My book stridently condemns – not ‘absolves’ – British imperialism in Palestine

I am grateful to Mondoweiss for publishing no less than two reviews of my new book Weaponising Anti-Semitism, and for the complementary things both Michael Steven Smith and Nu’man Abd al-Wahid wrote about it.

However, I’m afraid that Abd al-Wahid’s review contains a gross distortion – one which, as an anti-imperialist, I find particularly galling.

He claims that “Winstanley, as is the custom of British writers, downplays, even absolves, the historical role of British imperialism in creating the Palestinian predicament.”

While there’s no doubt that many – indeed, most – British writers downplay the crimes of the British empire generally, I am certainly not one of them. And I think that any fair-minded reader of my work would agree with that.

Abd al-Wahid writes as if he made up his mind about my book before reading it and then refused to let the actual text alter his foregone conclusions. His quotations from my book on this are highly selective at best.

It is simply untrue to say that my book “absolves” the British empire for its crimes in Palestine. On page 236, for example, I describe the Balfour declaration as “the infamous British colonial document which handed Palestine over to the Zionist movement.”

But more than such passing references, Abd al-Wahid ignores important sections of the book, which go into some detail to explain the historical responsibility of the British empire – and particularly the British Labour Party – for the Zionist colonization of Palestine which ultimately led to the expulsion of the Palestinians.

Chapter 2 focuses on the Jewish Labour Movement, the modern-day “left-wing” Zionist group within the British Labour Party. It also explains the history of labour Zionism in Britain more generally. Page 50:

Zionism’s left wing is just as colonial and racist as its right wing. It actively sought alliance with the British empire. Labour Zionism’s settler-colonialism was viewed favourably by many non-Jewish British Labour leaders . . . Party leader Herbert Morrison was an ardent anti-communist and fervent Zionist. He viewed Zionism as a way to transform Jewish people into “first class colonisers” who would “have the real, good, old, Empire-building qualities.”

Similarly, on page 51, I explain how “Ramsay MacDonald (Britain’s first Labour prime minister) heaped praise on ‘the Jewish colonisers in Palestine.’” Tellingly his pamphlet A Socialist in Palestine was stridently anti-Semitic, condemning the majority of Jews at the time for their anti-Zionism, using rather sickening language: the “views upon life” of what MacDonald called “the rich plutocratic Jew … make one anti-Semitic. He has no country, no kindred. Whether as a sweater or a financier, he is an exploiter of everything he can squeeze. He is behind every evil that Governments do.”

MacDonald had visited Palestine in 1922, and his pamphlet was published by Poale Zion the forerunner of today’s Jewish Labour Movement. This might seem to some readers like a counterfactual. But it was not uncommon for Zionists like MacDonald to be motivated by anti-Semitism. As with the pro-Israel far-right today, both Zionists and (other) anti-Semites agree that Jews should be made to leave their native countries and become colonisers in Palestine.

I continue my explanation of British imperialism’s motives and how British Zionists encouraged them on page 52 (emphasis in original):

Poale Zion argued that it was a natural ally for the British Labour Party. It had a point. Not only did Labour have pro-imperialist policies, but Labour governments up until the 1960s actually ran the British empire itself. Labour’s imperialism led to it being generally in favour of settler-colonial movements like Zionism. Going into the 1945 election, Labour’s official policy was to promote a (European) Jewish state in Palestine—a country whose Arab Indigenous people were overwhelmingly Muslim and Christian. 

In what way does this passage downplay or absolve the historical role of British imperialism in the Zionist colonisation of Palestine? The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t – quite the contrary.

Abd al-Wahid claims that I failed “to mention that it was Britain who had placed the Zionist movement in the position to take over Palestine. By 1945, Britain’s job was done.” He is incorrect to write that I failed to mention this. Again, he seems to have forgotten page 52 (emphasis added): 

In 1944, Labour’s National Executive Committee issued a party policy document on global issues and the “colonies.” Jews from Europe should “enter this tiny land in such numbers as to become a majority,” the document argued. After more than 50 years of Zionist colonisation under the tutelage of the British empire, Jews in Palestine were still vastly outnumbered by the Indigenous Palestinians. To achieve a majority, the document argued, there should be a mass expulsion of Palestinians. There was a necessity in Palestine “for transfer of population. Let the Arabs be encouraged to move out, as the Jews move in.” That’s what happened only three years later—800,000 Palestinians were “encouraged” by Zionist militias to flee from their bombs, guns, and knives as the state of Israel was established on the rubble.

