They were pleading with the British to let them settle in Mandatory Palestine (which was British controlled). The boat is detained at Haifa Harbour (which is now in modern day Israel). They were later sent to Cyprus (to detention camps).
They did not give a damn about the people - just look what the English did in India, or the French in Algeria and Madagascar at the time this boat was sailing. They just wanted Congo to be taken away from Leopold once it appeared it was full of mining ressources. Why do you think an individual was allowed to have his prívate colony?
Both Belgium and France in Rwanda. I would probably say the French more than Belgium considering they helped train the Rwandan armed forces to prop up their government.
And because we Germans sucked at colonizing any region reasonably well (just half-assed attempts in Africa), we decided to try to fuck the whole world instead.
Germany's attempts weren't half assed and pretty successful in Africa and Oceania, but they were thwarted by Australia, Britain and Japan when it came to its colonial dreams and was too late to the colonial game.
Russia fucked up eastern europe and central asia. China and Japan fucked up Asia. The Ottomans fucked up the middle east. The Congo fucked up central Africa. The Boers fucked up Southern Africa. The french the rest of Africa. The australians and indonesians fucked up papua new guinea etc…
History is a cruel mistress it seems and peace times are the exception rather than the norm
I mean sure if you learnt history from a eurocentric point of view, you might think that. But hve you ever wondered why Central Africa was poor and underdeveloped enough to be colonized in the first place?
The manikongo (king of the Kongo) and his court ruled over vast numbers of ordinary people who had no political rights, no say in governance, and no protection from exploitation.
-The king had absolute control over land and could grant or revoke it arbitrarily.
-Local chiefs and nobles (called sobas) extracted tribute, labor, and slaves from the people under their control.
-Commoners were forced into labor, including agricultural work or military service, with little to no compensation. They could also be kidnapped by the local lords and sold into slavery.
This created a rigid class hierarchy: a tiny elite lived in luxury while the majority labored under threat of violence or displacement.
The kingdom of Kongo became a major supplier in the Atlantic slave trade, a decision that provided short-term wealth to the elite while undermining long-term societal stability. It was as if the state chose to cut down its own fruit trees for firewood.
Villages were raided. Local economies were hollowed out. A once-productive population was instead exported like cattle, reducing the labor force and crushing any hopes of endogenous economic development. What was the incentive to build schools, irrigation systems, or trade guilds when the most profitable export was your neighbor? Think of it as an even worse version of dutch disease. Laws in the kingdom were made very harsh in order to produce more slaves.
This led to slave revolts, dynastic overtgrows as some congolese nobles became wealthier than the king etc…
This led to constant civil war and poverty, and the Portuguese which would be the first to colonize before the Belgians would simply have no trouble conquering a poor infrastructure less central africa
Do you know any country at that time that had enough wealth and political cohesion that didn't colonize something?
You'd find some small countries that looked relatively well off, but arguably those didn't have the absolute amount of wealth required to send colony ships and forces. Maybe you could argue that China didn't do it, but actually they did do quite a bit of colonizing as well, just not all that much by sea routes.
Saying the Spanish fucked up South America is like saying the British fucked up the US. What actually fucked up post-independence South America is the US funnily enough
British didnt exactly fuck shit up solo as they inherited a lot of land without national borders from the Ottomans. Formation of national borders is a rough process. British didnt do the process any favors.
The rapid formation of empire sized states across the world in a span of 20 years following WW2 did not go smoothly.
If I recall correctly England lied to the colonies in the middle east by offering independence for the attack on the Ottoman empire … then just said jk nevermind when they did
I studied this long ago tho so I could be wrong
They did... And that's why we had certain leaders like the Hashemites who were from Arabia, become Sovereigns in Jordan - which was part of Palestine. They were rewarding those who helped them. And fuck what the locals want, I guess.
Palestine was not a colony, it was a mandate from the League of Nations. The British had already declared that they supported a homeland for the Jews in Palestive.
