The HAMAS Case

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REPORT ON BRITAIN’S RELATIONSHIP WTIH ZIONISM

BY

PROFESSOR AVI SHLAIM FBA

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A. INSTRUCTIONS

1. I have been instructed by Riverway Law to provide a report on matters within my expertise in support of the application to the British Home Secretary to deproscribe Harakat al-Muqawwamah al-Islamiyyah (‘Hamas’).

2. Arthur Balfour was British Foreign Secretary from 1916 to 1919, whilst Boris Johnson occupied the role from 2016 to 2018. Between them they bookended a century in which it is instructive to examine Zionism’s role in shaping British foreign policy towards Palestine and how the concept of ‘antisemitism’ has been weaponised to suppress criticism of Zionism.

B. QUALIFICATIONS

3. I was born in Baghdad on 31 October 1945 to a Jewish family. I have dual nationality, British and Israeli. I went to school in Israel and I served in the Israel Defence Forces (“IDF”) between 1964 and 1966.

4. I received three degrees from British universities: a BA in History from Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1969; an MSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics In 1970; and a PhD at the University of Reading where I remained a lecturer and reader in Politics from 1970 through to 1987.

5. From 1987 through to 1996, I was a Reader and then Professor of International Relations and a Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford.I served two three-year terms as Director of Graduate Studies in International Relations.

6. I am an Emeritus Fellow of St Antony's College and an Emeritus Professor in International Relations at the University of Oxford. I was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2006 and was awarded a British Academy Medal for Lifetime Achievement in 2017.

7. I am a historian, my academic expertise is mainly on the international relations of the Middle East, and my principal research interest is the Arab-Israeli conflict.

8. My books on the Middle East include

• Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (1988);

• War and Peace in the Middle East: A Concise History (1995);

• Lion of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace (2007); and

• Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations (2009);

• The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (first edition 2000; updated second edition 2014).

9. My most recently published book is Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew (2023). This book was awarded the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize 2024.

10. I have co-edited the following books: The Cold War and the Middle East (1997); The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (2001, second edition 2007); and The 1967 Arab-Israeli War: Origins and Consequences (2012).

11. I have published a large number of scholarly articles and countless newspaper articles. I am also a frequent contributor to newspapers and a commentator on radio and television on Middle Eastern affairs.

12. In order to provide more comprehensive details, I attach both my short form curriculum vitae and my long form curriculum vitae.

C. THE BALFOUR DECLARATION

13. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the most bitter, protracted, and evidently intractable international conflicts of modern times. This conflict was made in Britain. During World War I, Britain sponsored the cause of Arab independence but then switched its support to the Zionist claim for a Jewish state in Palestine. This set the scene for the inevitable conflict between Arabs and Zionists over Palestine in the aftermath of the war. There were two peoples and one land, hence the conflict. Far from being an honest broker or a mediator, Britain prepared the ground for the systematic Zionist takeover of Palestine, a process that continues today with the illegal Zionist colonial project on the West Bank.

14. Arthur James Balfour, Lord Balfour, is closely associated with the British policy of support for the Zionist movement during World War I. In a 1917 document which bears his name, the British government pledged to support the establishment of a ‘national home for the Jewish people in Palestine’. The document is controversial because Balfour effectively gave away the homeland of the Palestinian people to the Zionists when it was not his to give.

15. On 2 November 1917, Arthur Balfour, Britain’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, addressed a letter to Lord Rothschild, one of the leaders of the British Jews, as follows:

I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, the following declaration of sympathy which has been submitted to and approved by the Cabinet: His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

16. The statement was exceedingly brief, consisting of a mere sixty-seven words, but its consequences were far-reaching, and its impact on the subsequent history of the Middle East was profound. It completely transformed the position of the fledgling Zionist movement vis-à-vis the Arabs of Palestine, and it provided a protective umbrella that enabled the Zionists to proceed steadily towards their ultimate goal of establishing an independent Jewish state in Palestine. Rarely in the annals of the British Empire has such a short document produced such far-reaching consequences.

17. The declaration started the process of the dispossession, dispersal, and exile of the Palestinians which culminated in the outbreak of a civil war in Palestine in 1947, the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, and the Palestinian nakba, the catastrophe.

D. BALFOUR & SYKES-PICOT

18. The Zionist movement was Britain's junior ally in the dispossession of the Palestinians. Zionism was a settler colonial movement and the state of Israel, its principal political progeny, is a colonial settler-state. It is also a state guilty of the international crime of Apartheid, as defined in the 1998 Rome Statute, as four major human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have concluded in reports they published in recent years.

19. Noam Chomsky, the radical American-Jewish academic, once observed that ‘Settler colonialism is the most extreme and sadistic form of imperialism’. Over the last 106 years, the Palestinians have had the great misfortune of being at receiving end first of British imperialism and then of Zionist settler colonialism.