Bear in mind that this was no mere abstract policy document – the Labour Party went on the following year to enter government, after winning the general election in a landslide. It seems strange that Abd al-Wahid failed to quote any of this passage. He is selectively quoting my book to make the facts fit around his conclusion. Page 52 continues:

The principal author of the [expulsion] policy was Hugh Dalton, chancellor in the 1945 Labour government (the same government that founded the NHS and the modern welfare state). Dalton was a particularly fanatical example of UK Labour Zionism. His policy called for the Jewish state to expand its borders into Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. According to Dalton’s biographer, this “Zionism plus plus” vision fell short of an earlier draft in which Dalton had advocated “throwing open Libya or Eritrea to Jewish settlement, as satellites or colonies to Palestine.”

Elsewhere in the book (page 112) I describe this as a “vision that endorsed the ethnic cleansing of Palestine [and] was part of [Labour’s] traditional commitment to empire and colonialism.”

Again, this directly implicates Labour (who led the 1945 government) and hence the British empire, in the expulsion of the Palestinians. That is the opposite of “absolving” the British empire.

The main example Abd al-Wahid gives of my alleged absolution of the British empire is that I failed to mention that the Nakba “commenced while Britain still ruled Palestine, and that the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population of Palestine began under Britain’s watch.”

For this highly misleading claim, he relies on my statement of the fact that, from 1945, Britain “began reneging on its pledge to hand Palestine over to the Zionist movement…” (page 51).

But he conveniently omits the rest of the sentence (emphasis added): “… in order to found a Jewish state, the two allies violently fell out (just as the British and the Boers had done in South Africa).”

As already noted, and on the very next page (52, emphasis in original) I wrote that: “Labour governments … ran the British empire itself … Labour’s official policy was to promote a (European) Jewish state in Palestine.”

The reviewer continues his habit of selectivity with a quotation of Ghassan Kanafani’s seminal text, The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine.

Abd al-Wahid writes: “As the Palestinian revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani argued, the Zionists in 1947 were plucking ‘the fruits of the defeat of the 1936 revolt, which the outbreak of the war had prevented it from doing sooner.’”

But only one sentence before Abd al-Wahid chose to commence this quote, Kanafani had written the following (emphasis added): “All this enabled the Zionist movement in the mid-1940s to step up its previously only partial conflict with British colonialism in Palestine, after long years of alliance. Thus, in 1947 circumstances were favourable for it to pluck…”

So, by writing that the Zionist movement and the British empire “violently fell out” I was, in fact, making a very similar point to Kanafani (who I reference elsewhere in the book). It’s not unusual for colonial proxies to fall out with their overseers. As I wrote, it also happened in South Africa, and history is often full of such complications.

I have not claimed that my book is a detailed history of the Nakba of 1948 or of the British occupation more generally. If it were, it would have gotten into far more detail about British responsibility (for that, see my colleague David Cronin’s excellent book Balfour’s Shadow). But the Nakba did form an important part of the historical context for the topic of my book: the ongoing battle over weaponised anti-Semitism inside the British left.

For reasons I can’t explain, Abd al-Wahid, has in the past, seemed quite determined to disprove the fact that the Israel lobby exists (without presenting evidence).

He seems to be continuing this habit in his review and even misquotes me to do so.

In reference to Jeremy Newmark, Abd al-Wahid writes, “Winstanley claims [he] is a ‘veteran professional Israeli Lobbyist’.”

This is a double misquotation. What I actually wrote about Newmark was this: “he is a veteran professional Israel lobbyist” (page 44, emphasis added). 

While easy to miss, these two subtle distinctions mark significant differences. Firstly, I do not use the capital “L” when referring to the Israel lobby, because it is not a formal title of an organisation. Rather, the Israel lobby is a diffuse network of organisations and individuals, many of whom have significant ties to the Israeli state itself (including Newmark).

Secondly, and more importantly, I would not describe Newmark as an “Israeli” lobbyist, because (as far as I know) he is not an Israeli citizen, he is British (although, of course, as a Jewish person he would be entitled to citizenship under Israel’s racist “Law of Return”).

I do not intend to suggest that Abd al-Wahid has deliberately misrepresented me here as a smear. Rather, this sloppy misquotation is more likely to be the result of – once again – not letting the facts of the text get in the way of a foregone conclusion.