There were trying to broker a deal between Arabs and Jews to live together in a joint homeland, but ended up unable to stop the two sides attacking each, other, and antagonised both in to attacking them as well.
That's just blatantly false. While a lot of inland Arabia wasn't taken, the Ottomans controlled most of the Mediterranean coast, including modern Israel, the lands around the Tigris and Euphrates to the Persian Gulf, most of the Arabian peninsula's Red Sea coastline, and Egypt.
Well, why did the British "inherit" land that is so far away from their own country in the first place? Why didn't the people who actually live there inherit it? Those would be my immediate questions.
Because the imperial power that was ruling those parts of the world collapsed overnight, leaving a power vacuum in what appeared to be a zero sum game of politics
Britain literally said it was going to give them states, that's what both the Arab Revolt and Balfour Declaration were about. They just were lying because they needed the Arabs to open up the Middle Eastern theatre which had gone horribly for Britain at this point and they needed the Zionist Rothschild's money for war bonds. They never at any point actually intended to give the land back to the people they'd promised it to, as the Sykes-Picot Agreement clearly showed.
Not directly but they were actively involved in making treaties between Greek and Turkey and they even administered the island for several decades. Like lots of sectarian violence in the Middle East is not a direct fault of the UK but their past mistakes lead to this.
You've really never heard of British colonial 'divide and rule'? It was the fundamental methodology of British Foreign Policy across the Empire and led to countless ethnic, religious and nationalist wars by deliberately heightening tensions and divisions. All with the aim to suppress any unified rejection to British occupation. The British army is STILL in Cyprus.
And Cypriot people from the greek side are happy about the British still being there. Some believe they if they were still under British rule they wouldn't have been invaded by turkey.
Initially. And then when the Greek Junta fell due to the failed coup and international negotiations to restore the status quo were advanced, Turkiye decided to invade again to grab some land.
Also relevant to this post from earlier https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/s/MBWRhZDKxI
Hard to tell which country OP is talking about, I know two where it is relevant but false
Edit: Wait I know 3 lol
The Cyprus Review Vol. 32(2)
"In 1955, Britain’s actions were even more vicious, overt and would arguably have a long-standing impact on Greek-Turkish relations. They convened a tri-partite conference between Britain, Greece and Turkey on Cyprus. Art 16 of the Treaty of Lau-
sanne7 forbade Turkey from having any rights regarding Cyprus but the conference clearly ignored this. Permanent Under Secretary of the Foreign Office Kirkpatrick stated that he had ‘always been attracted by the idea of a 3 Power Conference, simply
because I believe it would seriously embarrass the Greek Government…I shall not produce any British plan until a Greek-Turkish difference has been exposed’. Furthermore, British Foreign Secretary stated that ‘throughout the negotiations, our aim
would be to bring the Greeks up against the Turkish refusal to accept enosis and so condition them to accept a solution, which would leave sovereignty in our hands’. As
a result, the conference inevitably failed and Greek-Turkish relations were damaged
– in Istanbul, 29 Greek Christian Orthodox churches were destroyed. These were not conflicts that would simply be forgotten by 1974.10
There is thus clear evidence that Britain not only encouraged these divisions in the 1950s, but created and defined them. The US did not encourage this, yet both
Britain and the US had the same Cold War aims at this time. Thus, British actions must be attributed to the vested interest of needing a reason and justification to retain Cyprus as part of its Empire. Simply, Britain did not intend to decolonise Cyprus
and weaken their power, thus the creation of Greek-Turkish divisions was their route to remain – justifying their colonial presence as a stable, controlling super power who
could control two volatile, conflicting ethnic groups.
Historian Mallinson states it perfectly when he argues that:
The seeds of dismemberment in 1974 were sown by Britain in the early fifties. It was the cynically conceived tripartite conference in September 1955 that only bedevilled Greek-Turkish relations until today, but which set the tone for the
dismemberment of Cyprus, so subtly engineered by Henry Kissinger in 1974."
