The battles for Gaza were tough and costly. It proved a difficult target, with the defenders well dug-in. It took three battles spread out over much of the year before the strip fell.
Is this 2023–24? No, 1917, with the attackers the British, advancing not from the direction of modern Israel, but from Egypt. At present, Britain is blamed by Palestinian activists for having caused the current situation, and the British rule of the region now known as Israel from 1918 to 1948 was indeed eventually a period of grave difficulty. But the impression now given by activists is seriously mistaken, for the rule of what was then called Palestine, under a League of Nations mandate, was not at all the British priority in the Middle East.
Instead, thoughts were always on Egypt, and British forces advanced into Palestine in World War I with the goal of protecting Egypt from Turkish attack, rather than in pursuit of some master plan for colonial expansion.
Egypt was crucial because of the geostrategic location of the Middle East. For Britain, this was a matter of the route to India. That had become more important as the British presence there dramatically increased from the late 1750s on, with Bengal effectively under British control from 1765, Mysore conquered at the end of the century, and the Marathas heavily defeated in 1803. The route to India was of central interest prior to the opening of the Suez Canal (built in 1859–69), with Britain’s first major position in the Arab world being Aden, occupied in 1839. Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, an offensive explicitly launched as part of a plan to advance French interests in India, fired British concern, leading to a successful British counterinvasion in 1801 and the defeat of the French. A less successful intervention was launched in 1807, but in 1882, at Tel-El-Kebir, Garnet Wolseley inflicted a heavy defeat on the Egyptians, beginning a period of British control that lasted until the Egyptian nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956, a step that led to the unsuccessful invasion of the Canal Zone by Britain and France later that year.
Compared to Egypt, Palestine was of minor consequence for Britain. It was primarily a forward buffer. In the modern era, there was none of the emotional investment that had led Richard I and Edward I to campaign there during the Crusades.
Moreover, there was a separate sphere of British activity, that surrounding India, which had led to a presence in the Persian Gulf and, during World War I, resulted in British intervention in Mesopotamia and the eventual establishment of a mandate for Iraq. Again, strategic interests linked to the protection of India were to the fore, interests accentuated prior to the war by concern about German plans to establish rail links with the Persian Gulf, and separately and subsequently pushed to the top of British concern by the availability of oil. There were no comparable oil fields in Egypt or Palestine. Again, Iraq was an area of British commitment until the coup that overthrew the monarchy in 1958, with air bases from which the Soviet Union could be attacked, in addition to the ever-useful presence of oil.
Britain indeed was the major Middle Eastern power until the 1950s, a position solidified by its military success in World War I, in which the British had also conquered Syria and Lebanon, even though France became the mandate power there. So also with World War II, in which the British (including imperial forces) successfully defended Egypt from Italian and German invaders, while also conquering Lebanon and Syria from Vichy France and Iraq from a pro-German local government. The British also jointly conquered Iran with the Soviet Union. Thereafter, there was a lessening of British power in the region, although the French withdrawal from Syria and Lebanon in 1946 made Britain even more clearly the major Western power. British forces intervened in Jordan in 1958 and Kuwait in 1961 in order to maintain friendly governments in power and resist the pressures of Pan-Arabism and both Egyptian and Iraqi expansionism, which were of far greater concern than developments in the newly independent state of Israel.
To present such an account of British uninterest in Israel and not therefore discuss the pressures arising in the late 1930s from Jewish immigration and from the large-scale Arab uprising in Palestine in 1936–39 might appear surprising, but it is important to put the situation there in perspective. Both immigration and the revolt were extremely important as far as the situation in Palestine was concerned, and the British deployed a considerable force, but in terms of Britain’s wider strategic concerns in the late 1930s, these events were of relatively minor significance. This was not least because the states opposed to Britain did not successfully exploit the rising, even though Italy under Mussolini followed a general policy of trying to foment Arab nationalism. The Peel Commission, which had been established to tackle the linked issues of Jewish immigration and the violently hostile Arab response, recommended the partition of Palestine between Arab and Jewish states.
The report’s suggestion was rejected by Arabs and led to the rebellion, which, initially, posed a serious problem for the British, not least because—contending with sniping and sabotage, as well as a shortage of information about the rebels—they were unable to maintain control of much of the countryside. The opponents, however, lacked overall leadership and were divided, in particular among clans. Faced with a firm opposition from about three thousand guerrilla fighters, the British used collective punishments to weaken Palestinian support for the guerrillas, adopted active patrolling, sent significant reinforcements, and reoccupied rebel strongholds. In addition, partition as a policy was abandoned in 1938, and in 1939 a white paper outlined a new policy: independence in ten years and limited Jewish immigration in the meantime.
For the British, the Arab revolt had to be considered alongside the contemporary uprising on the North-West Frontier of India, but both instances were shadowed by growing concern about Germany, Italy, and Japan.
It was a new, post-imperial agenda that appeared from the late 1960s onward, one owing much to the retreat from “East of Suez,” which resulted in the British pulling out of the Indian Ocean, notably withdrawing from Aden in 1967.
The Aden struggle had seen Britain opposed to the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was also backing the republicans in Yemen against the Saudi-supported royalists. As a result, Egypt’s heavy defeat by Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967 served British interests, just as they had also been served by the Israeli defeat of Egypt in 1956. Alongside a distancing from Britain’s earlier role in the Middle East, close links between the Labour-dominated Israeli government and Britain’s own Labour governments were important to an improvement in British relations with Israel. Also important was the philo-Semitism of Margaret Thatcher. As significant from the late 1960s was the pronounced move of the most prominent Palestinian organizations, notably the plo, to the Soviet side in the Cold War and to the means of terrorism. This strongly affected the attitude of successive British governments, not least because of links between on the one side the plo and radical Arab governments—notably Libya—and on the other terrorism by the Provisional ira, which also received financial support and armaments from some Irish Americans. Moreover, the rise of the right-wing Likud in Israeli politics in the 1980s was not unacceptable to Mrs. Thatcher.
