments that rejected partition had just one objective… prevent the Jewish state from existing at all.
The claim now circulating in Westminster is not merely wrong, but a deliberate distortion, part of a decades-long campaign to rewrite history and weaponise that fictional account to demonise and de-legitimise the Jewish state, as a European colonial project.
The irony, or rather, the sheer absurdity of their demand, is that today’s map of the region is, in the main, the product of European imperial diplomacy.
What we now call the Middle East was not shaped by ancient nations reclaiming ancestral lands. It was largely constructed by imperial powers drawing lines on maps, with little regard for the ethnic, tribal, religious or historical realities on the ground.
The collapse of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War triggered the process. The Sykes/Picot Agreement of 1916 divided the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire into British and French spheres of influence. The arrangement was later formalised through the League of Nations mandate system, following the San Remo Conference of 1920.
Thus, the modern states of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan emerged from this imperial cartography. Before those lines were drawn by the colonialists, none of those states had existed in the form we recognise today.
The Kingdom of Jordan is probably the clearest example of imperial “creativity”. The British Mandate for Palestine originally covered territory on both sides of the Jordan River. Yet in 1921 Britain hived off the eastern portion of the Mandate to create a new political entity, Transjordan.
The territory represented roughly 77% of Mandatory Palestine. Only the remaining 23% was to be partitioned between Jews and Arabs, some twenty-five years later.
Britain installed a Bedouin prince as the ruler of Transjordan. Emir Abdullah, from the Hashemite tribe in the Hijaz in what is now Saudi Arabia, was neither local nor connected to the land in any meaningful way. He was placed there as a reward for the Hashemite role in the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans.
Transjordan later became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in 1946. Today somewhere between 50% to 70% of Jordan’s population is of Palestinian origin.
Yet none of the MPs demanding apologies, are calling for Jordan to dissolve itself and return its territory to create a Palestinian state. Nor any apology for creating yet another country with zero historical legitimacy. One can only wonder why.
The same selective amnesia appears regarding Gaza and the West Bank.
Following the failed attempt to defeat the Jews in 1948, Jordan annexed what became known as the West Bank, literally the western bank of the Jordan River, in 1950 and formally incorporated the Jewish historical regions of Judea and Samaria into the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, including the Old City of Jerusalem. Palestinians living there were granted Jordanian citizenship.
The Gaza Strip, meanwhile, was administered by Egypt. Cairo governed Gaza through a military administration from 1948 until 1967. It did not annex the territory and it did not grant its residents Egyptian citizenship.
More significantly, Egypt actively blocked the creation of a Palestinian state in Gaza, despite having complete authority to allow one.
For nearly twenty years Gaza belonged to Egypt and the West Bank belonged to Jordan. There were no plans for a “Palestinian” state. There was no international campaign to demand one. Come to think of it, there was no local campaign either.
The 1964 PLO Charter, the founding document of the Palestinian national movement, stated explicitly that the organisation made no claim to the very lands the West now insists must now form a Palestinian state.
Article 24 of the charter states:
“This Organisation does not exercise any territorial sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on the Gaza Strip or in the Himmah Area.”
The Himmah Area referred to a small demilitarised zone near Hamat Gader along the Israel–Syria armistice line established after the 1948 war. In other words, the organisation claiming to represent the Palestinian people explicitly stated that it was not seeking sovereignty over Gaza or the West Bank.
From the outset, and indeed ever since, the sole objective of the Palestinian project itself was never the establishment of a Palestinian state, rather the destruction of the Jewish state.
Jordan’s history provides another reminder of how little the Arab world cares about the Palestinians. By 1970 the PLO had effectively created a state within a state inside the Hashemite kingdom. The confrontation that followed in September that year, saw the Jordanian army crush the Palestinian guerrilla movement operating inside the country. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of Palestinians were killed. Known as Black September, it remains one of the bloodiest episodes in modern Palestinian history.
None of this appears to trouble those now demanding British apologies.
Then there is the inconvenient matter of Jewish history. Unlike Iraq, Syria, Lebanon or Jordan, Israel was not conjured into existence by colonial administrators drawing arbitrary lines across a map. Israel’s legitimacy rests on foundations far older than the twentieth century.
Israel is the historic homeland of the Jewish people. Jewish civilisation emerged there more than three thousand years ago. The kingdoms of Israel and Judah existed centuries before the rise of Islam. Jewish language, religion and culture are rooted in that land in a way that no false colonial narrative can ever erase.
Jewish history and artefacts permeate the land. Jerusalem, Hebron, Shiloh, Beit El, Jericho, Samaria and Judea appear throughout Jewish scripture and historical records. Even Arabic terminology alludes to the Jewish routes in the land. Jerusalem is known in Arabic as Al-Quds, “The Holy”, while the older Islamic name Bayt al-Maqdis derives from the Hebrew Beit HaMikdash, the Jewish Temple that once stood there.
By claiming that Britain “gave away Palestine,” the letter distorts both the history and the legal framework of the Mandate, with the clear implication that the Jewish state itself was illegitimate.
That is its true purpose. Strip away the legalese, the historical fraud, and what remains is a cynical attempt to recast the Jewish state as a colonial crime rather than what it is. Perhaps, the most successful national liberation movement of the twentieth century, an indigenous people returning to its historic homeland with a legitimacy unmatched by any other modern state in the region.
Their argument presented in this letter has zero basis in historical fact. It exists purely to serve their warped ideology and anti-Israel agenda. These are not the interventions of humanitarian politicians suddenly troubled by the legal intricacies and injustices of British colonial rule. This is about a movement that has spent decades singling out the Jewish state as uniquely illegitimate.
The double standards and hypocrisy are as revealing as they are disturbing. No one questions the legitimacy of states across the Middle East whose borders were drawn by imperial powers with rulers installed from outside, with scant regard for local history or the people who lived there.
Israel alone is incessantly placed in the dock. The one state in the region actually rooted in the history, identity and civilisation of an ancient people is treated as illegitimate and expected to justify its existence .
One cannot ignore that the country singled out in this way just happens to be the world’s only Jewish state.
This letter is not about principal or healing. It is all about something much older and far uglier.
Gary Cohen is a writer and filmmaker. His substack can be found here:
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