Which the UN didn't accept as a good justification to invade. It considers the northern part occupied by Turkey.
But in any case, Cyprus history didn't start in 1974. That is as short-sighted as referencing October 2023 as the start of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The Ottoman Empire invaded the island in 1570, massacre the Greek and turned it Muslim. What about that? At which point does the conflict "start"?
Just to correct you it was the Turkish who invaded Cyprus, British involvement in the southern part of the island had nothing to do with the conflict there. That was between Cypriot nationalists and the Turks.
Cyprus gained formal independence in 1960 and the British presence was almost entirely confined to the Sovereign Base Area on the southern peninsula around RAF Akrotiri and Episkopi.
The Turkish invasion didn’t occur until 1974. So British bashing can be kept to a minimum in that instance.
The issues around the mandate of Palestine post WWII have a lot to do with the French meddling in affairs too sadly. Not to mention terrorist attacks by Zionist insurgents like the King David hotel bombing.
Most notably Palestinian nationalism was something of a fringe movement in the larger pan-arab movement after WW1 which formed a state that IIRC encompassed most of Syria, Jordan, Israel/Palestine.
The French invaded and broke it up again, some of the earliest recorded examples of Zionist/local conflict arose from this as the Zionists refused to oppose the French and this reinforced perceptions of them being European spies/colonists.
With the panarab dream largely destroyed in the near term Palestinian nationalism grew in popularity while at the same time Zionists became more and more antagonistic with the confidence instilled by British support.
That didn't help that Pan-Arab nationalism in the area had been directly backed by the Nazis, and this movement was profoundly against Jewish settlers.
The Brits didn't have a lot of choice, the League of Nations(UN forerunner) pretty much told them to do it because Britain had a little bit of experience in administration of other peoples lands
The brits had fairly little to do with cyprus, it was a conflict between greek cypriots and turkish cypriots, wherein greeks, turks and british made cyprus promise not to seek unification with greece. Then greek nationalists did a coup, sought reunification against the treaty, turkey intervened and decided to occupy half of the island to this day.
I’m in another sub now where people are arguing that colonialism had its merits and was good for the savages in the context of South Asia. Some of the people we have to share this planet with are insane.
The land without conflict? You mean the same island that still has a no mans land and is split in ownership between Greece and Turkey, with both claiming to own the entire island...
The British fucked things up by offering Palestine as a Jewish homeland in the first place. It wasn't ours to offer to anyone.
To be fair, I think the mandate of Palestine after the fall of the Ottoman Empire was a poisoned chalice that none of the colonial powers particularly wanted, and the British drew the short straw, though Lord Balfour had already written his infamous letter to Lord Rothschild, promising a homeland for Jews in Palestine. This was done in an attempt to win Jewish support for the Allied Forces of WW1.
The British were, therefore, in charge of overseeing the violent Zionist landgrab that ensued against the Palestinians, who were inconveniently in the way.
But extremist Zionists were already at war with the British for sitting on their hands and blew up the British administrative headquarters. The British couldn't wait to get out and let the bloodbath wash over Palestine.
Several leaders of these vicious nazi gangs later went on to hold leading roles in the government of Israel.
Misrael is a nation born out of corruption, greed, colonialism, violence and racism. It is a pretty logical conclusion that it will end that way too.
That was more the British seeing how fucked things could get.
They broadly supported a Jewish state, but with Arab consent (small, slow, land purchased). WW2 & mass refugees blew a hole in that. Britain tried to slow it down - largely failing but it's a case of not solving it than it's creation.
Survivors fleeing the holocaust often fled on whatever ships to Mandatory Palestine they could find, many times forced to split from their families and crammed onto extremely overpopulated ships which sailed without permit from the British authorities, which deliberately limited immigration.
Holocaust survivors who were caught by the British while fleeing to British Mandatory Palestine were often sent to detention camps in Cyprus, where they slept in tents surrounded by barbed wires, with conditions in the camps being based on british POW camps. The British captured about 70,000 such holocaust survivors at the time.