20. The key to understanding British policy during this period is British imperial interests in a specific geopolitical context. In World War I Britain faced Germany and two other empires, and it was in desperate need of allies. In its quest for allies, it made three incompatible promises that greatly complicated the future of Palestine.

21. In 1915, Britain promised Hussein the Sharif of Mecca, a prominent Arab leader and a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, an independent kingdom after the war if he for his part would mount an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire. Sharif Hussein kept his side of the bargain by mounting the Arab Revolt in which his son Faisal fought alongside T. E. Lawrence, better known as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, against the Ottomans.

22. In 1916, Britain signed a secret agreement with France, the Sykes–Picot Agreement, to divide the Middle East territories of the Ottoman Empire into spheres of influence. As the two colonial powers could not agree about Palestine, they placed it under a separate international administration. This secret agreement flatly contradicted the promise of an independent kingdom to be headed by Hussein the Sharif Hussein of Mecca.

23. An even greater betrayal followed. In 1917, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration in support of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine with the well-known caveat about Palestinian rights. The difference between the Sykes–Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration is that the first was never implemented. When David Lloyd George came to power, in December 1916, he reneged on the Sykes–Picot Agreement and proceeded to issue the Balfour Declaration a year later.

24. The Sykes–Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration constitute the main terms of reference of Arab nationalists ever since the end of World War I. The Sykes–Picot Agreement is a symbol of Western attempts to carve up the Middle East into spheres of influence, of Western intervention in the area to promote their own imperial interests, whereas the Balfour Declaration is a symbol of the Western attempt to impose a foreign entity, a foreign people, in the heartland of the Arab world. Ever since then Arab nationalists have regarded the state of Israel not as an organic part of the region but as an artificial entity, an outpost of Western imperialism in the Middle East.

25. The Jewish writer, Arthur Koestler, famously described the Balfour Declaration as a statement in which one nation promised to a second nation the country of a third. Britain did not have any moral right to hand over Palestine to the Zionists. Nor did it have any legal right. There is in fact no basis in international law for the newly concocted concept of a ‘national home’. For the Zionists and for their chief supporters in Britain – Arthur Balfour, David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill – from the beginning the national home was just a euphemism for a state.

26. In 1917, the area that was later called Palestine, was still under Ottoman rule. The Arabs constituted 90% of the population of the country, the Jews constituted 10% and the Jews owned only 2% of the land. These are the key facts, incontrovertible facts. They make the Balfour Declaration a classic colonial document which completely disregarded the rights and aspirations of the majority of the population of the country. It flagrantly violated their natural right to national self-determination. There is an Arabic saying that something that starts crooked remains crooked and the Balfour Declaration is a good example.

E. BALFOUR AND ANTISEMITISM

27. Arthur Balfour was an aloof and arrogant British aristocrat. He was also a white supremacist. He once argued that Europeans should enjoy greater privileges than Blacks in South Africa by claiming that ‘men are not born equal’. His eponymous declaration granted greater rights to incoming European settlers than to indigenous Palestinians. He did not recognize the Palestinians as a people with legitimate national aspirations, but viewed them as a backward, Oriental, inert mass. In line with this Orientalist mindset, Balfour insisted that Palestinians should not be consulted about the Zionist colonisation project in their homeland.

28. Balfour claimed that support for Zionism was a noble Christian project to enable an ancient people to return to its ancestral homeland. But his real motives probably had more to do with imperialism and racism than with Biblical romanticism. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that he was an antisemite. Cosima Wagner, the wife of the composer, was even more antisemitic as her husband. Arthur Balfour met her in Bayreuth, they discussed the Jews, and later, by his own account, he shared ‘many of her antisemitic prejudices’. In 1905, as Conservative prime minister, Balfour introduced the Aliens Bill, the first anti-immigration piece of legislation in British history. Its purpose was to prevent Jews, who were facing persecution in East Europe, from coming to this country.

29. It may seem contradictory to be both antisemitic and pro-Zionist at the same time, but the contradiction is more apparent than real. It is perfectly logical for someone who does not like Jews in his or her own country, to want Jews from all over the world to be gathered in one Jewish state. Theodor Herzl, the visionary of the Jewish state, had predicted that ‘The anti-Semites will become our most loyal friends’. Contemporary examples of individuals who combine both tendencies are Victor Orban of Hungary and American president Donald Trump.

30. The main driving force behind the Balfour Declaration, however, was not Foreign Secretary Balfour, but Prime Minister David Lloyd George. In domestic politics, Lloyd George was a Welsh radical, but in foreign policy, he was an old-fashioned British imperialist and a land grabber. Lloyd George wanted Palestine to be in the British sphere of influence for two reasons: to exclude the French and to secure British control over the access to the Suez Canal. Giving Palestine to the Zionists was an indirect and devious way of reneging on the Sykes–Picot Agreement.

