One more thing white British people can do in response to Gaza: read and share British history

In British history, we can find the blueprint for every layer of Israel’s action in Gaza and, by failing to acknowledge that, we struggle to stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine.

The endless stream of violent, merciless and gut-wrenching content from the frontline of genocide in Gaza feels like something most of us have never experienced before.

It’s impossible (and mainly pointless) to say whether this is the most brutal and merciless onslaught on civilians in our lifetime, because so much else is hidden from view, by a morally pragmatic media and our own willingness to shut out far away trauma.

The scale of persecution of Uyghurs in China is estimated at one million humans forced into internment camps from 2014–2021, but the fear of and reliance on China by our media and political and financial elites, as well as the invisibility of these experiences from social media, keeps this genocidal oppression out of view.

In Sudan, ethnic cleansing and crimes against ethnic Massalit and non-Arabic communities by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces continue, including the murder of 15,000 people in the West Darfur city of El Geneina in 2023. Media silence and government inaction on Sudan is deep and disgusting, as the British government attempted to suppress stories that criticised UAE for its role supplying arms to the RFS. Sudan now faces a famine predicted to be the worst the world has seen since Ethiopia 40 years ago, with aid deliveries being blocked by warring armies, yet the world’s worst humanitarian crisis gets barely a trickle of coverage.

So, rather than any different or worse as an event, the Gazan genocide is in our faces, every day, from the moment we wake up until we go to sleep, so our experience of this vivid, visceral, relentless experience of extreme human suffering feels different and worse.

But, what to do with these experiences and feelings?

Pay attention to Palestinians, listen to Palestinians, donate to Palestinians, protest with Palestians — all of these. And one more, if I might humbly suggest it to other white British people: read and share British colonial history.

In British history, we can find the blueprint for every layer of Israel’s actions in Gaza and by failing to acknowledge that, we struggle to stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine.

Although I studied history as an undergraduate, I’m not a proper historian and there are many infinitely better, more nuanced and more comprehensive versions of this colonial history (see the list at the bottom for some examples). But I’m going to risk looking lightweight because I feel like reading and sharing this history, discussing it in the context of the Gazan genocide, is part of the responsibility of white British people like me.

A British colonial modus operandi: meeting retaliation against colonial oppression with vicious collective punishment

The blueprint for Israel’s abhorrent colonial action is British, where any response to colonial oppression was met with vicious collective punishment

The Mau Mau Rebellion against oppressive colonial rule in Kenya in the early 1950s, which saw 32 Europeans civilians killed, was met with an inexplicably brutal and genocidal response from Britain, executing, torturing or maiming 90,000 Kikuyu and forcibly resettling 160,000, many into detention camps, according to the Kenya Human Rights Commission.

The peaceful protest at the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, Punjab, in 1919 against colonial brutality, was met with 1,650 rounds of ammunition onto the trapped crowd, killing over 1,000 and injuring over 1,200.

The Indian Uprising (or First War of Independence) of 1857 was a response to extreme corporate exploitation, extraction and oppression by The British East India Company, which acted as a sovereign power of the British Crown. Around 6,000 of the 40,000 British living in India were killed and the British meted out a vast and ongoing collective punishment, killing around 100,000 Indian civilians, often wiping out the population of entire towns and villages.

“The orders went out to shoot every soul…. It was literally murder… I have seen many bloody and awful sights lately but such a one as I witnessed yesterday I pray I never see again”, wrote a 19 year old British officer, Edward Vibart.

Israel is simply following a British colonial precedent.

Israeli itself, is a British colonial project

Israel was carved out of Palestine by our ignorant, arrogant & deeply racist colonial ancestors. It was our project.

It is ironic that the eternal response from sources of power (media, government, academia) is that the Israel / Palestine situation is so very complicated. So complicated that clear cut conclusions cannot be drawn, action is impossible and moral disgust is only for the ignorant. So complicated that Israel is cleansed of its cruelty and inhumanity. Yet, throughout our colonial history and specifically in our role establishing Israel, Britain deliberately and systematically ignored all complexity and nuance.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916, which drew crayon lines on maps from an office in London to divide up the Arabian Peninsula well before the war was over and which still shape middle-eastern boundaries and crises today, was co-designed by British and French diplomats that had barely visited the region. The plan sought to cut through and dominate a complex web of interests and rights, cultures and territories and directly went back on pledges of freedom given by the British to the Arabs in exchange for their support against the Ottoman Empire.

Every aspect of this British colonial modus operandi are echoed in Britain’s role in establishing an Israeli state in Palestine.

The Balfour Declaration of 1917, which committed to support a Jewish homeland in Palestine, having already promised Palestine to Arabs as an independent state, and the 40 years of advocacy that ended with the establishment of an independent Israeli state in 1948, was just one in a long line of arm’s length colonial impositions on indigenous populations by the British.

Threaded through all of this, of course, was profound racism.

Talking about the rights of Palestinian people to their land in 1937, Winston Churchill said:

I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right.

He went on..

I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.

This history has been missing from our learning, debate and culture

This history was almost entirely absent from what I studied at school and University. And I don’t mean missing from the odd class or amongst the optional modules, I mean missing as a foundational layer and a perspective on all British history.

Through the lens of brutal and exploitative British colonialism that transformed this nation into what it is today, rather than the concept of British exceptionalism and national predestination, much of British history looks and sounds very different.