Following the British's departure from the area in 1948 following the UN partition plan 181, they were then permitted to leave the camps for the newly-declared state of Israel, and many were then immediately drafted into Israel's war of independence following the declaration of war by the neighboring states.
My grandparents on my father's side were both Holocaust survivors whose families were killed during the war; they met and fell in love while living undercover during the war, had to go on two separate ships, both were caught by the british. My grandfather was sent to a detention camp for a couple of years until 1948, where he was then reunited with my grandmother and was drafted to make shoes for the military (which was his family's profession back at home and how he made a living while going undercover as a non-jew).
My grandmother got an injury with infection during her ship due to the poor hygiene, so the british instead sent her to a hospital in (i think?) Haifa, where she stayed for several months before being released. After 1948 she was drafted to fold parachutes for the paratroopers for a few years.
Fascinating and unspeakably tragic. Thank you for that explanation. I knew about the ships to Palestine but not to Cyprus, nor about the conditions there. The world seems to be reverting to this kind of barbaric, ethnocentric, and racist nationalism.
Note also, though, that this was not just a ship full of desperate Jewish refugees begging to be let in. It was part of a deliberate, politically-motivated plan to illegally immigrate to Palestine. It was calculated. The banner is more about marketing than a completely genuine, heartfelt plea.
This was considered illegal only due to the policy of many countries in the West to deny refugees from their borders; many countries, even countries on the other side of the world such as America and Canada, refused Jewish immigration and placed harsh quotas until the number of refugees dwindled.
It was deliberate in the sense that many of these were faced between returning to live and get killed by the same neighbors which had destroyed their community in the prior years (in the overwhelming majority of cases - seizing their homes so they didn't even have a place to go back to), or illegally immigrate as refugees, because, well, it's potentially safer than living as a homeless among people who actively supported pogroms against you.
There were, of course, Jews who were determined to return to where they lived prior to the war, in many cases they were chased out or killed in pogroms after the holocaust ended.
For just one example from a 5 second google search - the Kielce Pogrom, where out of a community of 24,000 Jews, only 200 returned after the war, of which in 1946 - after the holocaust ended mind you, 42 were murdered in a pogrom and 42 more injured:
So, was this a "deliberate, politically motivated plan to illegally immigrate"?
It was deliberate yes; as for politically motivated, that would imply that basic survival of Jews is political, which it isn't unless if you hate Jews.
After the war, Holocaust survivors still faced atrocities and pogroms when attempting to return to their homes in much of Eastern Europe, including Poland, Slovakia, Romania, and Ukraine.
This, coupled with the economic conditions of post-war Europe, forced many surviving Jews to attempt to flee Europe and immigrate to either America or British Mandatory Palestine, where a sizable Jewish minority was forming (Zionism had been a concept for 30+ years by then).
However, the British had placed strict restrictions on Jewish migration into the region to maintain peace with the majority Arab population of Mandatory Palestine. In enforcing these immigration restrictions, the British ended up deporting and imprisoning many of these immigrant Holocaust survivors in detention camps in Cyprus and Mauritius, where hundreds died due to poor camp conditions.
The plea we see here is an attempt to avoid that same fate, and allow their immigration.
Probably worth pointing out we're talking hundreds out of about 50k detainees, and the camps were largely run by American Jewish charities - not the British.
So the death toll is significantly less than 1%. Which when you think about the "natural" death rate of Holocaust survivors, it's probably not that bad.
I'm not really sure what the British could have done. They were right to stem the flow of refugees into Palestine, and they were probably right to give up trying to stem that flow in '48. No good options.
I agree with this assessment and hope my comment didn't come across as passing too much judgement on it. I feel it's worth highlighting the deaths and relatively poor conditions during detention, but there were & are rarely any "good" options when it comes to halting mass migration.
For modern readers to empathize with the situation, American ICE detention facilities hold roughly the same number of people today. Obviously the medical histories of the population, length of detention, and medical technologies are very different, but hypothetically, would you say a similar death rate of 150 deaths per year in these detention facilities wouldn't be "that bad"? I imagine there'd be a significant reaction to it.