31. Moreover, Lloyd George knew that the majority of British Jews were opposed to Zionism. So why did he privilege the Zionists? Tom Segev in his book One Palestine Complete suggests the answer. The answer is that Lloyd George had a highly inflated idea of the international influence of the Jews. His support for Zionism was based on a misperception. In aligning Britain with Zionism, he acted in the mistaken, and I may add, the antisemitic view that the Jews had covert power. The Jews, he believed, had subterranean power; they made the wheels of history turn. By issuing a declaration in support of the Zionist project in Palestine, Lloyd George hoped to harness the influence of international Jewry to the British war effort.

32. The reality was that the Jews were virtually helpless with little to offer except the myth of secret Jewish power, and the Zionists were a minority within an impotent minority. Furthermore, the majority of mainstream English Jews were opposed to the nationalist idea inherent in Zionism. Sir Edwin Montague, the Secretary of State for India, was the only Jew in Lloyd George's cabinet. On the 23 August 1917, Montague submitted a memorandum to the cabinet under the heading ‘The Anti-Semitism of the Present Government’. The memorandum was four pages long but, in a nutshell, it argued that Judaism is a religion, not a nation, and that to establish a Jewish state in Palestine would undermine the struggle for equal rights for Jews in Britain, in Europe, and elsewhere. If there were a Jewish state in Palestine, he argued, and Jews were being difficult, people would say to them, why don't you go to your own country? Montague concluded that Zionism was ‘a mischievous political doctrine, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the UK’. This memorandum was ignored but is highly significant because it sums up the Jewish case against Zionism.

33. Lord Curzon, a member of the War Cabinet, was more troubled by the implications of the proposed move for the rights of the Arabs of Palestine than for the rights of the Jews in Britain. ‘How was it proposed’, he asked his cabinet colleagues, ‘to get rid of the existing majority of Mussulman inhabitants and to introduce the Jews in their place?’ In a paper to the cabinet he returned to the theme:

What is to become of the people of the country? . . . [The Arabs] and their forefathers have occupied the country for the best part of 1,500 years, and they own the soil. . . . They profess the Mohammedan faith. They will not be content either to be expropriated for Jewish immigrants or to act merely as hewers of wood and drawers of water for the latter.

34. Despite the strong objections of Sir Edwin Montague and Lord Curzon, the cabinet decided to adopt the Balfour Declaration. Dr Chaim Weizmann, the leader of a small band of fanatic Zionists, mostly foreigners like himself, was sitting in the antechamber as the cabinet was deliberating. When they had finished deliberating, the Secretary of the Cabinet, Sir Mark Sykes, the same Sykes of the Sykes–Picot Agreement, came out and announced the good news: ‘Dr Weizmann, it's a boy!’ This is an early and a very striking illustration of how close the Zionists were to the centres of power in Britain.

F. THE BRITISH MANDATE IN PALESTINE

35. Balfour realized all along that his declaration contradicted the principle of national self-determination for the majority of the inhabitants, but his Christian conscience was not unduly troubled. In 1919, he wrote to Lord Curzon: ‘Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land’.

36. Balfour also admitted, in 1919, that ‘So far as Palestine is concerned, the Powers have made no statement of fact which is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which, at least in the letter, they have not always intended to violate’. There can hardly be a more conclusive proof of the duplicity and cynicism of the British ruling class of this period.

37. Another major landmark in Britain's betrayal of the Palestinians involved the League of Nations which was established in the aftermath of WWI. The objective of its mandates system over the former territories of Ottoman Empire was to provide ‘administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone’. A document of 24 July 1922, appointed Britain officially as a Mandatory in control of Palestine with the aim of establishing the Jewish national home in accordance with the 1917 Balfour Declaration. This is highly significant because what had been a merely British promise to a group of Zionists became an international instrument and a binding legal obligation.

38. It must be emphasised that the Balfour declaration was incorporated in the Mandate not against the will but, on the contrary, at the insistence of the British government. These terms of the Mandate were in breach of Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations because they were taken against the express wishes of the local population. The Mandate was described as ‘a sacred trust of civilisation’. It included an explicit obligation to protect the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish population in Palestine. Britain utterly failed to protect these rights. It betrayed the ‘sacred trust of civilisation’ that the world body had assigned to it.

39. The British Mandate was unique. All the other mandates ̶ the French mandates for Syria and Lebanon and the British mandate for Iraq ̶ called on the Mandatory power to prepare the country for self-government. The Palestine mandate was different precisely because it incorporated the Balfour Declaration. In effect, the Mandatory power was asked to prepare the country not for self-government by the native population, but to prepare it for the benefit of Jews who came from Europe and from anywhere else in the world.

