While all of Europe is responsible, I think it’s also important for people from the UK to acknowledge the particular and direct culpability of our government in what has happened in Israel and Palestine - mostly because it never is. Politicians don’t mention it, the media never mentions it, they tell you nothing about it in school, no one talks about it. I was just saying exactly the same thing about India, but if you ask an average British person if they think their country did a good job of ruling Palestine you’ll get a blank stare, maybe they’ll pull a massively uninformed opinion out of their arse, I doubt many could tell you exactly when it was. But the fact is that when Britain assumed control of the Holy land in 1918 both Zionism and Palestinian nationalism were relatively minor concerns, and when we left in 1948 there was a civil war raging between those two sides. All of the important seeds of the conflict were sown and took root while Britain was in charge. The first major Palestinian uprising of 1936-39 was an anti-colonial struggle against the British Empire.
But today, watching the news, British people are like ‘wow guess we’ll never understand why Jews and Arabs just naturally hate each other’… just like those Hindus and Muslims in India and Pakistan, and those Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland’….. and all of those other places on earth where the legacy of British occupation and partition is division, violence and misery. The Empire is not a distant memory we can feel vaguely proud and nostalgic about (as most British people apparently do) it was a global crime of almost unimaginable proportions and it’s still (in some cases quite literally) blowing up in our faces.