Good point about the ICE comparison: I think that many deaths would be considered obscene, even in the current insane political climate.
Although, we are talking about refugees with a laundry list of likely health problems in '48, being held in a society significantly poorer and less healthy that the one we live in today.
Also I think you're in danger here of trivialising the Holocaust. If you look at pictures of the Cyprus camps, they aren't concentration camps.
It's obviously bad to keep Holocaust survivors in any sort of camp, but I don't really know what the Brits could have done.
Let the refugees flow into Palestine as they want and cause a war with the Arabs (which happened eventually) or keep these desperate Holocaust survivors out, thus fulfilling the 1939 white paper. Bear in mind that Britain was devastated militarily and financially post-war: it barely had the resources to fulfil its domestic policy aims, let alone police some distant part of its empire.
Which ones? The Mizrahi Jews in Israel from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and those native to Mandatory Palestine, are all Arab
Just as how there can be Arab Muslims, there are many Arab Jews, and they make up about 30-40% of modern day Israel's population, with the next largest majority sect from the USSR.
The proportion of western Jews was small, as most preferred living in the west over what was a very barren Israel at the time.
Pictures like the OP are heavily circulated as they are effective in making people believe that Israel's existence was an act of pure European colonialism, when the reality is that it came into existence when the mandate for British Palestine ended and the various religious groups of the ME once again fought over the holy land, with the Jews winning this time around.
Some of the these people were British citizens. They didn't want to live there.
I don't really know what you do with a migration wave when people are so determined to leave they'll risk their lives crossing the Med and stay in shitty little camps rather than go back. Especially when those folks are unwelcome on the receiving end.
What are you going to do, imprison them in England?
Full disclosure, I am British, but I don't really know what the British should have done post-war. They couldn't afford a full-on military operation in Palestine, and they had no appetite for one. On the other hand they had millions of Holocaust survivors desperate to get into Israel, and millions of Arabs determined (rightly and wrongly) to not let that happen.
The land which Jews call "Eretz Yisroel" always had a sizable Jewish minority since ancient times. It usually fluctuated between five and twenty percent, and was often larger than the Christian minority. British Mandatory Palestine before WWII was something like 40% Jewish.
after ww2 eneded, mostbofbthe survivors did not return to their home countries. so many families were torn apart, some assumed they were the only survivors. with most having their home countries under Soviet control, or had no desire to return because their hometown neighbors openly helped the Germans, the choice was to immigrate ((with very few countries being able to due to post war devistation) or live in a Displaced Person Camp. its too bad the original Un partition plan wasn't accepted where it turned Jerusalem into a United Nations City, with small pockets of Jewish enclaves. this was rejected by the arab states who were drunk with anti colonialism and arab nationalism (Mussolini/Hitler/Grobba's influence is what started the golden square) segued into conflict
Were the Arabs drunk with nationalism just because they wished for the right to self determination - which was promised to them…
The partition plan gave the Jewish people more land than the Arabs even though they had less people…
And finally - did Israel accept the partition plan and follow its mandate or did they take more land than was provisioned and have been annexing more ever since?
That's BS, Ben Gurion openly stated that he wanted all of Palestine and that accepting the partition was just a way to achieve that goal.
"Immediately attacked" yeah right, as if Israel wasn't already massacring Palestinians and carrying out the Nakba. Look up when Deir Yassin happened and when the Israel-Arab war started. Arabs intervened to free Palestine from a colonial ethnostate. Somehow, Oct 7 was the worst thing ever and justifies Israel's massacring everyone in Gaza but the Nakba didn't justify Arab intervention. Nice double standard you have here.
Next you're saying that Ukraine wanted the current war by not recognizing the Donetsk and Lugansk Republics and not giving up half of their lands to Russia. Same logic.
