Britain Should Read Its Own ‘West Bank’ History
Britain is moving to ban goods produced in Israeli settlements in Judea & Samaria (“West Bank”), presenting the measure as a defense of international law and an attempt to preserve the two-state solution. France and Canada are reportedly joining suit.
Before Britain once again assumes the role of moral arbiter in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, perhaps it should revisit its own history.
Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, administered the Mandate for Palestine, encouraged Jewish immigration and settlement, restricted it, changed policy again in 1939 and eventually withdrew.
Now it proposes to punish Israelis for producing goods in territory whose modern political history Britain itself helped shape.
Perhaps Britain should read the history before banning the wine and vegetables — and ultimately costing Palestinians jobs.
Starting in 1917, the Balfour Declaration expressed the British government’s support for establishing in Palestine a national home for the Jewish people, while protecting the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.
That commitment was incorporated into the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine. Article 6 required Britain to facilitate Jewish immigration and encourage “close settlement by Jews on the land”.
This did not give Jews a blank cheque. But it does contradict the claim that Jewish settlement in the West Bank began with Israel’s capture of the territory in 1967.
Jewish settlement was explicitly contemplated in the international framework Britain administered. In 1922, Britain separated Transjordan from the provisions of the Mandate relating to the Jewish National Home, effectively limiting those provisions to Palestine west of the Jordan River.
Then in 1939, the MacDonald White Paper acknowledged Britain’s obligations under the Mandate, including establishing a Jewish national home, facilitating Jewish immigration and encouraging Jewish settlement.
And then Britain restricted all three.
The White Paper proposed an independent Palestine within ten years in which Arabs and Jews would share government. It limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 over five years, after which further immigration would require Arab consent. It also restricted Jewish land purchases.
The timing is extraordinary. This was 1939, on the eve of the Holocaust.
Britain had moved from facilitating a Jewish national home to restricting Jewish immigration into the territory in which that national home was supposed to be established, as European Jews desperately needed somewhere to flee Nazi oppression.
That history deserves remembering when modern Britain lectures Israel about the simple morality of the conflict.
Here is the question rarely asked:
When, exactly, did Palestinian Arabs have sovereignty over the West Bank?
The territory was Jewish before Roman conquest, and subsequently ruled by successive empires before becoming part of the Ottoman Empire and, after the First World War, the British Mandate. There was never a sovereign Palestinian Arab state.
After 1948, Jordan took control and purported to annex the West Bank. That annexation received only limited international recognition.
In 1967, Israel captured the territory from Jordan and reunified Jerusalem.
There was still no Palestinian state.
There is a crucial difference between saying Israel occupies territory captured in 1967 and saying Israel occupies the sovereign territory of a Palestinian state.
The first describes military control. The second assumes a history of sovereignty that does not exist.
The Latin principle of uti possidetis juris — that new states generally inherit the administrative borders that existed before independence — does not settle the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. But it is a useful reminder that the West Bank was not the sovereign territory of a Palestinian state before 1967.
Jordan complicates the history further.
In 1988, King Hussein severed Jordan’s legal and administrative ties with the West Bank. Six years later, Jordan and Israel signed a peace treaty establishing their international boundary. The treaty described it as the “permanent, secure and recognised international boundary” between Israel and Jordan, while leaving the status of territories that came under Israeli military control in 1967 unresolved.
So when Britain describes the West Bank simply as “Palestinian land”, an obvious question follows:
If it was unquestionably someone else’s sovereign territory, whose was it — and when did that sovereignty become Palestinian?
Britain’s own position on the Falklands provides an awkward comparison.
Imagine Argentina argued that the Falkland Islands were occupied territory because Argentina had a historical claim and Britain exercised control over them. Britain would reject that argument.
Yet when it comes to the West Bank, Britain’s language often collapses several different questions into one: Israel occupies Palestinian land, Israeli communities are settlements, and pressure on Israel is therefore justified.
Britain insists on the principle of self-determination in the Falklands. It should explain why that principle receives so much less emphasis in its approach to the West Bank.
And that leads to another question.
Qatar presents itself as a diplomatic intermediary while maintaining close ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, and has spent billions building influence across the West, from universities to the media.
If Gulf diplomacy is influencing British policy, the public deserves to know.
There is something deeply ironic about Britain now presenting itself as the neutral custodian of the territorial principles of the Middle East.
Britain issued the Balfour Declaration.
Britain administered the Mandate.
Britain encouraged Jewish settlement.
Then, in 1939, it restricted Jewish immigration and land purchases.
Britain withdrew. War followed. Jordan controlled the West Bank. Israel captured it in 1967. Jordan later relinquished its claim. Israel and Jordan subsequently signed a peace treaty while leaving the West Bank’s final status unresolved.
And now Britain proposes to punish Israeli businesses for producing goods in what it calls ‘settlements’.
There is no credible path to Palestinian statehood while Hamas remains committed to the destruction of Israel. No Western nation should support that ideology. There is, however, a legitimate case for Israeli security.
The October 7 atrocities should force the West to confront an uncomfortable reality: the assumption that a negotiated two-state solution is simply a matter of putting more pressure on Israel is increasingly detached from reality. Even much of Israel’s political left has lost faith in the traditional formula.
Yet here in Australia, Penny Wong continues to promote the same approach. Who can forget her rushing to Ramallah after October 7 to promise further support to the Palestinians, while not visiting the sites of the atrocities or meeting the family of Australian Galit Carbone, who was brutally murdered that day?
Peace requires compromise.
Israel withdrew every Israeli civilian and soldier from Gaza in 2005, hoping disengagement might create the conditions for peace. Instead, Hamas turned Gaza into a base for attacks on Israel.
Perhaps the West should therefore question its own policies rather than simply demanding further Israeli concessions. Evidence emerging from Gaza about the use of civilian infrastructure, Hamas-linked personnel, allegations concerning UNRWA facilities and the involvement of individuals connected to the October 7 attacks should force a reassessment of the assumption that Israel has a reliable negotiating partner.
Israel has already seen what unilateral concessions and negotiations without a willing partner can produce.
If no amount of Palestinian territory is enough until Israel itself disappears, then Britain, Canada and France’s settlement boycott is not a peace policy. I give Penny Wong until the weekend to add Australia to that list.
It is simply pressure on one side of an unresolved conflict, emboldening the Palestinian side to believe it need never meet Israel halfway.
And Britain, given its own fingerprints all over this history, should know better.