40. As the mandatory power, Britain favoured the Zionists from the very beginning. The first High Commissioner for Palestine was Sir Herbert Samuel, who was both a Jew and an ardent Zionist. Samuel was sent to Palestine not because of—or even despite—his Jewishness, but because he was a Zionist. During his tenure, Britain introduced a series of ordinances that allowed for unrestricted Jewish immigration and Jewish purchase of land which Palestinians had farmed for generations. Moreover, as Sahar Huneidi shows in her book, A Broken Trust: Herbert Samuel, Zionism and the Palestinians, 1920–1925, most of the measures Samuel took during his tenure in Palestine—in the political, economic, and administrative spheres—were designed to prepare the ground not just for a Jewish national home but for a fully-fledged Jewish state. The Palestinians demanded restrictions on Jewish immigration and land acquisitions. They also demanded a democratically elected national assembly and a democratic government. All their demands fell on deaf ears.

41. Sir Martin Gilbert, a passionate British Zionist and Churchill’s biographer, wrote the following: ‘The cornerstone of mandatory policy was to withhold representative institutions so long as there was in Palestine an Arab majority’. In other words, the Mandatory power’s policy was to withhold elections until the Jews became the majority.

42. British rule in Palestine was not only ant-democratic; it was also informed by a distinct undercurrent of racism. Winston Churchill, who served as Colonial Secretary after the war, was one of most fervent champions of the Zionist cause. Here is what he said in evidence to the Royal Commission of Inquiry, headed by Lord Peel, appointed in 1936 to investigate the causes of unrest in Mandatory Palestine:

I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. 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 admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race… has come in and taken their place.

43. Churchill’s language is utterly shocking but not all that surprising. Racism usually goes hand in hand with imperialism.

G. THE GREAT ARAB REVOLT

44. The Arab Revolt which broke out in 1936 and which the Peel Commission was sent to investigate, was the result of the comprehensively one-sided policy that Britain had pursued since the beginning of the Mandate. On the ground, in Palestine, the British would not tolerate any resistance. Major General Bernard Montgomery was sent to Palestine to suppress the revolt. When he arrived, his advisers tried to brief him about the background to the rebellion. Montgomery cut them short and gave them a straightforward order: kill all the troublemakers. As a result, the Arab Revolt was suppressed by the British army with the utmost brutality, which included torture, detention without trial, draconian emergency regulations, summary executions, collective punishment, house demolitions, the burning of villages, and aerial bombardment.

45. The Arab Revolt lasted three years, from 1936 to 1939. Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi estimates that the Arab casualties during this period were 5,032 dead and 19,792 wounded. By another estimate, ten percent of the adult male Arab population between 20 and 60 was killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled. Using brute force, and knowingly breaching the laws of war, the Mandatory power decimated Palestinian society and smashed the nationalist rebellion into the ground.

46. During the revolt the British gave crucial support, training, and arms to the pre-state Zionist militia, the Haganah, and forced the flight into exile of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the leader of the Palestinian national movement. The revolt not only failed to achieve any of its immediate aims; it had far-reaching consequences for the subsequent course of Palestinian-Zionist conflict over Palestine.

47. Rashid Khalidi, the Palestinian-American historian at Columbia University, has argued that Palestine was lost not in the late 1940s, as is commonly believed, but in the late 1930s. He advances this argument in the chapter on the Palestinians, in the book that Eugene Rogan and present author co-edited under the title The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948. Khalidi’s argument is that because of the decisive manner in which Britain crushed the Palestinian resistance in the late 1930s, by the time the struggle for Palestine entered the critical phase in 1947, the Jews were prepared for the fight while the Palestinians lacked the means to defend themselves.

48. In the aftermath of the Second World War, right-wing Zionist militias, the Irgun and the Fighters of the Freedom of Israel, better known as Stern Gang, mounted a terrorist campaign to drive Britain out of Palestine. As a result, the cost of colonial policing kept escalating. This sapped the will of the Labour government headed by Clement Attlee to continue to discharge its duties as the Mandatory power. In February 1947, the government tossed this hot political potato into the lap of the United Nations, the successor of the League of Nations. It informed the UN of its unilateral decision to terminate the Mandate and to withdraw all its forces from Palestine by 14 May 1948.

H. THE UN PARTITION OF PALESTINE & THE NAKBA

49. On 29 November 1947, the General Assembly of the United Nations voted for the partition of Mandatory Palestine into two states, one Arab and one Jewish. The partition resolution was profoundly unfair to the Arabs: the Jews were less than half of the Arab populations and they owned only seven percent of the land, yet the plan accorded them 55 percent of the territory. The local Arabs, the Arab states, and the Arab League rejected partition as immoral, illegal, and impractical. The Jewish Agency accepted the partition plan although it had reservations about the borders of the proposed Jewish state.