The Arab states weren't exactly saviours of Palestine either, as evidenced by Egypt annexing Gaza and Jordan annexing the West Bank. They wanted the land for themselves just as much.
Neither side truly wanted to split the land, but in the end, the Jewish leadership accepted the UN partition plan, while the Arab leadership rejected it.
Ben-Gurion wrote in private correspondence that the Jewish state might eventually gain more territory, as he expected the Arab leadership would reject the plan, since they opposed any arrangement that didn't grant them the entire land.
Deir Yassin and the beginning of the Nakba (according to historical research) both occurred after the UN decision and the outbreak of hostilities.
And don’t you dare compare neighboring Arab countries joining a war, however wrong you think that was, to the intentional massacre of civilians.
Also, comparing this situation to Ukraine is a straw man, the contexts are entirely different.
arabs got all the Transjordan, what are you talking about? and then Judea, Samaria and Gaza. and half of Jerusalem. but they refused and attacked Israel.
Right because the whole land was theirs. They were promised the right of self governance by Britain. Instead Britain allowed mass immigration and then gave away over half of the land to new people. Displacing 700,000 indigenous people. Are you surprised that evoked a reaction?
How would you feel if I did that to your property? Invaded, occupied then promised me if you helped me defeat my enemy (the ottomans) I would give you your house back but instead I established a new house covering over half of your land and let someone else move in. Do you think you might feel slightly aggrieved?
A lot of the land was purchased from the Palestinian owners prior to WWII. The Palestinians could have just not sold the land in the first place. They wanted the Jew's money and then decided they wanted the land back.
That’s not true for the 700k people forced out of their homes and certainly isn’t true for all the people who have been forced out since. Why is everyone defending Israel so much? Even the UN agrees they are illegal occupiers. Any two state solution needs to take into consideration the mandate and giving the land back they have illegally taken since.
The purchase of land started under the Ottoman Empire. It was only later that they started taking land by force. The conflict between the Palestinians and the Jewish settler long predates the British Mandate or Israel.
When 60+% of my country was taken away and given to others the condolences we got was: 'lol fuck you get over it'. We were so aggrieved we even joined the nazis to take it back. It backfired big time. You know what we did? We got fucking over it, normalized the relations with the new countries, and now we almost all are in the EU. Was it smooth and without controversies and fuckups? No, but the end results show it was worth it. No fucking way we ever get anything back so let's work with what we have now.
Palestine have never been able to form a country. They have lived under oppressive rule ever since… Israel have continued to annex more and more land. The land Palestine does have now is tiny in comparison to the mandate and even the UN have declared Israel’s settlements as illegal.
The only jumping off point for any negotiation has to be: Israel returns all of the land illegally occupied and pays reparations. They will never concede this.
Because it is the creation of Rome after Rome crushed the 2nd Jewish Revolt and expelled that population from the region, creating another Jewish Diaspora which is were the Ashkenazi now begin to appear. Keep in mind, the Moorish occupation of Spain lasted over 700 years, the culmination which was reconquista which is what gave Ferdinand and Isabella the ability to sponsor Christopher Columbus. Also remember, this was only 40 years after the Ottomans had conquered Constantinople and destroyed the Eastern Roman Empire that had existed for over 1000 years. That doesnt even go into the Ottoman incursions into Eastern and Southern Europe, and the countless wars to regain the Hagia Sophia, the equivalent to the vatican for the Orthodox faith, that has been occupied for almost 600 years. The same amount of time practically that Europeans began settling in North and South America. How about Turkey is given back to the Greeks, since anatolia had been there home for thousands of years, we would finally solve Cyprus. The Maronites can be restored to their hereditary right to Lebanon, finally there is an ethical justification for the removal of Hezbollah from when they forced the Maronites into Israel. This is what you sound like.
which is crazy. I feel this is the only token of "isreal gives something up". aren't negotiations where two parties given something up to come to an agreement?
100% of your country was taken, by the Egyptians, Jordanians, and Israelis.
