The third wave of recognitions, especially the European ones, regarding the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, represents a strategic shift and a natural outcome of the justice of the Palestinian cause and the steadfastness of the Palestinian people amid the ancient fractures in the homeland’s terrain, spanning nearly eight decades against a colonial project characterized from the start by replacement and extermination under exclusive British patronage.

The notable aspect of this third wave of recognitions of the Palestinian state is the British stance. As the great power and heir of the colonial empire with the deepest experience in Palestine and the Arab East among European countries, Britain has (morally) joined in affirming the Palestinians’ right not only to an independent state but to human existence on the land in the face of a project of uprooting and genocide.

It is evident that any neutral historian can determine that the Zionist colonial settlement project in Palestine, represented by the Jewish state in Herzl’s form, would not have transformed into the state form of Ben-Gurion without absolute British sponsorship. Here it can be emphasized that the British colonial project created the major intellectual and political prerequisites for the Zionist organization to declare, consolidate, and enable the Jewish state on Palestinian land.

The opening of the first British consulate (1838) in Jerusalem occurred amid the fierce Anglo-French struggle following Muhammad Ali Pasha’s campaign, supported by France, on Palestine and the Arab East. British intervention alongside the Ottoman state to eliminate the Ottoman governor’s influence (Muhammad Ali Pasha) henceforth allowed Britain direct interference in the economic, cultural, and religious systems in our lands. The establishment of the British Palestine Exploration Fund (1865) opened the country to what is known as the Torah studies, which were adopted by early Zionist/Christian formations envisioning the Jewish state at the dawn of the Iron Age 1200 years BCE.

The colonial (supremacist) vision of the white man culminated in the issuance of the Balfour Declaration during World War I’s peak, when the Zionist movement had reached twenty years since its founding. These twenty years witnessed the crystallization and maturation of the alliance between the Zionist and British projects.

Under British Mandate authority (1917-1948), the Zionist organization and the Jewish Agency as the institutional arm of Zionism established and consolidated the authority of Jewish immigrants through the Mandate charter, which explicitly included the enforcement of the Balfour Declaration. Thus, the administration of the country directly moved towards establishing the Jewish state. The Jewish Agency was officially authorized to build the Jewish state’s institutions, including the military force (Haganah), on one hand, and to maximize Jewish immigration and acquire available and possible land, including 197,000 dunams of state land from the Ottoman land system, which was exclusively owned by the Palestinian people.

In the context of Jewish immigration waves that enjoyed British patronage and support, the population in Palestine reached about 2 million, of whom approximately 550,000 were Jewish immigrants, less than one-third of the population in Mandatory Palestine.

It should be noted that the Mandate government issued several hundred laws, regulations, and military orders (emergency and martial laws), as well as discriminatory civil, economic, and educational laws, which exhausted the country and violated its sanctities and moral and human nature in an unprecedented way in its ancient and modern history.

The Great Palestinian Revolt of 1936 was a comprehensive moral and national expression to end this colonial state that destroyed the country and made it vulnerable to the Zionist project.

Britain realized the impossibility of the Palestinian people’s submission and acceptance of the Jewish state and the military mandate authority, as various investigation committees proved. It resorted to trying to contain the Palestinian national movement by announcing the formation of the Peel Commission to investigate the causes of this revolt, which recommended ending the mandate and partitioning Palestine. This was officially reflected in the British White Paper of 1939, which proposed partitioning Palestine. The partition project became the international project in UN Resolution 181 after Britain referred the Palestine issue to the United Nations. Britain then left the country on 15/5/1948, leaving it open to the Jewish Agency, the Haganah army, and other militias without any political arrangements to preserve security in Palestine before its forces departed.

The catastrophe and Nakba were the inevitable results of colonial policies over the three decades of this mandate, not only as a blatant violation of human values but also of the League of Nations system first and the United Nations laws later.

It should also be noted that Britain, as well as the active European countries, have denied all international laws, including Resolutions 181 and 194, followed by absolute support for the expansion and occupation of the remaining part of Palestine in 1967, and continued to adopt the Israeli stance considering the Palestinian national movement a terrorist organization.

We truly consider the collapse of European countries’ recognition of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, including Britain, especially amid the Gaza massacre, as a moral value of the peoples, forces, and parties of these countries, and a tacit governmental apology for the disasters and calamities inflicted upon us that defy human understanding.

It is time, as the French president said in his speech at the international conference, to triumph for justice and human rights and to save the Palestinian people from this death, as the moral collapse of the international community in Palestine will return the world to the law of the jungle.