While the students of this decade will inevitably have Anas Baba’s iconic Beit Lahia night-time ‘fireworks’ photo seared into their consciousness this Eid, we would be remiss to forget, one Obama and one Trump later, the many painful images from the past not least through the days of Protective Edge and Cast Lead. In the intellectual theatre of war before us today, the ‘arming’ of oneself ‘with the arguments to support the Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank’ as Bookmarks puts it, has us charging into combat with Ilan Pappe, among others. Settler colonialism in this decade, simply another mode of forceful colonial confiscation of affairs from an understandably insurgent native, persists through human history.
“Suppose a man were, all of a sudden, to see a young child on the verge of falling into a well. He would certainly be moved by compassion, not because he wanted to get in the good graces of the parents, nor because he wished to win the praises of his fellow villagers or friends, nor yet because he disliked the cry of the child. The heart of compassion is the germ of benevolence; the heart of shame, of dutifulness; the heart of courtesy and modesty, of observance of the rites; the heart of right and wrong, of wisdom. Man has these four germs just as he has four limbs.” (Mencius, II, A, 6, trans. D. C. Lau)
Recently several book lists have been touted and passed around our physically isolated yet virtually connected web of the wider world, not least being carried so by a certain blue bird, but none so far it seems would include John Newsinger’s gem of a chapter from his 2002 British Counterinsurgency. With my utmost admiration intact for the Goliaths of the likes of Lacqueur, the Kimches, Chomsky and so on, and with my metaphorical white dove in mind, here, I will briefly share with you what had been elucidated not too long ago.
June 1948 would prove to be eventful if we are to under-describe it as Britain would plunge into an undeclared war in Malaya with the last of the British troops evacuating the then Israel within the same month that year. In the preceding chapter to Malaya, Newsinger ends his premier chapter titled ‘At War with Zion’ with the following summation of his chapter-long point – that Britain’s defeat in Palestine which gave way to the Palestine War was a result of political failure.
The British government in 1948 was ‘trapped between the Zionists and the Palestinian Arabs’. The colonial apparatus was unable to enlist the support of either group in the ‘maintenance of British rule’ in the Mandate of Palestine due to ‘external circumstances and considerations’. This political failure left Britain’s security forces ‘fighting the Zionist underground without any allies or collaborators among the local population’ and were equally unable to ‘use repression to the scale that had defeated the Arabs a decade earlier’, and in the case of Malaya, and then Kenya, the decade following 1948. Like Jala Tower, Newsinger’s argument does not stand alone.
Almost in solidarity, Efraim Karsh, in 2002, had served similar conclusions through pointing to British High Commissioner for Palestine Alan Cunningham’s exasperations with British obstructionism and desire to simply leave Palestine swiftly without ‘any regard to the consequences in Palestine’ – certainly a point which at the time was made clear to the Secretary of State for the Colonies. The ‘for’ in the designation being a type of dark humour viewed from the gaze of the present day, and perhaps the swiftness a type of British skill cultivated from the days of abandoning Singapore and Malaya as quickly as possible to the Japanese in the Second World War just a few years earlier. British presence in the Mandate before their decision to route, according to Karsh, ultimately ‘deterred the Arab states from sending their armies into Palestine’ before the end of the Mandate and that the ‘pattern and pace of British withdrawal influenced Jewish and Palestinian operational planning and execution’ (in the case of Britain’s naval blockade and so on) as well as determine the outcome of native war efforts and ‘critical military encounters’.
Certainly, the craft and the face of conflict will change through the centuries, yet in a classroom (even a virtual one) needing to comprehend lessons, caring citizenry cannot help but to comb through history albeit in a more critical way. As our train steams on through that tunnel of time, the outstanding question which will remain straight is, of course, how will we be blamed by our grandchildren given our periodic dishonesty in recognising our own historicity while the virus that is colonisation is allowed to mutate and remain resistant?
“How fleeting, how brief, how fragile is the life of a man, and how subject to misfortune, assailed already by a multitude of diseases and accidents, buildings which collapse, shipwrecks, earthquakes, lightning! We do not need to add war to our woes, and yet it causes more woe than all the others.” (Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, trans. Neil Cheshire and Michael Heath)
DR.MA
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