Western elites have been unnerved by the outpouring of grassroots support for the Palestinian people over the last seven weeks. As such, the British establishment historian and bestselling author, Simon Sebag Montefiore, was quick off the mark to denigrate these popular pro-Palestinian sentiments. Writing in the American journal “The Atlantic” he generously wrote a 4,500-word essay in an attempt to disabuse humane people of their misplaced sympathies in light of the Zionist genocidal response to the Palestinian Resistance’s military advance on October 7th. The erudite diatribe, titled “The Decolonisation Narrative Is Dangerous and False” argues the reason there is so much support for the Palestinian cause among “Western academics, students, artists and activists” is because they are 'toxically' taught a distorted account of history by intellectuals who have embraced the ideology of “decolonisation” which he defines as “a toxic, historically nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda, and traditional anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages and the 19th century.”

Whether this hotchpotch definition of decolonisation is correct or even intelligible is beyond the scope of this essay but what I shall do is identify and unpack some of the dubious claims, sleight of hand and factual errors in Montefiore’s elegant invectiveness. In essence, Montefiore aims to show that the Zionist occupying entity in Palestine is not a “settler-colonialism” project that was ‘fostered’ into existence by the British Empire.

In this regard, all of Montefiore’s spurious claims are rooted in the fact that he misrepresents, minimises and obfuscates the most consequential historical period in the settler-colonial project in Palestine. Specifically, the period between 1917 and 1948, is sometimes referred to as the ‘Mandate Palestine’ period although the Mandate didn’t officially commence until 1923. 1917 is the year when the British Empire issued the Balfour Declaration. This Declaration committed the British government to “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” and to “use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.” This declaration became part of the official Mandate period which ended in 1948, the year the Zionist colonial settlers announced the establishment of their state in Palestine. It can be accurately considered that the “Mandate Palestine” period refers to the years Imperial Britain occupied Palestine. 

Each of Montefiore’s distorted claims are dealt with in the order they appear in this supposed denunciation of decolonisation. Firstly, he writes that in “the 1930s, Britain turned against Zionism, and from 1937 to 1939 moved toward an Arab state with no Jewish one at all.” This statement is false because Britain didn’t turn away from Zionism in the 1930s. Far from it. Britain crushed the Arab rebellion against settler-colonialism between 1936 and 1939, and in doing so, it military-trained the recently arrived Zionist colonial settlers. According to David Cronin, author of Balfour’s Shadow: A Century of British Support for Zionism, “Many of the Zionist forces who forced around 750,000 Palestinians from their homes during the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine had received British training” in the 1930s. The journalist Linah Alsaafin claims this period saw a “strong collusion between the British and Jewish fighters, mainly from the Haganah paramilitary group, the largest Zionist militia in Palestine at the time, which would later form the central component of the Israeli army.”

Furthermore, the genocidist Winston Churchill, a leading champion of inhumanity and British Zionist settler-colonialism in Palestine, elucidated what was at stake in Palestine during this period in his parliamentary testimony to the Peel Commission on Palestine in 1937:

“I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time…I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia…I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, ‘The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here’. They had not the right, nor had they the power.”

As can be seen in the current war on the Palestinians in Gaza, Churchill’s psychopathic genocidal intentions reverberate to this day. It is therefore quite clear that Montefiore has a very mistaken account of what happened in 1930s Palestine.

More so, the idea as Montefiore implies that European Zionist-colonial migration to Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s is akin to Commonwealth migration, that is migration from Britain’s former colonies in the Caribbean, Africa and Asia, to Britain in the post-World War Two period is risibly flawed, if not, unabashed historical ignorance. For a start, post-war Britain wasn’t being ruled by a foreign power with the greatest Empire the world had ever seen. 

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Secondly, Montefiore plays fast and loose to fiddle the timeframe of when the Zionist colonial project commenced. He claims that “Most Israelis are descended from people who migrated to the Holy Land from 1881 to 1949.” This may well be the case but it circumvents the fact that the British Empire’s Balfour Declaration in 1917 opened the door to mass European Zionist colonial migration. The vast majority of the Zionist colonisation of Palestine took place during the ‘Mandate Palestine’ period between 1923 and 1948. In 1917, there were some 60-80 thousand Jewish people in Palestine, and by 1948 there were well over three hundred thousand. It was the British colonial authorities that allowed the number of European Zionist colonial settlers to exponentially grow. It was these same settlers who then carried out the ethnic cleansing in 1947-48.

It is lost on Montefiore that the essence of the ‘Mandate Palestine’ is the British colonial authority imposing its military power in order to establish “a Jewish national home” against the wishes of the indigenous Palestinian population. As Churchill informs us, colonialism is about the exercise of power on those that are less powerful; it is about usurping the land of others in the interests of another people, hence his references to “the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia.” Just after the Arab rebellion erupted in 1936, British Colonial Secretary William Ormsby-Gore informed the British parliament what lay behind the rebellion and Britain’s uncompromising response:

“…The [indigenous Palestinian] Arabs demand a complete stoppage of all Jewish immigration, a complete stoppage of all sales of land, and the transfer of the Government of Palestine…to what they call a National Government responsible to an elected democratic assembly. Those are their three demands, and quite frankly, those demands cannot possibly be conceded.”