50. It was a tragic situation, at least partly of Britain's own making. On the one hand there was a weak and embattled Palestinian community which had lost so much ground in the previous three decades and whose leaders had been driven into exile. On the other hand, there were the Jews of Europe, in the aftermath of the Nazi Holocaust which claimed the lives of six million victims, in desperate need of a safe haven, a piece of land they could call their own. Britain abstained in the UN vote on the partition plan. It also refused to implement the partition plan on the grounds that it was not acceptable to both sides. Instead of helping the UN to resolve the problem, Britain decided to cut its losses, regardless of the consequences, including the inevitability of a civil war. The manner in which the Mandate ended, without an orderly transfer of power to the inhabitants of the country, was the worst blot on Britain's record as the custodian of the ‘sacred trust of civilisation’.

51. The UN partition resolution was a charter of international legitimacy for a Jewish state, but it was also the signal for the outbreak of a savage civil war in Palestine. This phase of the war, between the two local communities, ended in a Palestinian defeat, the decimation of Palestinian society, the first wave of Palestinian refugees, and the proclamation of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948. The following day, the regular armies of seven Arab states invaded with the declared aim of liberating Palestine. The inter-state phase of the war ended in January 1949 with an Israeli victory and a resounding Arab defeat.

52. There is a debate between traditional Zionist historians and revisionist Israeli historians, or ‘new historians’ of whom I am one, about Britain's role as the Mandate approached its inglorious end. The standard Zionist rendition of events claims that when Britain withdrew from Palestine, it was not reconciled to the idea of a Jewish state and that it armed and encouraged its Arab allies to invade Palestine upon expiry of the Mandate and to strangle the infant Jewish state at birth.

53. Ilan Pappé, my fellow ‘new historian’ and I, contest this version of events. We accept that there is a case to be made against British policy towards the end of the Mandate, but the case is not that it tried to suppress a Jewish state, but that it set out and succeeded in aborting the birth of a Palestinian state. Ilan Pappé develops this thesis in his book on Britain and Palestine Britain and the Arab Israeli Conflict, 1948–1951. I advance a similar thesis in my book Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement and the Partition of Palestine. Hostility towards the Palestinians was a constant factor in British policy in 1947-1949. In British eyes a Palestinian state was synonymous with a Mufti state. The Mufti was seen as a renegade who had thrown his lot with Nazi Germany. This was the reason for Britain's refusal to enforce partition and for its decision to leave it to the two sides to fight it out.

54. The Foreign Secretary in the Labour government was Ernest Bevin. His critics claimed that his policy was driven by blind prejudice against Jews. The real key to his policy during this period, however, was Greater Transjordan, to support King Abdullah of Transjordan in his bid to grab the West Bank, the heartland of what was to be the Palestinian state. Abdullah was Britain's client. The commander of his army, the Arab Legion, was an Englishman, Sir John Bagot Glubb, or Glubb Pasha. In the Foreign Office, Abdullah was known as ‘Mr Bevin’s little king’. Abdullah was, in the phrase of one British official, ‘a born land grabber’. So were the Zionists.

55. The first Arab-Israeli war degenerated into a general land grab. The winners were Israel, which in the course of the war increased its territory from the 55% of Palestine assigned by the UN cartographers to 78% of the country, and King Abdullah, who captured and later annexed the West Bank to his kingdom. The losers were the Palestinians. Approximately, 750,000 Palestinians lost their homes and became refugees, and the name Palestine was wiped off the map. This is the Nakba, the catastrophe, but the Nakba is not a one-off event. It’s a process that continues to this day with the expansion of Israeli settlements on the West Bank and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

I. CONTINUED BRITISH RESPONSIBILITY FOR PALESTINIAN DISPOSSESSION

56. This brief account suggests that Britain's record as the Mandatory power is shameful and indefensible. In Palestine, Britain empowered and enabled a small minority to start the systematic take-over of the country. Britain, in fact, over-fulfilled its promise to the Zionists. It promised to view with favour the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, but it ended up crushing their opponents and helping them to achieve a fully-fledged state. On the other hand, and by the same token, Britain failed to honour its most minimal responsibilities towards the Palestinian majority. This is a sad story of double standards, broken promises, and betrayals stretching all the way from 1917 to the present day.

57. Given this historical record, one might expect British leaders to hang their head in shame and disavow the toxic legacy of their colonial past. One would also expect Britain to recognise the Palestinian right to independence and statehood. But several prime ministers of both main political parties - Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Keir Starmer, and David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak - have all displayed staunch support for Israel and utter indifference to Palestinian rights.

