The blood of Palestine stains Britain’s hands

I REGRET my combativeness towards my father for his work in the British Palestine Police, writes Margaret Wenham. But seventy years on from the declaration of the Israel state, I still condemn Britain’s role.

WE have photos of him in the Middle East.

An easily identifiable figure despite his youth, he’s often captured by the camera in the easy stance familiar to me. One leg straightened, taking most of his weight, the other slightly forward and bent, he cuts a lean, athletic, handsome figure. In some he’s squinting, for there the sun is always at once burning down and reflecting up from the burnished landscape.

It is the 1930s and my father, John, in his 20s, is in Palestine, a member of the British Palestine Police.

“Nazareth, 1938,” is written on the back of one snap of him. “On guard in the Judaean Hills,” appears on the back of another. “The Police training school, Mount Scopus. It is surrounded by the huts of the Palestinians,” informs yet another.

I learned about his time in Palestine piecemeal as I grew up, from realising he spoke an exotic sounding, foreign language — Arabic. He taught my sister and me how to count to 10, how to say hello, how are you and so forth. My sister recalls more phrases than I do.

Growing up in the damp greyness of London where the family was based when I was small, my head was filled with romantic notions of my dashing, uniformed father in this far-flung desert place with its strikingly different peoples. Pictures of him with rifle slung across his shoulder and small arms strapped to his leg notwithstanding, it all somehow fitted into the fading though then still quite pervasive British narrative of rich empire past, benevolently administered.

John Hetherington in Palestine in the late 1930s. (Pic: Supplied Margaret Wenham)

But, as I grew older — the family having decamped again to Australia — and began to read modern history the romance died, slain by what I regarded as Britain’s criminal duplicity in its dealing with the Arabs during and after World War I and its stupidity in ignoring or downplaying Zionist aims for a Jewish nation state. For Britain, in pursuit of its national interests alone, promised independence in exchange for Arab assistance against Turkey in World War I, then broke that promise by making a secret deal with the French in 1916 to divide up the Middle East, with Britain’s mandate area to include Palestine, and then published the Balfour Declaration in 1917 announcing sympathy for “Jewish Zionist aspirations” and pledging British “best endeavours” to establish “in Palestine ... a national home for the Jewish people”.

What perfidy and idiocy. British colonial rule replaced Ottoman rule and the naive secondary caveat in the Balfour Declaration that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” was quickly trampled by militant Zionism, later supported by Western guilt about the holocaust and the widespread persecution of Jewish people that preceded it. I proclaimed my father guilty by association of condemning the Palestinian Arabs to either passive acceptance of the unjust and unacceptable, or rejection of and resistance against a long oppressed people. It must have hurt but I don’t recall him yielding fully, only saying that he, for one, at least, had got on well with Arab people while in the Palestine Police, even in the course of the 1936 general strike and the 1936-39 revolt, as Arab dissent against the British colonial administration of Palestine and growing Jewish immigration and land purchases, boiled over.

World War II interrupted and my father, now in the British Army, fought in the Syrian campaign where he first rubbed shoulders with Australians whose company he enjoyed immensely, but that’s another story.

The father (R) of 15-year-old Palestinian teenager Azzam Oweida is consoled by another man as he mourns outside the hospital where his son died after being shot by Israeli forces on the Gaza border. (Pic: Said Khatib/AFP)

But why these reflections? On May 15 this year, Palestinian Arabs will commemorate the 70th anniversary of al Nakba, “the catastrophe”, marking 70 years since Zionist David Ben-Gurion unilaterally declared the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine on May 14, 1948, pursuant to the 1947 UN-sanctioned partition plan. This declaration happened just hours before the official end of Britain’s egregious and ill-fated mandate, it having abstained from voting on the UN’s partition plan, which Palestinian Arab leaders had rejected out of hand and which sparked the 1947-48 civil war between Arabs and Jews in Palestine.

Following Ben-Gurion’s declaration and the British exit, the civil war became the full-blown 1948-49 Arab-Israeli War resulting in hundreds of thousands more Palestinian Arabs fleeing or being expelled from their homes, their towns and villages reduced to rubble. Then followed the fighting between Palestinian militants or fedayeen and the Israel Defence Forces in the 1950s and 1960s, followed by the 1967 six-day war, the Yom Kippur War, the first and second intifadas (Palestinian uprisings in the West Bank and Gaza), offensives and counteroffensives in Gaza and on and on and on.

One hundred years since the end of WWI and 70 years since the state of Israel was declared there remain millions of displaced Palestinian Arab refugees and the 1947 partition plan is barely recognisable in the current boundaries of the much reduced and blockaded Gaza Strip and the West Bank, which is now peppered with exclusive Jewish settlements. Jerusalem once mooted to become “corpus separatum”, then to be a shared capital between the Palestinian and Israeli states, is claimed in its entirety by Israel.

Is a two-state solution, based on Israel’s internationally recognised 1967 borders at all possible now? Perhaps, contingent on the Jewish settlements being reabsorbed into the Palestinian West Bank and Israel relinquishing its claim to the whole of Jerusalem.

Is a one-state solution conceivable? Maybe, conditional on the basis of Arab and Jewish citizens holding absolutely equal civil and political rights.

My wonderful father has been dead for 20 years. I rue my personalised combativeness with him. But my view of Britain’s role remains condemnatory.

A great deal of the blood shed in and over Palestine over the past century continues to stain British hands.

Margaret Wenham is a Courier-Mail columnist.