THE RESULT OF ISRAEL’S IMPUNITY AND WORLD INACTION
IS THIS THE END OF PALESTINE?
As Israel destroys Gaza and the West Bank and kills Palestinians every single day, the world watches it all happen impotently. So, as 2025 ends, are we seeing the final dismemberment of Palestine and the end of the Palestinian struggle for freedom?
Only a fool would deny it is a distinct possibility, given Israel’s unprecedented impunity to do whatever it likes. If the worst happens, it will be the culmination of a long and cruel colonial journey that was imposed on the Palestinians from the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 until now.
That pernicious and ill-advised decision to create a ‘national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine led inexorably to the current genocidal war on Gaza and Israel’s multiple human rights abuses against the Palestinians, ongoing since Israel’s establishment.
Balfour’s great crime in 1917 was not just to cede control of Palestine (which Britain did not own) to foreign colonists, but to do so specifically and, of all people, to a group of tortured, complex Jewish European Zionists with an acute sense of grievance about their historic persecution. The deep animus they held against a world which had allowed it to happen fed their belief that the world owed them recompense for their sufferings, and Britain’s offer of a ‘national home’ in Palestine was only their due. It gave them a sense of entitlement to the country which bred an arrogant conviction that it belonged exclusively to them no one could deny.
Such ideas, never questioned or rejected by Israel’s western supporters, but on the contrary indulged and accepted as valid, have been disastrous for Palestine and its people. Today, Gaza lies in ruins that will take decades and billions of dollars to repair. Its people, already reduced by Israel’s deadly assaults, may not long survive a lethal combination of famine, disease, a harsh winter, relentless Israeli violence, and ethnic cleansing.
On the West Bank, incessant settler attacks backed by Israel’s army have led to over 1000 Palestinian deaths since 2023, and caused mass displacements, destruction of Palestinian villages and the evacuation of refugee camps. East Jerusalem has been steadily absorbed into Israel, and the Palestinians inside Israel’s 1948 borders are persecuted and intimidated.
And now we have a new colonial imposition on Palestine presented to the UN in the shape of Donald Trump’s UN Security Council Resolution 2803, which was unanimously passed on 17 November. This makes Trump the head of a so-called Board of Peace, whose task is to oversee an ‘International Stabilisation Force’ of peace keepers for Gaza, an interim Palestinian technocratic administration, and a local police force – all code for the re-colonisation of Gaza by outside forces.
The idea that the funder and chief enabler of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, who could have ended it long ago with a snap of his fingers, should now pose as Gaza’s saviour is simply grotesque. Even so, if the guns had fallen silent as a result of Trump’s initiative it might have gained some support on those grounds alone. But Israel’s daily killing of Palestinians has not abated for a single day since the ceasefire announced on 11 October.
The truth is that from pre-British Mandate days British government officials were well aware of Zionist sentiments, and they knew precisely who they were letting into Palestine. In 1920, just three years after the Balfour Declaration, a House of Lords debate on security for the Arabs of Palestine reveals a remarkable degree of insight about the Zionist project at the highest level.
The lords deprecated the demands of a self-constituted ‘Zionist Commission’, which had been allowed to base itself in Jerusalem under British military protection, to have a say in all British policy decisions. The Zionists also wanted concessions over public works in an ‘arrogant, and extraordinarily impolitic’ manner. Some lords thought the troubles in Palestine were mainly due to the actions and behaviour of Zionists, many of whom were ‘extremists’ and behaved as if they owned Palestine.
The Jews who had come to Palestine as immigrants from Russia, Poland, and Rumania, had ‘raked up an ancient name with which they have nothing whatever to do’. The lords insisted that Britain must not smooth the way for these Jews to take over ‘The Promised Land’, or make it a dumping ground for all the Zionist ‘rowdies of Europe’. Nothing should be done against the wishes of the [Palestinian] population to ‘pamper the expectations of people spread all over the world’.
The Palin Commission of the same year strongly echoed these views. It accused the Zionists of ‘impatience, indiscretion and attempts to force the hand of the [British] Administration’ into giving them a Jewish state. Many British administrators in Palestine resigned or were dismissed for questioning the conduct of the Zionists at this time, their complaints to the authorities in London ignored. Not long after in 1929, the High Commissioner of Palestine, Sir John Chancellor, anticipated what he called the ‘extremes of arrogance’ of the Jews if they were ever to become a majority in Palestine.
However, none of this deflected the government in London from continuing to support the Zionists project right up to Israel’s establishment in 1948. In the final years of British rule over Palestine, the Zionists were even more high-handed and defiant in their dealings with the authorities, carrying out acts of terrorism against their British benefactors.
Yet, it was thanks to British support that the Zionists attained their Jewish state, although it never diminished their appetite for acquiring more, or their view of themselves as a special people who, on account of their history, could not be judged like others. This self-assigned impunity, nurtured by Israel’s western backers, has characterised Israeli actions ever since. The Gaza genocide, its savagery, sadism and depravity, is not a product of Israel’s ‘right-wing’ government alone. It is also underpinned by a majority of the Israeli Jewish public who have similar attitudes of entitlement.
A long history of Jewish exceptionalism brought us here, nurtured by Western supporters. The true reckoning for Palestine’s tragic fate lies squarely with these western patrons of a Zionist project they knew would inflict a people with preposterous pretensions and an arrogant disregard for others onto a settled, cohesive and peaceable Arab society, innocent of any crime against Jews.
Predictably, they destroyed that society and replaced it with an aggressive, expansionist and violent entity that has brought danger and instability to the whole Middle East and the world beyond. It was a blunder of historic proportions, for which they can never be forgiven.