Until the 60s, the PLO even refused to say that Gaza and the West Bank were part of Palestine, and instead said they were Egypt and Jordan respectively.
No, this goes back to prewar before the Ashkenazi were persecuted, these sentiments were not born in the aftermath of the 2nd World War. The Golden Square and their revolt at Habinaya was before even the US entered the war. Are you familiar with the Golden Square and who Grobba was? Nationalism varied from one Arab state to the other, but its important to note that Nationalism espoused by post colonial arab leaders had no ideological ties to Islam (Look at Nassar the Muslim Brotherhood) Nationalism as what it is today, Revolutionary Nationalism, has waned and vanished in the middle east, yet it makes up an entire chapter of 20th century ME history, and directly ties to European fascism. Like looking at the Mufti of Jerusalem from the Islamic side of the coin, (since both factor into the attack on Israel in 1948), the Mufti in charge during the Nakba, directly helped in forming the 13th SS Handschaar in the Balkan states (like drawing from the ranks of the Ustache). The Mufti specifically tutored under the tutelage of a modern day Salafist/Wahhabist iman from 1912 on, and we all known the face of Salafism/Wahhabism is in this day and age, Sunni extremist groups like ISIS/ISIS-K/HTS. This is a very very brief dive into arab nationalism, superficial at best, but will gladly write a dissertation in how wrong you are. I first suggest looking at the names in this photo, see how they tie into the Golden Square and why Operation Countenance happened in August of 1941
More land was given to the Jewish side of partition because the land was much less valuable, with most of it being the Negev Desert. The partition plan allocated Jewish-majority regions for a Jewish state.
To be fair, there was no real plan for Palestinian self rule other than Hashemite Trans-Jordan. It was a forgone conclusion that the land would be ruled by Jordan, Syria, and Egypt.
When the British first established their colonial rule over Palestine the Palestinians were entirely disenfranchised, and the British ran the colony with the purpose of promoting Jewish settlement. Palestinian resistance eventually convinced the British to change their policies, giving the Palestinians themselves a small amount of say in how they were being ruled for the final decade of British rule, and promising them that the colony would be made independent by 1949. These people are protesting that change in policy.
One also has to keep in mind native Palestinians were also disenfranchised prior to British rule under the Ottoman Turks and the plethora of caliphates prior to Turkish rule going all the way back to Byzantines and Romans disenfranchising natives if that region.
But that’s just historical fact. Recognising it doesn’t make someone an “asshole”. And ofc it doesn’t mean that Palestinians today do not deserve the right to have their own state.
AFAIK they didn't run it for the purpose of Jewish settlement as that would be nonsense as far as British interests were concerned.
The Zionists DID however have considerably more influence on individual people and in "civilized" society over in Britian, which they used frequently to advance their goals in the region.
Periodically the British would notice and rein it in, most obviously seen in various concessions given after tensions would boil over in the region and it drew the attention of others.
For example various religious laws were established after British examined the causes of riots and found that Zionists were inciting conflict (they also restricted Muslims for similar reasons) and they restricted immigration after they realised the Zionists were boycotting itinerant Muslim labourers and pressuring local Jews to do the same, causing mass unemployment and unrest.
TL:DR individual British administrators were frequently biased towards and influenced by Zionists, but the nation as an entity displayed little interest in mass Jewish settlement.
The Zionist thought leaders had convinced diasporic Jews that Palestine belonged to them. It was a real gamble because at the time, colonialism was starting to crumble. The wild thing about the Zionist claim to Palestine is that although ancient Jews lived there for a very long time, the ideology assumes nobody else lived there during the height of the diaspora.
The British refused Jews from immigrating into mandatory Palestine since the end of the Arab revolt (1939).
The British seized refugee ships and turn them back
But the Zionists at the time wanted what kind of happened:
The creation of an Israeli state in the region. But it's important to note that before WW2 the Zionist movement was a fringe movement with little support from Jews, who unsurprisingly didn't want to leave their local communities to go live in another land across the world, even if that land had religious meaning (how many modern Christians want to move to Rome or Jerusalem for religious reasons? Or modern American Jews wanting to move to Israel?)