58. The Conservative Party and its leaders are the standard-bearers of this shameful legacy of unqualified British support for Israel and indifference to Palestinian rights. Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) is by far the most powerful pro-Israel lobbying group in Britain, and its membership includes around 80 percent of Tory members of parliament. Since the May 2015 general election, CFI has sent almost 30 delegations with more than 180 Conservatives to visit Israel. The last four leaders of the Conservative Party have been uncritical supporters of the State of Israel. Former Prime Minister David Cameron described himself as a “passionate friend” of Israel and insisted that nothing could break that friendship.

59. Theresa May was probably the most pro-Israeli leader in Europe during her premiership. In an address to CFI in 2016, she described Israel as a “remarkable country … a thriving democracy, a beacon of tolerance, an engine of enterprise, and an example to the rest of the world”. She spoke of Israel as “a country where people of all religions and sexualities are free and equal in the eyes of the law”.  Rubbing salt in Palestinian wounds, she called the Balfour Declaration ‘one of the most important letters in history’, and she promised to celebrate it on the anniversary the following year.

60. In 2017, a petition calling on Mrs May’s government to apologise for the Balfour Declaration was signed by 13,637 individuals, including the present writer. The government responded as follows:

The Balfour Declaration is an historic statement for which HMG does not intend to apologise. We are proud of our role in creating the state of Israel.

The declaration was written in a world of competing imperial powers, in the midst of the First World War and in the twilight of the Ottoman Empire. In that context, establishing a homeland for the Jewish people in the land to which they had such strong historical and religious ties was the right and moral thing to do, particularly against the background of centuries of persecution.

Much has happened since 1917. We recognise that the declaration should have called for the protection of political rights of the non-Jewish communities in Palestine, particularly their right to self-determination. However, the important thing now is to look forward and establish security and justice for both Israelis and Palestinians through a lasting peace.

61. May reserved her sharpest criticism for the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, which works to end international support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and to pressure Israel to comply with international law. BDS is a non-violent, global grassroots campaign whose principal demands - the right of return of 1948 refugees, an end to occupation, and equal rights for Israel’s Palestinian citizens - are all grounded in international law. This movement, May stated, “is wrong, it is unacceptable, and this party and this government will have no truck with those who subscribe to it”.

62. May reminded her audience that Britain was entering a “special time” - the centenary of the Balfour Declaration - and went on to deliver a wholly one-sided verdict on this colonial document: “It is one of the most important letters in history. It demonstrates Britain’s vital role in creating a homeland for the Jewish people. And it is an anniversary we will be marking with pride.” There was no mention of Britain’s failure to uphold even the minimal rights of Palestinians. 

63. Ardent Zionist though she was, Theresa May could not tolerate her Secretary of State, Priti Patel's clandestine visit to Israel and secret meetings with key officials alongside the CFI. Patel was fired by May in 2017 but would return as Home Secretary in 2019, going on to proscribe Hamas for the first time in British history. Ms Patel is currently shadow Home Secretary.

64. Boris Johnson, who succeeded Mrs May as prime minister, is famous for his mendacity and naked political opportunism. In his 2014 book, The Churchill Factor, he wrote that the Balfour Declaration was ‘bizarre’, ‘a tragically incoherent document’ and ‘an exquisite piece of FO fudgerama’. In 2015, however, on a trip to Israel as mayor of London, Mr Johnson hailed the Balfour Declaration as ‘a great thing’.

65. In 1917 Arthur Balfour undertook to uphold the civil and religious rights of the native population of Palestine. A century later, the House of Commons added national rights as well, voting in October 2014 - by 274 votes to 12 - to recognise a Palestinian state. Cameron chose to ignore the non-binding vote; at least he was consistent in his passionate attachment to Israel, which is more than can be said about his successor. As with Johnson’s approach to any subject, in his attitude towards Palestinian rights, expediency prevailed.

J. ‘ANTISEMITISM’ & THE IHRA DEFINITION

66. An unbroken thread of moral myopia, hypocrisy, double standards and skulduggery connects British policy on Palestine from Balfour to Boris. The Conservative government’s adoption in December 2016 of the IHRA’s non-legally-binding working definition of antisemitism falls squarely within this tradition of partisanship on behalf of Zionism and Israel, and disdain for Palestinians. The definition states: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

67. The definition does not mention Israel by name, but no fewer than seven out of the 11 “illustrative examples” that follow concern Israel. They include “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour”; “applying double standards by requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation”; “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis”; and “holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel”.

68. The 11 examples make a series of unwarranted assumptions about Israel and world Jewry. They assume that all Israelis adhere to the notion of Israel as a Jewish state; that Israel is a “democratic nation”; that Israel is not a racist endeavour; and that all Jews condemn the comparison between Israeli policy and that of the Nazis.