At the same time, Britain was clearly secondary to America on the Western side in the Middle East, a position eased by a significant distancing of France from Israel.
It was America that played the key role in rearming Israel after the Six-Day War, in assuring that Israel was not isolated when it was attacked by Egypt and Syria in the Yom Kippur/October/Ramadan War of 1973, and in helping Israel achieve peace with Egypt. America became Israel’s major supporter and arms supplier. Britain’s role, in comparison, was minor. As America’s principal European ally in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s—at a time when West Germany was going in a different direction with Ostpolitik and France was leaving nato’s military structure—Britain followed the trend of America’s policy, even if not all the details.
More significant in the late 1960s and 1970s was a retrenchment of Britain’s geopolitical concerns in response to fiscal strain, onerous nato responsibilities, and the eventually successful drive to join the European Economic Community.
Under Thatcher, there was a degree of broadening out and a more global international stance, but the Middle East continued to be a relatively minor concern compared to the escalation and then resolution of the Cold War in Europe.
Britain’s principal military commitment in the Middle East between the withdrawal from Aden in 1967 and the Gulf War in 1991 was the provision of forces to help Oman fight a South Yemeni–backed insurrection in Dhofar. This was a successful commitment, one in line with the policies of America, Saudi Arabia, and the Shah’s Iran. At the same time, it was a conflict that attracted very little public attention and ended fairly quietly in 1976.
The situation changed in the 1990s, with the Gulf War seeing Britain prominently return “East of Suez,” while in Palestine tensions led to the first intifada, which helped encourage both public attention and attempts to reach a negotiated settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Britain encouraged a settlement but was not prominent in the debates. Instead, in the mid- and late 1990s, Balkan crises engaged more attention. In the 2000s, in contrast, the theme of a “clash of civilizations” appeared to come to fruition with the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks—significantly in America and not Europe—followed by the “War on Terror,” first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. Britain followed the American lead, which also entailed an alignment with Israel that caused Tony Blair serious problems within the Labour movement in 2006 and which helped bring about his
fall in 2007.
The 2010s saw continued tensions in Palestine overshadowed by the consequences of the Arab Spring. The British were not significantly involved in the crises in Tunisia and Egypt but played a key role in providing support to the insurgents in Libya in 2011. In the short term, this contributed to the overthrow of the regime of Colonel Gaddafi, but in the longer term it led to protracted instability both there and across the Sahel belt in Africa, notably in Mali and Niger. The facile optimism shown by David Cameron proved totally misplaced and indicated his deeply flawed grasp of international relations.
The British engagement in Libya was followed in 2012 by Cameron losing control of the House of Commons when he sought to persuade it to back America in a military confrontation with the brutal Assad regime in Syria. Such action was both limited in prospectus and justified, but Cameron lost control when he unnecessarily turned to Parliament for permission to participate, and the British climbdown undermined the American stance, thereby helping to embolden the Russians.
Again, Palestine/Israel was not the major point in British public discussion of the Middle East, as has indeed been the norm other than when particular crises arise. At the same time, growing criticism of the Israeli settlers in the West Bank affected a swath of British public debate. Ironically, British activist groups, prior to the October 7 attack, rarely discussed Gaza, because the Israelis—as part of their drive for peace—had previously evacuated the Gaza Strip and forced their settlers out. That this has not occurred on the West Bank makes for a fundamental contrast.
The angry response from the Left to Tony Blair over Israel’s 2006 bombing of Lebanon was a precursor to current demonstrations. The scale might be very different, but the current disturbances were also prefigured by those during the 2003 Iraq War. In contrast, there were no demonstrations of comparable substance against the 1991 Iraq War, nor against the murderous Syrian policy toward Syrians over the last eleven years, or indeed against that of the Sudanese regime in South Sudan and Darfur. We can say the same for other groups who have suffered, such as Kurds at the hands of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.
These and other contrasts invite consideration. In part, there is doubtless a degree of anti-Semitism that has become more apparent among the Left since elements of it embraced Palestinian terrorism from the late 1960s. In this respect, Hamas is simply another iteration, albeit one that is more “Islamic” than those earlier movements. Indeed, there is an echo of Cold War attitudes and propaganda, as with many other issues at present. Today’s situation in Israel is very much not parallel to the early stage of the Cold War, a stage more closely reflected in recent and current Russian support for Syria and alignment with Iran. Instead, the “Global South” propaganda of Mao Zedong and the latter stage of the Cold War are the key background to the situation in Israel at present.
The reason the reaction to the events of 2023 has been so different from reactions in the past essentially is the large number of Muslims who now live in Britain and their determination to take an activist stance. This is very different in scale to previous displays of activism and makes us consider a political consequence of recent mass-migration. Instructively, the virulence and size of the current demonstrations is different to those occasioned by other instances in which Muslims have been persecuted, from Bosnia to Xinjiang. In part, this contrast is a reflection of the salience of the issue, but it also has much to do with left-wing mobilization.
That a discussion of long-term British policies in the Middle East should end with the demonstrations in London in 2024 may appear presentist as well as problematic, mistaking the demonstrations of the minority for the views or engagement of the majority. Certainly, there is no sign that the Israel issue trumps Britain’s strategic interests in the region, interests currently centered on following the American lead and furthering both the peace and stability of Britain’s allies. How these will be advanced in the years to come is unclear.