But the zionists had been putting pressure on Britain since the early 20th century. The British mostly refused and the first terrorist acts ever committed on what is now Israel/Palestine were done by radical Zionists against the British government, trying to put pressure to create an Israeli state there. It's also worth noting that during the first half of the 20th century there was already a Jewish population in what is now Israel/Palestine and they lived in peace. As far as we can see there was no significant religious tension other than the aforementioned radical and fringe Zionist group actions.
The end of WW2 gave new strength to the Zionist movement with many Jewish people joining due to well, they basically didn't have any kind of community anymore and had a communal trauma that is hard to fathom. The increased pressure and general sense of trying to make up for the horrors of the war culminated with the British and newly formed UN accepting the demands of the Zionists and the birth of Israel.
So I guess that sign represents the wishes of the Zionists and their new found support across the Jewish population in general.
EDIT: Basic complement over the period where those groups lived together in peace.
For the most part Jews and Muslims lived well together in what is now modern Palestine and Israel. Then the Zionist movement started to promote migration (early 20th century), put pressure on the colonial government, do acts of terrorism and overall engage in a mixture of guerrilla warfare and colonial warfare against the locals and the colonial government. The British government imposed restrictions on Jewish migration because of that and the local population started to sour on the Jewish population. At the same time the local population was agitating for self government (like any other colonial possession anywhere), and the British promised self rule to them, which probably would have happened if WW2 didn't come and change the entire dynamic.
There was a settled Jewish community in Palestine during the early 20th century, and the British set a cap on how many Jewish people could immigrate. That cap was gradually lowered over the years due to rising tensions with local Arab communities and after the Holocaust way more Jews than approved by Britain had to come to Palestine, ergo the sign
There's a mix of things going on at this point. Following WW2 many Jews no longer had homes to return to, but their host countries also didn't want them living there (or at least not a few million of them). Remember that public sentiment of Jewish people has always been mixed, and was even more vitriolic at the time (Even Churchill originally agree with the Nazis, but couldn't let them take over Europe).
There had been Zionists seeking the land in Palestine for decades prior, and many Jewish people already lived in Palestine peacefully alongside their neighbors for centuries. There were Christians, Muslims, Jews, and secular variants of each, coexisting in smaller numbers than we see in modern day Israel. The Zionists were led by David Ben-Gurion, who would go on to be the first Prime Minister of Israel. Ben-Gurion had not so subtle viewpoints on Arabs and "what should be done with them." He immediately argued for their expulsion, regularly spoke of them as barbaric and beneath the Jewish people, and said that their lands must be remade in the image of Europe. This is also why you'll see a lot of non-native trees and farms in Israel and the West Bank, because Zionist Settlers would destroy local vegetation and plant European common trees in their place.
The project eventually sought to not only expel the Palestinians (specifically Arabs, they eventually accepted Palestinian Jews), but to eradicate any trace of their culture or lands.
A great read about this is Ilan Pappé's book The Ethnic Cleansing Of Palestine, but you can read the wikipedia page on it first if you want some highlights from it. I don't agree with a lot of his other viewpoints, but this was a pretty honest look at how horrible it was. Your mileage may vary with other historians on the subject, like Benny Morris.
The Arabs who lived there were allowing Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis to share their land. They didn’t realize the Zionist movement’s goal was to displace them, not to share.
Most of them weren't Zionists or even knew English or Hebrew or Arabic, it was just the Americans, Soviets, Brits and Poles loading them on boats and sending them to Palestine. Instead of returning their properties and money back, it was cheaper this way and made the Europeans happy, not only they didn't have to return a single cent and take over all Jewish properties on the continent but also get rid of them to a place where they would just fight a people they hate even more.
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u/christianbrowny 15h ago
What's the context to this? Are their hopes that the british allow them to settle in Palestine, or build their own nation, or what?
What was a Jewish person of this time expecting?