newsGaza and Nakba 2025: Historian William Dalrymple says that Britain is largely responsible for one of the biggest moral catastrophes since the Second World War
The true architects of the tragedy of Gaza 2025 are not the Israelis or the Arabs but the British, says the distinguished historian Willian Dalrymple
“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” (Part of the Balfour Declaration issued in the form of a letter written by the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs to Lord Rothschild and dated November 2, 1917).
By Trevor Grundy
Speaking to a packed audience at St James’s Church in Piccadilly on May 30, 2025 during a performance of A Golden String -William Blake in Words and Song, the distinguished historian said that Israel was created 77 years ago.
He said: “Seven hundred and fifty thousand (750,000) Palestinians were terrorised, raped and brutalised out of their homes and farms and villages in the Galilee, from Tiberius, Beit Sha’an, Safed and the great Palestinians ports of Jaffa and Acre. They were driven out with napalm and machine guns and machetes and forced to flee from their olive trees into the barren sand dunes of Gaza where they remain.
“At the end of 1948, less than 15 percent of Palestinians remained where they had always lived.
“Eighty five percent had been ethnically cleansed, despite the promises of Lord Balfour that ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.’ “
“The Nakba happened because the politicians of this country (Britain) enabled it.
Lord Arthur Balfour
Child of immense privilege and wealth
“They enabled it with the Balfour Declaration and they enabled it with thirty (30) years of British colonial rule in Palestine during which the indigenous inhabitants had seen their leaders detained and arrested and sent to prison camps outside the country.
“This country (Britain) has an historic responsibility, more than all other countries, to see the establishment of a Palestinian state and to provide some protection for the Palestinian people who have suffered what they did because our grandparents’ generation regarded the Palestinians as somehow expendable and unimportant.
“You might have thought that this shameful history would galvanise our government to atone for past mistakes and make good for past failures.
“Far from it.
“For our leaders do not know the history of the sufferings of the Palestinians because their story is not taught in our schools.
Theodor Herzl . . hero to Zionists, deadly enemy to Arabs
He wrote: “Supposing, for example, we were obliged to clear a country of wild beasts, we should not set about in the fashion of the fifth Century Europe. We should not take spear and lance and go out individuals in pursuit of bears; we would organise a grand and glorious hunting party, drive the animals together and throw melinite bombs into their midst.”(Quoted on page 220 of HERZL by Desmond Stewart (Hamish Hamilton, London 1974).
Historian and diplomat Christopher Hugh Sykes (1907-1986) was the second son of Sir Mark Sykes, co-author of the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement that provided for the division of the former Ottoman Empire in the Middle East between France and Britain which led to the cynical joke that Israel/Palestine was, in fact, the twice promised land.
The grave of Colonel T.E.Lawrence (above and portrait in bronze of him below) close to where he died in Dorset (Picture: Trevor Grundy)
Hollywood has shaped the way we see events in the Middle East and Lawrence of Arabia is central to a misleading myth about British care for Arabs
Strangely symbolic – the home of T.E. Lawrence close to the RAF base in Dorset where he hid his identity for so long. No window to see out – no window to let light in. Just one small window on the roof which gave ” Aircraftsman Shaw” views of other worlds, (Picture: Trevor Grundy)
“The BBC is too frightened to tell their stories in documentaries or news bulletins.
“The British people are not taught the dark history of our responsibility for their mess.
“Instead, we as a country, still provide diplomatic cover for Netanyahu’s extremist administration, which has made it intention entirely clear.
“Smotvich, Netanyahu’s finance minister, said last week on television – ‘Gaza will be entirely destroyed and its population will leave in great numbers for third countries.’ “
“Yet, this government has done nothing. It is complicit with the most public and visible of war crimes. Our taxpayers’ money is still being used to send the RAF to assist the genocide in Gaza with British-gathered intelligence to enable the murderers to kill yet more women and children with aircraft parts made in this country and freely exported to the IDF.
“Shamefully, more weapons for the IDF have left Britain under Starmer than under the Tories.
Close to two million people face starvation in Gaza . . .
. . . but Christian leaders stay silent as the graves they ignore
“At this moment, half a million Palestinians are facing starvation. One million others can barely get enough food.
“Human Rights Watch has said that Israel’s blockade has transcended military tactics to serve a tool of extermination.
“But you cannot supress the truth.
“Everyone here in this church tonight knows about this slaughter.
“More than sixty thousand (60,000) innocents have been killed and maybe as many as one hundred thousand (100,000).
“This is one of the great moral catastrophes of our time, arguably the biggest moral failure of the West since the Second World War.”