69. In fact, Israel is a highly heterogeneous and deeply divided society with a wide range of opinions on all these issues - and a political culture marked by fierce disputes and no-holds-barred debates. Many left-wing Israelis regard Israel as a racist endeavour. B’Tselem, the highly respected Israeli human rights organisation, issued a closely argued position paper in January 2021 titled “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid.” It declared: “The entire area Israel controls between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is governed by a single regime working to advance and perpetuate the supremacy of one group over another. By geographically, demographically and physically engineering space, the regime enables Jews to live in a contiguous area with full rights, including self-determination, while Palestinians live in separate units and enjoy fewer rights.”

70. As countless commentators, lawyers and scholars of antisemitism have pointed out, the IHRA working definition is poorly drafted, internally incoherent, hopelessly vague, vulnerable to political abuse, and altogether not fit for purpose. It does not fulfil the most elementary requirement of a definition, which is to define. The definition states that “antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews” but fails to spell out what this perception is. In my 54 years as a university teacher, I have not come across a more vacuous or useless definition. Yet, although it is vacuous, it is not innocuous. Kenneth Stern, the lead author of the definition, has rejected its adoption as a campus hate speech code, arguing that it “will harm not only pro-Palestinian advocates, but also Jewish students and faculty, and the academy itself”.

71. What the non-legally-binding IHRA document does do, with the help of the examples, is shift the focus from real antisemitism to the perfectly respectable and growing phenomenon of anti-Zionism. Anti-Zionism is sometimes described by pro-Israel stakeholders as “the new antisemitism”. It is essential, however, to distinguish clearly between the two.

72. Antisemitism may be simply defined as “hostility towards Jews because they are Jews”. Zionism, meanwhile, is a nationalist, political ideology that called for the creation of a Jewish state, and now supports the continued existence of Israel as such a state. Anti-Zionism is opposition to the exclusive character of the state of Israel and to Israeli policies, particularly its occupation of the West Bank. Antisemitism relates to Jews anywhere in the world; anti-Zionism relates only to Israel.

73. The IHRA document, taken as a whole, is susceptible to political abuse in that it makes it possible to conflate legitimate anti-Zionism with nefarious antisemitism. Israel’s energetic apologists, who were instrumental in promoting the document, conflate the two deliberately and routinely.

74. To criticise the definition for its vacuity is thus to miss a central point. In this endeavour, the definition’s very vagueness confers a political advantage. It enables Israel’s defenders to weaponise the definition, especially against left-wing opponents, and to portray what in most cases is valid criticism of Israeli behaviour as the vilification and delegitimisation of the State of Israel.

75. The Labour Party discovered to its cost the divisive and damaging consequences of adopting this document. Initially, the party’s code of conduct incorporated five of the IHRA examples verbatim, and an additional two with minor amendments. This did not satisfy Israel’s friends either inside or outside the party. The party was bullied by the Jewish Labour Movement, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Community Security Trust, and the Campaign Against Antisemitism to adopt all the examples verbatim. Not to adopt all the examples exactly as they stood, it was misleadingly argued, was tantamount to a rejection of the definition. Labour’s national executive committee caved in and abandoned its amendments to the remaining two examples. In the Orwellian world of the post-full-adoption Labour Party, many of the members who have been suspended or expelled for the crime of antisemitism were themselves Jewish. Several Jewish Labour Party members have been investigated since 2016, nearly all on the basis of allegations of antisemitism. This made a mockery of the claim of Keir Starmer, who succeeded the allegedly antisemitic Jeremy Corbyn as leader, to be making the Labour Party a safe place for Jews.

76. Under the new regime, the Labour Party is slavishly subservient to the benighted definition. A local Labour Party branch recently tried to submit a motion endorsing a 2023 report by B’Tselem on Israeli apartheid. It said: “This Branch supports the call from B’Tselem for an end to the apartheid regime to ‘ensure human rights, democracy, liberty and equality to all people, Palestinian and Israeli alike, living on the bit of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.’” The motion was ruled out of order at the national level of the party on the grounds that, according to the IHRA’s working definition, this could be seen as designating Israel a “racist endeavour”.

77. In the rush to burnish its pro-Zionist credentials, the Labour Party turned against some of its most progressive Jewish members. Moshe Machover, the veteran Israeli British anti-Zionist, was expelled and then reinstated in 2017 after the Guardian published a letter of protest undersigned by 139 Labour Party members, including eminent Jewish lawyer Geoffrey Bindman, dismissing the insinuation of antisemitism as “personally offensive and politically dangerous”.

