Let’s get one thing straight from the outset: Israel’s annihilation of Gaza is no isolated military assault or “act of self-defence” - rather, it is the unquestionable and horrifying culmination of a brutal story of settler colonialism dating from the zenith of the British Empire.
An aggressive process of ethnic-cleansing, dispossession and systemic violence - the virulent racism at the core of these Israeli crimes against Palestinian men, women and children is an imperialist blueprint bequeathed directly from Britain.
From the colonial decree of the Balfour declaration to its current role in aiding and abetting Israeli genocide in Gaza, Britain has consistently enabled the dispossession and oppression of Palestinians.
As it does in many parts of the world, Britain’s imperial shadow casts long over Palestine. A wretched monument to colonial callousness, the roots of Israeli barbarism lead all the way back to Victorian London and the imperialist desire for ‘holy-real estate’.
For it was here that the colonist Claude Reignier Conder, dismissing Palestinians as “brute beasts” while eyeing their land for an imperial bread basket, would come to epitomise the views at the heart of the British Empire.
This was no abstract policy, but premeditated ethnic cleansing, openly advocated by Queen Victoria’s confidante Laurence Oliphant as early as 1879, who saw “no difficulty clearing out” the indigenous population.
These then were the supremacist seeds of conquest; the colonial bedrock of Israel’s contemporary crimes - the inevitable harvest of a century of British sown injustice and criminal disregard for Palestinian humanity.
Britain’s colonial playbook in Palestine was a gruesome mosaic, assembled from atrocities perfected across its sprawling empire. British oppression in Mesopotamia provided lessons in aerial bombing and the blitzing of villages; South Africa supplied the sinister use of attack dogs; and from India came the dark arts of interrogation torture techniques - the first truly global pedagogy of colonial cruelty.
However it was the conquest of Ireland that proved to be the crucible from which a brutal thread of oppression emerged.
Arthur Balfour - who had previously served as Chief Secretary in Ireland and earned the epithet ‘Bloody Balfour’ from ordering the shooting of protesters in Cork - would infamously sign away Palestine’s fate; while Herbert Samuel, hated in Ireland for sanctioning Roger Casement’s execution and the internment of thousands following the Easter Rising in 1916 - would as Britain’s first High Commissioner in Palestine order the indiscriminate aerial bombardment of Palestinian protestors in 1921; in what would be the first bombs dropped from the sky on Palestinian civilians.
The transfer of terror was explicit. Winston Churchill, then Colonial Secretary, redeployed the infamous Black & Tans, and the Auxiliaries from Ireland to Palestine. Their ingrained supremacism - chillingly exposed by veteran Douglas Duff when he later admitted to “scarcely regarding these people as human” - undoubtedly fuelled the systemic violence that was unleashed.
Churchill’s close friend and ally Henry Hugh Tudor was at the centre of this exchange of terror - from launching the infamous ‘Bloody Sunday’ reprisal attack on Croke Park in Dublin when dozens of GAA spectators were mowed down by British soldiers, Churchill sent him to Palestine to “toughen up” the new colonial police force.
Warnings against repeating the ‘mistakes’ in Ireland were ignored. Just as Cork and Balbriggan were burned to the ground during the Irish War of Independence, British colonial forces razed Palestinian towns including Jenin and Jaffa, and many isolated villages like al-Bassa and Mi’ar.
The repression was barbaric: torture was a constant feature - including sexual violence against men, women, and children in Nazareth; mass public floggings; starving dogs unleashed on children; and victims were often left to burn in steel cages in the desert sun. The use of civilians as human shields, forced labour, and concentration camps became widespread.
Britain’s first Military Governor of Jerusalem, Ronald Storrs, encapsulated the colonial blueprint in his memoirs many years later, when on the eve of the Nakba he acknowledged that Britain’s objective was the destruction of the Palestinian homeland and the creation of a colonial outpost that was loyal to Britain’s imperial interests, a “little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism”.
Storrs exposed the consistent, supremacist British agenda; Ireland, the laboratory had provided the methods of national subjugation that were exported to dismantle Palestinian nationhood. The horrors unfolding in Palestine were nothing new; but a devastating rerun of Ireland’s torment, cementing Britain’s legacy as a ruthless engine of conquest.
Today, the physical British Empire may be gone, the sun finally set on its once vast, brutal dominion, but the ‘old’ imperial power remains deeply involved in ‘new’ forms of colonial injustice as a fervent junior partner in US-led global imperialism - particularly evident in its unwavering support for Israeli settler-colonialism in Palestine.
Indeed its increased supply of lethal arms, covert military support, cynical diplomatic cover, and the authoritarian suppression of domestic dissent illustrates Britain’s deep entanglement in Israel’s crimes; revealing not only a chilling continuity of its imperial legacy in Palestine, but more importantly a litany of evidence that should see it’s political leaders charged for aiding and abetting crimes against humanity, including genocide.
Since October 2023, Britain’s arms pipeline to Israel has surged, with more than £127million in arms licenses approved in the first three months alone - a sum dwarfing the previous four-year total. Despite mealy-mouthed assurances from Government spokespersons, these were no ‘benign exports’ but critical components in Israel’s war machine.
Despite the British Government’s own acknowledgement of a “clear risk” that Israeli jets were violating international humanitarian law, Britain controversially carved out an exception for F-35 components from a partial arms suspension and continues to exploit this legal loophole.
