From Empire to Accountability: The Complicated Legacy of British Rule in Israel and Palestine 

From Empire to Accountability: The Complicated Legacy of British Rule in Israel and Palestine 

When UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy stood at the United Nations in July 2025 to announce Britain’s recognition of a Palestinian state, he spoke of feeling “the hand of history on his shoulders.” This was more than political rhetoric; it was a profound acknowledgment of a century of tangled, often contradictory, and deeply consequential British policy in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. To understand the modern Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to trace the fingerprints of the British Empire, whose decisions between 1914 and 1948 laid a foundation of fractured promises that continues to shape the region’s destiny. 

The Great War and the Web of Contradictory Promises 

The story begins not in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, but in the corridors of power in London, Paris, and Istanbul during the First World War. As the Ottoman Empire allied with Germany, Britain’s strategic imperative was to dismantle its enemy and secure its imperial route to India. This ambition spawned a series of secret agreements and correspondences that would become legendary for their incompatibility. 

First, the 1915-1916 McMahon-Hussein Correspondence. In exchange for launching an Arab revolt against the Ottomans, Sharif Hussein of Mecca believed he had received a British commitment, through Sir Henry McMahon, to support an independent Arab kingdom encompassing most of the Middle East, including Palestine. This promise galvanized the Arab Revolt, immortalized by T.E. Lawrence, and created an expectation of post-war sovereignty. 

Simultaneously, however, Britain and France were secretly negotiating the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916. This pact cynically divided the envisioned Ottoman carcass into spheres of influence, not independent states. While it proposed an international administration for Palestine, its essence was old-world imperialism, contradicting the assurances made to the Arabs. 

Then, in November 1917, came the third and most fateful commitment: the Balfour Declaration. In a brief letter to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour declared His Majesty’s government’s support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” The critical, often overlooked, caveat was that it should be “without prejudice to the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities.” 

In the span of two years, Britain had, in effect, promised the same land to three separate parties: international administration (Sykes-Picot), sovereign Arab rule (McMahon-Hussein), and a Jewish national home (Balfour). This trifecta of contradictory pledges was not just diplomatic incompetence; it was a calculated risk based on the assumption that the details could be worked out later under the umbrella of British control. It was a gamble that would cost millions their homes and peace. 

The Mandate Years: Fueling the Fire of Nationalism 

In 1922, the League of Nations formalized British control over Palestine through a mandate. Crucially, the Balfour Declaration was embedded directly into the mandate’s terms, giving Britain a dual responsibility: to facilitate Jewish immigration and to develop self-governing institutions, all while protecting the rights of all inhabitants. 

This mandate was fundamentally unworkable. From the outset, Britain was tasked with nurturing two emerging national identities that were on a direct collision course. 

• For Zionist Jews, the Balfour Declaration was a historic charter, a long-awaited international endorsement of their right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. They saw the mandate as a vehicle for building the infrastructure, economy, and demographic basis of a future state through legal immigration, especially as the shadow of anti-Semitism in Europe grew darker. 

• For the Arab majority in Palestine, the declaration and the mandate were a profound betrayal. They had fought for independence from the Ottomans only to be placed under another colonial master who was actively supporting the colonization of their land by a foreign population. Their “civil and religious rights” seemed a poor substitute for the political sovereignty they had been led to expect. 

The British response to the inevitable tensions was a series of half-measures, commissions, and reversed policies that satisfied no one and inflamed everyone. The 1936-1939 Arab Revolt, a mass uprising against British rule and Zionist settlement, was met with brutal military suppression. Yet, it also led to the 1937 Peel Commission, which for the first time officially recommended partitioning the land into separate Jewish and Arab states. The proposal, which allotted the much larger and more fertile portion to the Jewish state despite its smaller population, was rejected by Arab leaders but established partition as a potential solution. 

As Nazi persecution escalated, Britain, fearing the loss of Arab allies on the eve of World War II, performed a stunning about-face. The 1939 White Paper severely restricted Jewish immigration just as European Jews were most desperate for refuge—a policy many historians view as a death sentence for thousands who were denied asylum. It also promised an independent Palestinian state (with an Arab majority) within ten years, explicitly stating that the Balfour Declaration was never intended to create a Jewish state against the will of the Arab population. In the span of two decades, Britain had gone from promising a Jewish national home to blocking the doors to it. 

The Scuttle: Abandoning the Mandate and the Seeds of Nakba 

By 1947, Britain was a weakened, bankrupt post-war nation. Facing escalating violence from Jewish militant groups like the Irgun and Lehi, and from the Arab community, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin made the fateful decision to “hand the problem” to the United Nations. After 30 years of managing, and often exacerbating, the conflict, Britain simply walked away. 

The UN’s Partition Plan (Resolution 181) of November 1947 proposed a map more favorable to the Arab population than the Peel plan, but it still granted the Jewish state, which owned less than 7% of the land, 55% of the territory. It was accepted by Jewish leaders and rejected by Arab leaders. Britain, tasked with overseeing the implementation, refused to cooperate, announcing it would terminate its mandate and withdraw all forces by May 15, 1948, leaving a power vacuum in its wake. 

This abdication of responsibility was catastrophic. As British troops stood aside, civil war erupted between Jewish and Arab forces. The period between the UN vote and Israel’s declaration of independence in May 1948 was characterized by fierce fighting and the beginning of the mass displacement of Palestinian Arabs. When Israel declared statehood and neighboring Arab armies invaded, the conflict exploded into full-scale war. By the time armistice agreements were signed in 1949, approximately 750,000 Palestinians had been displaced or fled from their homes—an event known as the Nakba, or “catastrophe.” The state of Israel was established; a Palestinian state was not. 

The Enduring Legacy: A Debt of History 

Britain’s role did not end in 1948. It simply changed. The mantle of international influence was swiftly seized by the United States, which, after initial even-handedness, became Israel’s primary ally and patron during the Cold War. 

Yet, Britain’s historical responsibility remains a powerful and unresolved specter. Its legacy is one of foundational contradictions: 

• The Blueprint for Conflict: Britain’s simultaneous nurturing of two national movements within one administered territory created a zero-sum struggle for land and sovereignty that continues to this day. 

• The Architecture of Dispossession: Policies like the Land Transfer Ordinance of 1920 restricted Arab land sales to Jews but were weakly enforced, allowing Jewish agencies to acquire large tracts of land, often from absentee landlords, displacing tenant farmers and creating a bitter class of landless Arabs. 

• The Moral Failure: The decision to block Jewish refugees from escaping the Holocaust remains a dark stain. Conversely, its failure to prepare the Arab population for partition or protect their rights during its withdrawal was a dereliction of its duty as the mandatory power. 

When David Lammy speaks of the “hand of history,” he is invoking this complex burden. Britain’s recognition of a Palestinian state is, in many ways, a belated attempt to address the second half of the Balfour Declaration—the part about the rights of the “non-Jewish communities”—that was so catastrophically overlooked for a century. It is an acknowledgment that the imperial maps drawn in London offices, the cynical double-dealing, and the abrupt abandonment left a wound that has never healed. 

The path to peace in Israel and Palestine is fraught with modern complexities. Yet, it is impossible to navigate that path without understanding the rocky, contested, and deeply consequential road built by the British Empire—a road that led two peoples to a crossroads of endless conflict, and one which Britain is only now, a hundred years later, beginning to seriously help redraw.