Balfour to Blair
Anne Irfan
The British government has formally backed Donald Trump’s latest plan for Gaza, which proposes a leading role for Tony Blair in the Strip’s future governance. Under the Trump plan, which was devised in consultation with Israel but without any Palestinian input, a ‘technocratic apolitical committee’ will govern Gaza under the supervision of a ‘Board of Peace’ headed by Trump himself. The twenty-point plan states that the committee will include ‘qualified Palestinians’ as members, but names no one other than Blair.
The idea of a governing role for Blair in Gaza revives the legacy of British colonial rule in Palestine, which formally ended in 1948. On 2 November 1917, the day that the foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, wrote his letter declaring support for ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’, British troops marched into Gaza from Egypt (which they had occupied since 1882). A month later, the British army seized Jerusalem. Within a year, they had occupied the whole of Palestine.
Five years later, the League of Nations issued Britain with its Mandate for Palestine. The Balfour Declaration was incorporated into the text of the Mandate, which directed Britain to ‘secure the establishment of a Jewish national home’ in the country. In other words, British rule was supposed both to prepare Palestine for self-governance and to deny self-determination to the majority of its people.
Under the Mandate, the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine) was given significant autonomy, with a recognised role for the Jewish Agency and its para-state institutions, including the paramilitary Haganah. Palestinian Arab institutions, by contrast, had considerably less autonomy and no recognised representative role in the Mandate government. The establishment of the state of Israel on 78 per cent of Palestine in 1948 was, in no small measure, enabled by three decades of British occupation. When the British left Palestine in May that year, they handed over control of much of the state infrastructure to the Jewish Agency, headed by Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion.
But British interference in Palestine did not end with its formal withdrawal in May 1948. Eight years later, Britain had a direct hand in Israel’s first occupation of Gaza. In league with France, they plotted an offensive against Nasser’s Egypt that involved a co-ordinated invasion of Gaza and Sinai in the autumn of 1956. The Israeli army stayed in Gaza for four months. The brutal occupation that included massacres of Palestinians in Khan Younis and Rafah refugee camps. Some men were forcibly disappeared, their bodies later discovered in mass graves. Many of the victims had been driven out of their homes in Palestine eight years earlier, when Zionist militias and the Israeli army had expelled Palestinians across the country as part of the drive to create a Jewish state. As countless Palestinians have pointed out, the Nakba did not end in 1948.
When Israel occupied Gaza again in 1967 – this time along with the West Bank – it drew directly on the British Mandate’s Emergency Regulations to impose military rule on Palestinians in the occupied territories (as it had in its regime over Palestinians inside Israel until 1966). Israeli practices such as administrative detention (arresting and incarcerating Palestinians indefinitely without trial), land grabs, house demolitions and restriction of movement were all grounded in British laws.
In the 1940s, the British Mandate authorities had used the Emergency Regulations against both Palestinians and Jewish immigrants to Palestine, including Zionist insurgents such as Menachem Begin, who led the Irgun Zvai Leumi militia when it massacred more than a hundred unarmed Palestinians at Deir Yassin in 1948. Serving as Israeli prime minister from 1977 to 1983, Begin deployed the same measures against thousands of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. Forty years later, the Israeli regime continues to draw on the same Emergency Regulations to facilitate mass detention, forced disappearances, land grabs and displacement in the Gaza genocide.
Directly or indirectly, Britain has had a hand in the governance of Palestine since its troops invaded in 1917. Blair’s envisioned role in Gaza would not be a first for him personally, either. He served as the Middle East envoy of the so-called Quartet (the UN, the US, the EU and Russia) from 2007 to 2015 – a period that saw the imposition of the Israeli blockade and the three most devastating wars on Gaza before 2023. As envoy, Blair spent little time in Gaza and was criticised for possible conflicts of interest in his opaque private business dealings in the region. Palestinian figures condemned his lack of even-handedness and ‘gross efforts to please the Israelis’. He was already widely reviled in the Arab world for his part in the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003.
By endorsing the Trump plan, Keir Starmer continues the long-standing British position of denying the Palestinian people’s right to national self-determination. The UK’s recognition of Palestine at the UN last month was, it seems, a mere blip, that will go no further than its symbolic function. In October 2023, when he was still leader of the opposition, Starmer said on LBC that Israel had the right to cut off the power and water supply to Gaza. The water stoppage was widely condemned on supposedly apolitical humanitarian grounds – even President Biden called on Israel to reverse it, and Starmer two weeks later told Parliament that ‘basic services … cannot be denied’ – but the denial of essential services is inextricably linked to the denial of political rights. The Trump-Blair plan for Gaza, which continues to deny both, is colonialism by another name.