militarily occupied Palestine from Nov 1917 and worked with Zionist organisations to bring to Palestine great numbers of Jews from Europe to build towards a Jewish homeland against all the pleas of the native Palestinians.The anti-Semitic British Government under Balfour himself had severely limited entry to Britain for Jews fleeing persecution from Eastern Europe with the Alien Act 1905. Together with similar limitations in the USA from 1924 this meant that most Jews fleeing persecution looked to Palestine and not Britain or America as a place of refuge.
fuelled Zionist expectations in 1919. Churchill , Minister for the Colonies, wrote then that he envisaged the Jewish homeland to be "three or four million Jews" (far more than the population of Palestine about 800,000).
He also said "There are Zionists whom we are pledged to introduce into Palestine and who take it for granted that the local population will be cleared out to suit their convenience". 'Churchill and the Jews' Martin Gilbert.
denied a representative body with elections to the people of Palestine as "any representative body would stop immigration " but recognised Zionist organisations as self-governing institutions (precursor to state institutions) for the Jewish people. The Zionist movement "under British sponsorship'" created separate Jewish facilities such as a school system , university, hospitals , Jewish trade union and an army. 'Churchill and the Jews' Martin Gilbert
rejected time after time Palestinians appeals for freedom democracy and sovereignty in their own country and failed to bring an end to the takeover of their land and to evictions of Palestinian farmers to be replaced by Jewish workers.
produced a plan in 1936 (not adopted) to partition Palestine into two states with the proposal that the indigenous Palestinian people living there could be forced out of the suggested Jewish state.
"This opened the floodgates to the discussion of transfer (expulsion) in the Zionist movement". Ben Gurion, Zionist Leader wrote to his son “we must expel the Arabs and take their place . If we have to use force then we have force at our disposal. “ Avi Shlaim 'Israel and Palestine'
ensured the British army trained the Zionist army and participated together in the brutal collective punishment of entire villages during the Palestinian uprising in 1936-1939.
continued to use the immigration law to limit Jewish access to a safe haven in Britain leading up to and during the Holocaust .
The Evian conference in 1938 was convened to agree between the nations that attended how they would provide places of refuge for the Jews of Germany and Austria fleeing for their lives. However at the conference the United States and Britain shamefully dashed Jewish hopes and refused to take in substantial numbers . All but one of the countries at the conference followed suit.
British self interest consistently limited humanitarian aid to Jews . Refuge was severely restricted during the Holocaust ...the visa process was designed to exclude large numbers of European Jews -perhaps ten times as many as were let in.....However 78% of the British people favoured the admission of endangered Jews. Louise London 'Whitehall and the Jews 1933-1948"
failed to implement the Mc Donald white paper decision made by the British Parliament in 1939 to create an independent democratic Palestine governed by Palestinians and Jews in proportion to their number in the population.
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From Feb 1947 David Ben Gurion assembled "an ad hoc cabal of Zionist leaders and Military Commanders solely for the purpose of plotting and designing the dispossession of the Palestinians. They met weekly. This group I refer to in my book as the Consultancy". Ilan Pappe in "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine"
Next continued in Nakba page
