When Israeli artillery destroyed buildings in Gaza last month, Gaza was one of the two territories that Palestinians had been squeezed into in the last century, and the British government was once again in trouble. assertion The kindness of its empire in the past to those who demanded that its harm be liquidated. #BritishEmpire was popular on Twitter even when Gaza was burned down.

These phenomena are interrelated: the continued whitewashing of the history of the British Empire makes the condemnation of Israel as “settler colonialism” in many ways unable to resonate morally. Far from tarnishing the origins of Israel, the country’s British predecessor is considered valid. The “Belfort Declaration” issued by the British government in 1917 announced its support for “the establishment of a national homeland for Jews in Palestine”, which was mythologically laid the foundation for the Jewish state in the Middle East, thereby providing international legitimacy for the establishment of the state. Iseral’s. Awareness of the morally dubious origin and significance of this statement may help break the entangled myth of the benevolence of the British Empire and the benign existence of Israel in Palestine.

The Balfour Declaration was one of several strategic “commitments” made by the United Kingdom regarding the territories of the Ottoman Empire during World War I, because the United Kingdom was busy protecting the route to India and the oil-rich Gulf. Dismembered. In order to allow the Arab population in the region to stand on their side, they promised the ruler of the Hanzhi Sharif in the Arabian Peninsula that this would be an independent kingdom extending from Palestine to Damascus. At the same time, in secret negotiations with France and Russia to divide the region, they promised to turn Palestine into an international territory. When Russia withdrew from the war in October 1917, they saw an urgent need to secure Britain’s position in the Middle East with a new commitment, this time a commitment to the Zionist movement. Palestine has thus become the land of the three promises-there are enough reasons to doubt the sanctity of any one of the promises.

The new pledge was formally drafted by the British Foreign Secretary and Conservative Party leader Arthur James Balfour. Belfort is a staunch imperialist. He was called the “Bloody Belfort” because as the chief secretary of Ireland he suppressed Ireland’s demands for greater independence. He was also an amateur philosopher who was skeptical of reason, and was attracted by the occult—and the concept of the mysterious power of certain groups. The idea of ??promising the Zionists to ensure security in the Middle East was partly rooted in his anti-Semitist assumption, which other influential British politicians also agreed with that the Jews controlled public opinion and global finance. Balfour calculated that his propaganda statement would condense the opinions of American and German Jews into the cause of the Allied forces and also end the unpopular flow of Eastern European Jews into Britain.

The declaration was in line with the type of British colonialism, which shaped the history of violent deprivation in Kenya and other colonies. The British think Palestine is something they can promise to any group without consulting its population. This is a typical imperial hypothesis. The difference here is that Jews, rather than British settlers, will assume the “civilization mission”-and act as a loyal presence near the Suez Canal. The declaration implies that Jews are racially and culturally superior to the indigenous population of Palestine, even though it implies that Jews do not belong to Europe and possess conspiracy power.

Not everyone in the British government agrees with these views. Indian Secretary of State Edwin Montagu (Edwin Montagu) is Jewish and considers the statement highly anti-Semitism. “Jews will be treated as foreigners in every country except Palestine from now on,” he worried. He insisted that his family did not have the necessary “community of views” with Jewish families elsewhere: “It is not correct to say that a Christian Englishman and a Christian Frenchman belong to the same country.” Montagu worried that the declaration would mean In Palestine, “Jews should be in all priority”, and Muslims and Christians will be required to “make way for Jews”. He foresaw: “When the Jews are told that Palestine is their national homeland, every country will immediately want to get rid of its Jewish citizens, and you will find that the Palestinian population has expelled its existing residents.”

Montagu was formulating the Montagu Declaration at the time, promising Indians greater autonomy to ensure Their Loyal in wartime. Conservatives, especially Belfort, are hesitant to make this concession to anti-colonialism, believing that Indians do not have the ability to govern themselves. That is the kind of imperialist Belfort.