Beyond the direct sale of death, Britain offers covert military support, a ghostly echo of its military control of the old mandate. As revealed by DeclassifiedUK, since October 2023 the Royal Air Force (RAF) has conducted more than 500 surveillance flights over Gaza; at least one team of British special forces has been deployed on the ground in Palestine; Israeli Air Force planes have been given operational access to RAF Brize Norton; and British military equipment continues to be sent to Israel’s Hatzerim airbase - training pilots to fly the very combat aircraft that are dropping 2000lb bombs on the children of Gaza.
The fact that all of these military endeavours have occurred beyond the reach of the British parliament - or any public oversight at all - reveals a deliberate policy of enabling Israeli aggression without fear of democratic accountability.
Such complicity has been exemplified by the reports that David Cameron, as Foreign Secretary in April 2024, warned the International Criminal Court (ICC) against issuing arrest warrants for Israeli leaders, saying it would be “like dropping a hydrogen bomb”.
In what can only be described as a blatant attempt to subvert international justice, the former Prime Minister also threatened to defund the court and withdraw Britain from the Rome Statute - the founding treaty of the ICC.
Indeed, this aggressive intervention - potentially a criminal act under British law - is reflective of the British government’s willingness to dismantle the rules-based international order it claims to champion.
Similarly, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s monstrous comments legitimising Israel’s right to cut off water and power to Gaza - a clear act of collective punishment - reflect a pervasive political reluctance within Westminster’s corridors of power to unequivocally condemn actions that constitute war crimes, and have undoubtedly nurtured a permissive environment for Israel’s repeated violations of international law.
Set against his comments 10 years earlier in 2014 at the International Court of Justice, where Starmer was part of a team of human rights lawyers making the case that Serbia’s three-month siege of the Croatian city of Vukovar in 1991 amounted to genocide - the mental gymnastics for the British PM to state that a “sustained campaign of shelling, systemic expulsions, denial of food, water, electricity, sanitation, and medical treatment” did now not represent clear grounds for a genocide ruling illustrate the depths the British state, and its political class will stoop to defend the indefensible.
Domestically, the authoritarian crackdown on pro-Palestinian support has been a throwback to Britain’s historical repression of anti-colonial solidarity, and has yet again exposed a glaring double standard in Britain’s approach to free speech.
The BBC’s refusal to broadcast programmes reflecting the horrific reality of life in Gaza, and the targeting of musicians like Bob Vylan and the Irish rap group Kneecap has been the high profile tip of the iceberg, as dozens of journalists, artists, performers, museums, and universities have had their homes searched, events cancelled, and exhibitions removed - as the definition of ‘hate-speech’ has been weaponised to silence criticism of Israel.
The recent proscription of Palestine Action by the British Government has been an alarming illustration of these double standards, where peaceful dissent against state-sanctioned violence is criminalised while complicity in colonial oppression is normalised.
Despite the government’s propaganda, the proscription of Palestine Action is not about security; it is about maintaining a compliant political landscape, suppressing anti-imperialist movements, and ensuring the uninterrupted flow of support to a pariah regime that perpetuates oppression. This is a chilling message to anyone who believes in self-determination and stands against the machinery of occupation: your dissent will be met with the full force of the state, while imperial interests will be protected at all costs.
Yet, this government’s unwavering stance, its calculated complicity, stands in stark, shameful contrast to the moral outrage of its own people. Millions have poured onto the streets of London, their collective conscience a thunderous demand for justice, for an end to the bloodshed, for a complete arms embargo on Israel, and the freedom of Palestine.
Their voices, unlike those of their leaders, refuse to be silenced by the convenient fictions of ‘international peace and security’ or the cynical calculus of geopolitical alignment. The growing, insistent chorus of voices within Britain, from former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s courageous call for an independent public inquiry into Britain’s complicity to the tireless, principled advocacy of the Council for Arab-British Understanding (Caabu) against impunity, underscores the urgent, moral imperative for a radical rupture.
I am proud that this demand for truth and accountability is amplified by the powerful solidarity of Sinn Féin MPs in the north of Ireland. We have backed Corbyn’s call for an inquiry, and also signed an open letter to the Prime Minister, demanding an investigation into the British government’s role in the genocidal assault on Gaza.
This cross-party condemnation, echoing from the very heart of a nation that knows the lingering bitter taste of British colonialism, highlights the escalating demand for an end to complicity and equivocation.
Under the weight of this mounting pressure, Starmer has been forced to speak out on the deteriorating situation in Gaza in recent days, culminating in a public declaration that Britain will officially recognise the state of Palestine at the UN General Assembly in September if Israel fails to meet a number of conditions.
Yet by framing Palestinian nationhood as a ‘bargaining chip’ dependent on Israeli compliance, Starmer grotesquely perpetuates the imperialist logic that denies the Palestinian people their inherent right to self-determination, and to freely determine their economic, social and cultural development without external interference.
In reducing Palestinian liberation to a transactional leverage point within a clearly oppressive colonial framework, the British Prime Minister is yet again adopting an approach rooted deeply in British imperialist interests, and has been roundly condemned for its inherent contradictions and failure to decisively challenge the ongoing genocide, occupation, and Israeli dispossession of the Palestinian homeland.
Instead, the urgent imperative must be to allow unfettered humanitarian aid into Gaza to end the genocide, dismantle the settler-colonial regime, and unconditionally recognise the Palestinian state - with East Jerusalem as its capital.
Then it will be time for those complicit in these egregious crimes to be held accountable.
Only then can true peace and justice begin to take root in a land long scarred by London’s imperial decree and Palestine be free.
Chris Hazzard is the Sinn Féin MP for South Down