78. But in 2020, Machover was suspended again. He received a 20-page letter from party bureaucrats containing a melange of old and new allegations of antisemitism, which Machover described as "full of lies" and part of a “Stalinist purge of the Labour Party”. He considered resigning and slamming the door behind him but decided to give the party inquisitors a chance to further disgrace themselves by expelling him.

79. The real question is: why did the British government adopt this fundamentally flawed and deeply controversial document? The government cannot claim in self-defence that it had not been warned about the potentially harmful consequences of adoption.

80. It actually rejected calls from the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee to insert two “clarifications” to the IHRA definition and examples: firstly, to clarify that it is not antisemitic to criticise the government of Israel, without additional evidence to suggest antisemitic intent; and secondly, to clarify that "it is not antisemitic to hold the Israeli government to the same standards as other liberal democracies, or to take a particular interest in the Israeli government’s policies or actions, without additional evidence to suggest antisemitic intent”.

81. The clearest clue that the Conservative government was wedded to the IHRA definition as a means of curtailing debate and restricting free speech on Israel is contained in a letter from Gavin Williamson, secretary of state for education from 2019 to 2021, to university vice chancellors. Sent in October 2020 amid a national crisis of the education sector due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the letter noted that the number of universities that had adopted the IHRA definition remained “shamefully low”. The universities who ignored it were said to be letting down their staff and students, and their Jewish students in particular.

82. The education secretary insisted that these universities stop dragging their feet and formally endorse the IHRA definition. He threatened to cut off funding to universities at which antisemitic incidents occur and which had not signed up to the definition. 

83. Williamson’s letter was not well received. He himself came across as authoritarian, while the tone of his missive was arrogant, hectoring and bullying. More worrying, however, was the content. It made no reference to any other form of bigotry, such as Islamophobia, homophobia or anti-Black racism. It did not escape notice that antisemitism was singled out for attention and punishment by a Conservative government that was renowned for its intensely relaxed attitude towards Islamophobia. 

84. The letter assumed that universities that did not formally endorse the IHRA definition were not taking antisemitism seriously, which is far from being the case. It did not allow for the fact that most universities have rules and disciplinary procedures for combatting most forms of discrimination and racism, including antisemitism. Even if a specific definition of antisemitism is needed, which is debatable, no reason was given for privileging the IHRA one. Above all, the letter, or rather the ultimatum, was seen as a threat to free speech, which universities and the Department for Education have a statutory duty to uphold.

85. Israel’s friends in the US and Europe have claimed for the definition an international status that it does not have. They pushed hard for the adoption of the definition by as many governments as possible, because it can be used to intimidate critics of Israel and pro-Palestinian campaigners by tarnishing them with the brush of antisemitism. In Britain, the top echelons of the Conservative Party have followed the Israel lobby’s lead. Indeed, in the Conservative Party as a whole, the IHRA document seems to have acquired the status of holy writ.

K. CONCLUSION

86. In October 2017, in his capacity as Foreign Secretary, Mr Johnson introduced a debate in the House of Commons on the Balfour Declaration. He repeated the mantra about Britain’s pride in the part it played in creating a Jewish state in Palestine. He had the perfect opportunity to balance this with a recognition of Palestine as a state, but he firmly refused, saying the time was not right. During Mr Johnson’s premiership, the International Criminal Court decided to open an investigation of war crimes committed in the occupied Palestinian territories. In a letter to the Conservatives Friends of Israel, Mr Johnson wrote that his government respected the independence of the court but that it was opposed to this particular investigation because Israel is a close friend and ally of the United Kingdom. In other words, Israel is above international law and should not be held to account for its crimes against the Palestinian people. The equivocal and lukewarm reception from Keir Starmer and David Lammy towards the recent arrest warrants issued by the ICC for Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant strongly indicates that unstinted support for Zionism is not the exclusive preserve of any political party.

87. It would appear that despite the passage of a century, the colonial mindset of the British political elite is still deeply entrenched. Mrs May, like her World War I predecessors, continued to refer to the Arabs as ‘the non-Jewish communities in Palestine’. True, her government acknowledged that the declaration should have protected the political rights of the Arabs of Palestine. But successive British governments have taken no action to promote a two-state solution to the problem they had created. Britain's rulers, like the Bourbon kings of France, have apparently learnt nothing and forgotten nothing in the intervening 107 years.

L. EXPERT OBLIGATIONS

88. I confirm that I have made clear which facts and matters referred to in this report are within my own knowledge and which are not. Those that are within my own knowledge I confirm to be true. The opinions I have expressed represent my true and complete professional opinions on the matters to which they refer.

89. I understand that proceedings for contempt of court may be brought by anyone who makes, or causes to be made, a false statement in a document verified by a statement of truth without an honest belief in its truth.

90. I confirm that I have not received any remuneration for preparing this report.

Professor Avi Shlaim FBA

Oxford, the United Kingdom

30 November 2024