After the war, the British abandoned all their wartime promises about the Middle East: they first betrayed the arrangement with France and asked Prince Sharif Faisal to establish a government in Damascus, but then let France drive Faisal out in exchange for a liberation oil. Resource-rich Mosul. Faisal was crowned King of Iraq under British rule—despite the promise of independence to the Iraqis during the war. Britain directly controlled Palestine (no international territory)-confirming that the vague promise of the Balfour Declaration to the homeland of the country does not imply political control of the Jews. In 1921, the United Kingdom removed Jordan from the Palestinian territories without any feeling of infringement on the Jewish homeland. A white paper in 1930 deviated from the idea of ??a Jewish homeland. The outcry by the Zionists forced the British government to withdraw the newspaper.

With Hitler coming to power, hundreds of thousands of desperate European Jews found their doors closed in Britain and the United States and arrived in Palestine. More and more landless and impoverished Palestinians revolted in 1936. The British borrowed from the cruel, terrifying and destructive counterinsurgency methods developed in Ireland and Iraq, which influenced the later Israeli military practices.

Britain changed its policy in 1937 and 1939, supporting Jews and Arabs in turn. In the process of advising on Palestinian policy, Winston Churchill generally issued his eugenic defense of settler colonialism in 1937: “I don’t admit that…the red Indians in the United States or the blacks in Australia made a big mistake. …In fact, a stronger race, a higher-level race…has come in and take their place.” He believes that the Jewish settlements in Palestine are similar to these early cases, including their genocide implications.

At this time, Hitler was also watching the genocide of Native Americans As a model Because of his concept of living space, he began to apply the violent logic of settler colonialism in Europe itself. Churchill admired Hitler and wrote a chapter for him in his 1937 book “Great Contemporaries”. Although the British today celebrate Churchill’s defeat of Nazism, they still do not explicitly condemn the settler colonial ideology upon which Nazism is based.

The defenders of British imperialism poured their energy into the defense of another settler colonialist, Cecil Rhodes, even after a prudent committee recommended the removal of his statue at Oriel College, Oxford. . Rhodes argued: “We are the best race in the world… The more world we live in, the better it is for humans.” His private company killed several people when establishing a colony of Rhodesian settlers. Thousands of Matabele people. As prime minister of the Cape Colony, he also established the foundation of apartheid in South Africa — the current Israeli regime is often compared to — depriving non-whites of their voting rights and claiming their land. Even his British contemporaries were angry at his behavior.

Recently, former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum claimed on CNN that the settlers “created America from nothing, … there is nothing here”, which not only erased the Native American culture and life CNN parted ways with him, and erased the memory of their mass settler violence, in response to the tremendous pressure from the public, including the Native American Journalists Association.

However, major British news media such as The Times continued to provide generous space for settlers’ colonialist defenders. Last month, the “Guardian” officially expressed regret for its support for the Balfour Declaration in 1917, when its editor wrote: “The existing Arab population in Palestine… is in the low-level stage of civilization.” It is now its false promise and its It is time for the settler colonial ideology on which it was based to be more broadly and clearly condemned.

Britain’s wartime commitments were not based on principles, but on expediency, and based on racist ideas—almost not on a sacred basis. In addition, the declaration also contains self-denying language to ensure that “no actions that may damage the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine are not allowed.” Belfort’s conservatism is to avoid radical change. The framework of the declaration is ambiguous, so it may be broken, just like the promise to the Sharif sect during the war. Its expediency, colonial presumption, and the origin of anti-Semitism hardly endow it with the aura of legitimacy it has today in some respects—not to mention sacredness.

The British launched settler colonialism in Palestine, as careless as they did in Australia and New Zealand, and in Kenya and Rhodesia. Israel’s violence in Gaza is not only self-defense, but also part of a longer story of settler colonialism during the heyday of European colonialism. Contrary to British mythology, settler colonialism is a process of radical ethnic cleansing based on racism. The United States supports Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories by supporting a colonial country made by Britain to support another country. It is no coincidence that this support has become particularly generous during the Trump administration. The Trump administration is also proud of white supremacy in North America. Facing the history of colonialism is indispensable to confronting colonialism itself.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.