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Israel: An Anti-Colonial Triumph

(Spiked-UK) James Heartfield - While the Arabs have long mischaracterized the Israeli victory in 1948 as a British-Jewish collaboration, nothing could be further from the truth. After the Second World War, the Jews fought a war of national liberation against Britain, the ruling colonial power. In the fighting between Arabs and Jews in 1948, Britain did not support the Jews. Britain was actually involved in arming the Arab forces and even fighting alongside them in an attempt to limit the Zionist victory. In 1945, Britain brokered the founding of the Arab League, persuading Egypt to join Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan and Yemen in a new pan-Arab front. This would be the force - in the shape of the Arab Liberation Army - that attacked the newly founded State of Israel in 1948. The Jordanian Arab Legion, an army built up as a local militia of the British under Lt.-Gen. John Bagot Glubb, and part of the Arab Liberation Army, crossed over into Palestine to "occupy that part of Palestine awarded to the Arabs." Britain's ambassador to Jordan, Alec Kirkbride, said that Jordan annexing Nablus and Hebron "was the logical solution." The Arab Legion planned to attack the Jews once the British had left. Britain resupplied the Arab Legion's munitions just before the attack on the Jews, with eight 25-pounder guns arriving in February 1948, each battery commanded by a British officer. Britain also armed the Egyptian and Iraqi forces and used British facilities to refuel Egyptian aircraft. On May 18, Glubb's Arab Legion entered Jerusalem. By May 28, the Jews had surrendered their foothold in the Old City. The Arab Legion was undone when the British government, under pressure from the UN and the U.S., ordered its British officers to step down. Anti-Israel activists may today try to present Israel as a "settler-colonial state." But its founding, forged in the heat of anti-colonial struggle, shows it was anything but.
2025-04-01 00:00:00
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