The following article was written by Alex Ryvchin, ECAJ co-CEO, and was ori­gin­ally published in The Courier-Mail entitled “Britain not to blame for plight of the Palestini­ans”.

Britain not to blame for plight of the Palestinians

Alex Ryvchin
The Courier-Mail
May 10, 2018

A RECENT piece published in The Courier-Mail — dis­cuss­ing the legacy of British cus­todi­an­ship of the land that is now Israel between the end of WWI and Israel’s declar­a­tion of inde­pend­ence in 1948 — charged the British with “criminal duplicity” and “perfidy and idiocy”.
It is true that Britain hardly covered itself in glory during the period that it admin­istered the region then known as Palestine in its trans­ition from an outpost of the Ottoman Empire to a return to Jewish self-rule. In 1939, just months before the outbreak of World War II, Britain issued the White Paper bowing to Arab pressure to resist Jewish migration to Palestine, in spite of its oblig­a­tion under the League of Nations Charter — among other instru­ments of inter­na­tion­al law — to facil­it­ate Jewish immig­ra­tion and set­tle­ment of the land.
This left millions of Jews stranded, prevented from emig­rat­ing and destined instead for the killing fields of Europe.
Some Palestini­ans, not content with stopping Jews from returning to the land which, as Woodrow Wilson had said, was “the cradle and home of the Jewish race”, actively cam­paigned for their complete anni­hil­a­tion. A Palestini­an leader, Haj Amin al-Husseini, declared: “Kill the Jews wherever you find them – this pleases God, history and religion,” and per­son­ally inter­vened to prevent a Red Cross-brokered release of thousands of Jewish children, ensuring instead they were all delivered to Auschwitz.
But Britain’s support for the res­tor­a­tion of the Jews to their ancestral land was noble and just, and was part of a broader policy of the victors in World War I to restore self-gov­ern­ment to the native peoples of the Middle East. At the same time Britain expressed support for the creation of a Jewish state on a small part of its ancient homeland, it also supported the creation of 22 Arab states in the Middle East.
The creation of Israel was not about col­on­isa­tion, it was about the precise opposite – the removal of colonial influence from the region, whether Ottoman or British, to allow for indi­gen­ous peoples to exercise self-determ­in­a­tion.
A further fallacy often used to undermine the legit­im­acy of Israel’s creation is that Europe handed a state to the Jews to atone for its “Holocaust guilt”. Yet Israel’s creation had been mandated by inter­na­tion­al law decades before the Holocaust, on the basis of 3000 years of unbroken his­tor­ic­al con­nec­tion to the land. Israel was not created by guilt, but by the blood, sweat and tears of its people.
The still-unre­solved Palestini­an refugee problem, which followed the creation of the state of Israel, is the direct con­sequence and legacy of the Palestini­an rejection of the 1947 UN Partition Plan, which recom­men­ded the creation of a first-ever Palestini­an Arab state alongside the reborn Jewish state. The ensuing war, which cul­min­ated in a full-blown invasion of the nascent Jewish state on all fronts, led not only to the flight and dis­place­ment of some 700,000 Palestini­ans but to the destruc­tion of 1 per cent of Israel’s pop­u­la­tion.
Arab bel­li­ger­ence towards Israel also caused an even greater refugee problem than exper­i­enced by the Palestini­ans, as some 800,000 Jews who had lived in Arab lands for hundreds, even thousands of years, were ruth­lessly dis­pos­sessed and forced to flee their homes.
It is correct that the periodic blood­let­ting through wars and intifadas is a cause for lament. Had the Arabs not rejected peace in 1947 and at every oppor­tun­ity since, Israelis and Palestini­ans would be cel­eb­rat­ing a joint 70^th anniversary of inde­pend­ence this year. Instead, Israel is a marvel of innov­a­tion and cre­ativ­ity while the Palestini­ans are kept stateless by their corrupt and violent leaders.
Alex Ryvchin is co-CEO of the Executive Council of Aus­trali­an Jewry