Learn about the history of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, equality and justice by exploring major events in the history of their oppression on this day of the year.
30 May
UK LABOUR SUPPORTED ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS
On this day in 1944, the UK Labour Party annual conference accepted an NEC statement that included, “Let the Arabs be encouraged to move out as the Jews move in …The Arabs have many wide territories of their own; they must not claim to exclude the Jews from this small area of Palestine”. Labour supported “transfer of population”, later known as ethnic cleansing. Zionist leader Weizmann was surprised at such fervent support for his movement: “The British Labourites...went beyond our intentions”.
دعم حزب العمل البريطاني التطهير العرقي للفلسطينيين
30 مايو
في مثل هذا اليوم من عام 1944 ، وافق المؤتمر السنوي لحزب العمال في المملكة المتحدة على بيان اللجنة الوطنية للانتخابات الذي تضمن ، "لا بد من تشجيع العرب الخروج من فلسطين وتشجيع عودة اليهود لها. للعرب مناطق واسعة كثيرة خاصة بهم، و يجب ألا يدعوا الى استبعاد اليهود من هذه المنطقة الصغيرة من فلسطين ". دعم حزب العمل "تهجير السكان" ، الذي عُرف فيما بعد بالتطهير العرقي. فوجئ الزعيم الصهيوني وايزمان بهذا الدعم القوي لحركته: "العمال البريطانيون ... تجاوزوا نوايانا".
The British Left and Zionism: History of a Divorce, Paul Kelemen interviewed on his book
Jadaliya: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous research?
PK: I began with an interest in British colonialism, and particularly in East Africa. The British began settling white people in the Kenyan highlands only a decade or so before the Balfour Declaration allocated another part of the imperial estate to another set of Europeans. Volumes have been written detailing in admiring terms every move by Weizmann and his colleagues to persuade the British elite of the Zionist objective. But the British agonized over it remarkably little, considering it their prerogative to give the land of a people they considered to be of an inferior race to people that Balfour and his colleagues believed formed an inassimilable race. It is revealing that Lord Balfour, the architect of the anti-Semitic 1905 Aliens Act, devised to keep Britain closed to Jews fleeing from Russian pogroms, is honored by having a street in Tel Aviv named after him.
Jadaliya: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
PK: The Arab nationalist cause had no voice in Britain and, more broadly, in Western Europe during 1947-48 when the Nakba occurred. The French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, a founding figure of the study of collective memory, made the point that if an event is not fixed in the public consciousness when it occurs, it is unlikely to be recalled in later years. In 1948, the left, which usually championed the cause of the victims of imperialism, was silent on the Palestinians; the refugees were largely forgotten until the New Left began to recall what had happened and to develop solidarity with the Palestinian national movement.
The Labour Party remained committed to the Zionist cause in Palestine throughout the war, although the 1939 White Paper was never withdrawn by the Churchill Coalition government. This commitment was decisively reaffirmed in a party statement on “The International Post-War Settlement”, drawn up by Hugh Dalton, and issued in the spring of 1944.
The section on Palestine stated quite bluntly that a future Labour government had “to let Jews, if they wish, enter this tiny land in such numbers as to become a majority”. There was a necessity in Palestine “for transfer of population. Let the Arabs be encouraged to move out, as the Jews move in”. They should be “compensated handsomely for their land” and their “settlement elsewhere…generously financed...we should re-examine also the possibility of extending the present Palestinian boundaries by agreement with Egypt, Syria or Transjordan”. Dalton decided to leave out a recommendation for “throwing open Libya or Eritrea to Jewish settlement as satellites or colonies to Palestine”.
The whole document was adopted as policy at the December 1944 Labour Party conference. According to Weizmann, in this statement “the British Labourites, in their pro-Zionist enthusiasm, went beyond our intentions”. Not even the Revisionists had “advocated so extreme a political solution”. The Tory Oliver Stanley warned him that the policy was “Zionism plus plus” and risked “encouraging the Jews to believe that the next British Government…will do everything for them”. At its May 1945 conference Labour restated its commitment yet again with Dalton looking forward to “a happy, free and prosperous Jewish state in Palestine”.
The commitment was Labour Party policy during the 1945 general election and was included in the party’s 1945 Speaker’s Handbook where it was stated once again that Zionist settlers should be allowed into Palestine “in such numbers as to become a majority” and that “the Arabs be encouraged to move out as the Jews move in”.
It was abandoned immediately the party took office. The interests of the Empire took priority over any commitment to the Zionist cause. Ministers were made aware that any attempt to implement this commitment would seriously, perhaps fatally, undermine the British position throughout the Middle East which required Arab collaboration...
This precipitated an armed Zionist revolt against British rule in Palestine, a revolt supported by both the Soviet Union and the United States, as a way of weakening the British position in the Middle East; it was to end with the British effectively forced out of the country.
Until just after its victory at the 1945 general election, the British Labour Party was regarded as being supportive of Zionist ambitions for a national home for Jews in Palestine and many party conferences from 1921 onwards past resolutions in favour of such a home. Not that all leading Labour politicians were sympathetic to Zionism, and there were pro-Zionist Conservatives and Liberals but prior to 1945-6 the Labour Party more than any other political party in Britain favoured a Jewish national home in the Land of Israel and was sympathetic to the aspirations of the halutzim (‘pioneers’) in villages and towns there.
The British Labour Party and Palestine 1917 to 1948 Cecil bloom