Thank you for having the courage to bring it up (many here wouldn’t)What took courage was to resist a colonial occupier intent on imposing it's policy of divide and rule by playing one tribe off of another as in India or Nigeria. The Palestinian "national identity" is the sad legacy of British propagandists and their attempts to pit Arabs against Zionists only the Zionists refused to play the game and instead attacked their real enemy.
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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Not sure it's an arguement I'd engage in. The inventors of the blood libel which persists to this very day, Judaism being illegal from the late 13th to mid 19th century. It could be argued that their treatment of Jews was better than most of western Europe at the time, but it's kind of like argueing about who was the most enlightened slaveholder. More modern times, the Brits accepted the burden of resettling the Jewish Homeland with Jews. A charge they consciously failed, dividing the Jewish homeland and not only refusing to accomodate large scale Jewish immigration but eventually barring it. Resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands, likely hundreds of thousands of Jews who were trapped on the continent. And the author wins the arguement, there were other countries far more complicit in the slaughter of Jews. Not a pleasant arguement, we persecuted them less through most of the history of Jews in western Europe, even if true. Unmentioned on the thread, the King David Hotel was the headquarters of the British Mandate Authority, as well as of the British Military in what is now Israel and Jordan. A perfectly legitimate target.
Colonial occupier? Perhaps of Ottoman land, yes. But remember Zionism hardly at any following at all until Herzl in the late 19th century and if it hadn’t been for the Balfour Declaration, the whole dream would have died.
Of course the British had to juggle the difficult realities on the ground and the wide geopolitical situation (not least when Britain faced the Nazi threat alone between 1939 and 1941).
Whatever you want to believe, even the early Zionists who went to Palestine acknowledged that this was not “a land without a people for a people without a land” — remember the report back to the first Zionist conference: “The bride is beautiful, but she is already married to another man”.
Uprooting an entire population and dumping them East of the Jordan river would have amounted to ethnic cleansing. WHile some Zionists acknowledged the inceredibly tricky position in which Britain found herself, a bunch of extremists didn’t. I would call them cowardly, rather than courageous.
Palestine was not a colony. It was administered by Britain as part of a UN mandate.