In the following three years, the British authorities rejected Palestinian demands and imposed their military power on Palestine. One of the ways they imposed their power was, as already mentioned, militarily training Zionist-colonial settlers to crush any resistance to Britain’s colonial project in Palestine.

Thirdly, Montefiore claims that the early “Jewish migrants did not aspire to a state, merely to live and farm in the vague “homeland”. In 1918, the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann met with the Hashemite Prince Faisal Bin Hussein to discuss the Jews living under his rule as king of greater Syria.” This is a historical sleight of hand because he doesn’t identify who the early “Jewish migrants” were and I’m sure there were some who didn’t aspire to a “homeland”. But this certainly wasn’t the case with the Zionist movement or the British imperialist government. In a meeting between Lloyd George, then British Prime Minister, Lord Balfour and Weizmann, George and Balfour confided to Weizmann in 1921 that by “Jewish National Home” they actually “meant an eventual Jewish State.”

Fourthly, Montefiore, referring to the war in 1948, claims that “there was indeed intense ethnic violence on both sides when Arab states invaded the territory…” This is misleading. The Zionist and racist ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinians had commenced well before certain Arab states intervened once the Zionist state was officially declared in 1948. According to Rosemarie Esber’s book “Under the Cover of War”, by the time the Zionist state became official, 400,000 Palestinians, that is most of the indigenous Palestinians, had already been ethnically cleansed and 225 villages, towns and cities had been destroyed to prevent the indigenous population from ever returning by Zionist-colonial settlers. And it needs to be emphasised that this was all done while Britain was still ruling the country.

Montefiore concludes that decolonisation “only stands up in a landscape in which much of the real history is suppressed…” Yet a closer inspection of Montefiore’s diatribe allows us to see that it is actually himself who is not so much suppressing history but circumvents important moments of history in order to validate his extremely flawed thesis. He circumvents the fact that the British colonial authorities imposed their colonial agenda and will on the territorial space that is Palestine between 1917 and 1948.

To be fair to Montefiore, it is not only Britain’s most ardent Zionists such as himself who circumvents, minimises and obfuscates Britain’s foundational role in the creation of the Zionist colonial entity. Britain’s anti-Zionists also play this deceptive game. For Britain’s anti-Zionists, the Palestinian predicament begins in 1948 when the British Empire formally departed and de facto relinquished Palestine to its Zionist colonial-settler proteges after it had military-trained them. Indeed, in the accounts of these anti-Zionists, the Balfour Declaration is pejoratively (i.e calling it “infamous” is the most popular) acknowledged to only be followed by an evasive herculean stride into May 1948, never discussing what happened in the intervening years. By avoiding, if not concealing, Britain’s role, anti-Zionists can be seen to be morally absolving Britain of any responsibility for the Palestinian predicament. This echoes an observation made by Dr. Stephen Howe in his book "Anticolonialism in British Politics," that left-wing Britons in the Victorian and Edwardian eras may celebrate rebellion in other Empires but when it came to rebellions against the British Empire they were mute at best. As such, Britain’s anti-Zionists only register the Palestinian predicament after Britain left Palestine in 1948. 

Overall, there is a lack of honesty in Montefiore’s essay. It is not only that he makes a mockery of the historical record but the rest of the essay is taken up by bog-standard Zionist talking points. The most abject, fraudulent and shameless among them is that the “Israeli goal in Gaza - for practical reasons, among others - is to minimize the number of Palestinian civilians killed.” The Zionist colonial forces leading up to the humanitarian truce in late November have killed, according to the United Nations, over 5,300 children and 1,200 children are unaccounted for. One hundred and fifteen children a day have been killed. Two-thirds of the at least 14,000 killed are women and children. According to John Mearsheimer, co-author of the seminal Israeli Lobby and US Foreign Policy, the Zionists are “purposely killing civilians… They’re trying to beat the Palestinians into submission. There’s no way you kill this many civilians if you’re trying to precisely take out HAMAS fighters. And by the way, the IDF spokesman has explicitly said that we are not pursuing precision bombing and that what we’re doing is trying to maximise the amount of destruction and damage that we can inflict on the Palestinians.” Mearsheimer admonishes the Zionist leaders for “going on a rampage and killing huge numbers of civilians” as “obviously morally wrong.” In this light, Montefiore’s claim about Zionists minimising the killing of civilians is pure deception, especially as Zionists have killed a disproportionate amount of civilians in previous wars against Palestinians.

The British Empire, more than any other nation or empire, certainly did “foster” the settler-colonialism and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1947-48. Montefiore’s critique of “decolonisation” is partially an exercise in proven historical evasion, coated in Zionist propaganda talking points, garnished with supposedly learned historical references and imperially palanquined in a journal edited by a former Zionist prison guard. The stench of a genteel historical fraud is hard to avoid. In conclusion, to argue that Zionism in Palestine is a settler-colonialism is not a “robotic denunciation” but perfectly encapsulates the actual historical record.