LONDON — Labour Party Prime Minister Keir Starmer has welcomed Israel’s ceasefire as “desperately needed to end the suffering in Gaza.” For months Starmer has pressured the Israeli government to end the war before Hamas was destroyed and before Israel had ended Tehran’s moves to develop nuclear weapons. All this threatens the existence of Israel and the Jewish people.
Starmer imposed an arms embargo on Israel, supported the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and resumed funding for the Hamas-ridden United Nations Relief and Works Agency. His course is consistent with U.K. foreign policy over more than a century.
Many on both the left and right of capitalist politics argue that U.K. foreign policy has been pro-Jewish and pro-Israel ever since the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which pledged U.K. support for “a national home” for the Jewish people in Palestine. Nothing could be further from the truth — then or since.
Two years before Balfour’s pledge, London promised the emir of Mecca, Hussein ibn Ali, the very opposite — a greater Arab nation, including Palestine, in return for support for the Allies in World War I.
Both pledges were buried as the 1916 “Sykes-Picot” carve-up of the Middle East was implemented after the war. Paris got control over Syria and Lebanon, as well as most of the region populated by the Kurds. London got control over Iraq, Transjordan and Kuwait and reinforced its domination over Egypt and Iran.
The League of Nations awarded the U.K. government a “mandate” over Palestine, under which London appointed Amin al-Husseini, one of the most powerful landowners in the region, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Al-Husseini, a vile antisemite, led pogroms against Jews in Palestine in 1920, 1921, 1924, 1929 and 1936, often encouraged by British Mandate officials. He did so again in Iraq in 1941 — after which he decamped to Berlin to collaborate with Hitler in World War II to advance the Holocaust.
Al-Husseini went on to lead the Arab Higher Executive Committee of Palestine, dedicated to blocking the establishment of the state of Israel, and helped lead the invasion of the new state by the reactionary governments of Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, Lebanon and Syria.
London and Russian Revolution
While Balfour’s declaration was part of London’s divide-and-rule strategy to maximize its domination in the Middle East, its immediate aim was to strengthen efforts to win Jews away from the Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution in 1917. In a Jew-hating article in 1920, “Zionism versus Bolshevism,” Winston Churchill, then secretary of state for war, claimed the majority of the Bolshevik leaders “are Jews.”
“This movement among the Jews is not new,” he said. From the days of “Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxemburg (Germany) and Emma Goldman (United States), this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization … has been steadily growing.”
Churchill was the chief advocate for the British 1918 military intervention in Russia on the side of the counterrevolutionary White armies trying to overthrow the Bolshevik government. The Whites were responsible for the greatest massacre of Jews in history — surpassed only by the Holocaust itself.
British rulers’ policy: Keep Jews out
Nor did Balfour hold any sympathy for Jews. As prime minister, he enacted the Aliens Act of 1905 — to curb immigration by Jews fleeing pogroms in the czarist empire.
By the time Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, the government in the U.K. had blocked entry by Jews almost entirely. A similar bar was imposed on London-controlled Palestine.
A 1939 U.K. government “White Paper” overturned Balfour’s “national home” promise. It further restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine, imposed restrictions on land ownership by Jews and called for an Arab state there within 10 years.
“Let us offend the Jews rather than the Arabs,” Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said.
The Churchill-led wartime coalition rejected calls to bomb the railway lines going to the Holocaust death camps, which could have saved thousands of lives.
After the war Prime Minister Clement Atlee increased British troop deployment in Palestine to 100,000 and imposed a naval blockade to prevent survivors of the Holocaust from getting there.
Some 50,000 so-called illegal Jews were interned in prison camps in Cyprus and 1,500 in Mauritius. Others were forcibly returned to wretched barbed-wire-surrounded displaced persons camps in Germany, Austria and Italy. Of the more than 60 ships carrying survivors that set sail for Palestine just a handful got through.
War against Israel
London opposed the establishment of Israel. In 1948 the five invading Arab regimes joined al-Husseini to declare war on the fledgling Jewish state. The U.K. rulers provided British army commanders and troops to Transjordan’s Arab Legion, along with weapons, ammunition, military vehicles and intelligence to the invaders while London imposed an arms embargo on Israel.
The new state was only recognized by London in April 1950, nine months after the war and nearly a year after Israel was admitted to the United Nations. The British rulers saw their national interests tied to a bloc with the rulers in Egypt, Iraq and Iran, and later Bahrain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia — to defend their control over the Suez Canal in Egypt and to keep oil flowing from the Middle East to the U.K.
As the imperialist rulers in the U.K. fought a losing effort against Washington’s growing influence in the Middle East, they continued to look to blocs with reactionary Arab regimes.
They imposed arms embargoes on Israel under prime ministers Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher, Anthony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and now Starmer. Today, London’s trade, investment and military relations with Israel are minimal, dwarfed by its ties with other capitalist regimes in the Arab world.
Like all imperialist powers, the ruling class in the U.K. has based its politics on how best to assert its own predatory interests.