In 1700, Britain was a backwater. London, compared to a city like Smyrna in the Ottoman Empire, was tiny, poor and unsophisticated. It wasn’t until the wealth started to flow from The East India Company’s corporate exploitation of India that Britain and London in particular grew in wealth, size and significance. Every layer of wealth that followed was accumulated either directly or indirectly from further British colonial exploitation, right through to the most brutal, oppressive and profitable of all: the sugar plantations in the Caribbean.

Conversely, the Bengal region of India was one of the richest in the world in 1700. After systemic exploitation by the East India Company over a century, it became one of the poorest. Historian William Dalrymple calls this “the single largest transfer of wealth until the Nazis”. Our rise from 1700 to the Victorian era we glorify was tied inextricably with the decline — even decimation — of the regions we colonised, oppressed and exploited.

I’m embarrassed that these truths were missing from the history I studied, because it undermines the value of almost all of that time and work. And I’m embarrassed that they were missing from almost two decades of work as an activist, campaigner and charity worker. Would I have regarded something like Fair trade as such a wonderful example of ethical social enterprise through the lens of transformational, exploitative and brutal British colonialism? Does paying a few extra pence to an Indian tea farmer really represent an ethical response to the deliberate deconstruction of Indian production and drastic impoverishment of its people through British colonialism?

This points to a rather painful thread through much of my career — focusing on the little, nice feeling things that not only piss into the wind of historic social injustice, but also deliberately distract us from what the big, systemic things that are required. I spent, for example, too many years campaigning for more individual action and incremental change on the environment. What George Monbiot rightly calls “micro-consumerist bollocks” has, for decades, kept people distracted from what is actually going on — the continued acceleration of highly profitable environmental destruction by a small group of powerful people, through darker and darker tactics, like removal of public protections and rights to protest.

In this case, by attempting to embody and uphold our sense of national morality by buying Fair trade tea from India, we help keep at bay any meaningful engagement with our historic relationship with these parts of the world, with our colonial legacy and with the need for acknowledgement, apology and reparation.

And, yes, this matters now, including to the people of Gaza.

Our shared understanding of British history, gathered in our classrooms, through the stories we tell each other and from the media we consume, is the beating heart of Britain’s sense of self. This national identity is still shaped by a belief that Britain has always been one of the good guys, the well intentioned bringer of civilisation, the magnanimous provider of progress. Yes, a few scrapes and mis-steps here and there and a few bad apples, but, fundamentally, the version of our history that we maintain tells us we’ve been on the side of good. And certainly not one of the most brutal, racist and exploitative colonial regimes in human history, which laid the foundations for the wealth of modern Britain.

This is a big problem, for us and for Palestine.

First, because of the way that we have obscured and warped our history, from our schools curriculum through to the violent shutting down of more accurate accounts of the British Empire, we don’t acknowledge, redress or face up to the open wounds we have left across the earth. Progress is slow, reluctant and often redoubles the pain and harm. There have been weak official expressions of regret from the British government for Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar in 1919, but no apology; the British Museum has loaned a few of the spoils of colonial theft that fill its archive, but there is still a law preventing the British Museum from returning them; there was reluctant and obstructionist participation by the UK government in the Mau Mau lawsuit in the 2010s, that it ultimately lost, but continued to deny legal liability for the actions of the colonial government in Kenya.

After this latter judgement, which resulted in payments of £20 million to survivors and families of the Kikuyu slaughter, torture and imprisonment, Desmond Tutu said that “It sends a signal to the world that no matter how badly human beings behave towards one another, goodness ultimately prevails”. This beautiful human was right that it sends a powerful signal when it happens, but the British government continues to prove him wrong that there is anything inevitable about justice or even basic acknowledgement when it comes to colonial oppression and brutality — even genocide.

Not only can Israel use British colonial action as a blueprint for its collective punishment of Gazans, it can also use its continued denial of responsibility as a blueprint for what surrounds and follows it. In that sense, the explicit and implied support for Israel, from both the Tory government and Labour opposition, has added another layer to Britain’s own colonial history of brutality, denial and justification.

Our colonial history continues to be intertwined with Israel’s: Britain’s continued lack of accountability for the lives or welfare of the people it colonised exists within Israel’s oppression of its Palestinian citizens; and Israel’s lack of accountability for this Gazan genocide exists within Britain’s continued denial of it’s colonial crimes.

The only way we can move out of and beyond this is to face our colonial history head on. This should include acknowledgement, apology and reparations. It should include the reshaping of our national identity and our role in the world based on these truths and our brave and honest response to them; it should necessitate proactive engagement with the profound harm of our ignorant and racist legacy in Sudan, Palestine, Kashmir and so many other places of conflict and oppression around the world.

This isn’t weak, anti-British hand-wringing, this is self-aware, strong and authentic global leadership. The kind that Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Priti Patel cannot fathom, as they would have no role in anything self-aware, strong or authentic.

Secondly, more personally, any feelings of solidarity with Gazans are weakened, if not entirely undermined, by living in a society that is not only so deeply complicit, but also blind to how these colonial truths live in our daily lives. And that feeling of weakness extends not only to any attempt to stand with the people of Palestine, but to any attempt to stand alongside those in Britain with heritage in former British colonial lands.

British colonial racism and oppression lives just as much in our culture, systems and structures as it does in our foreign policy. These are connected, interdependent and mutually reinforcing. By failing to acknowledge and act on one, vociferously and consistently, we dilute and weaken any efforts to acknowledge and act on the other.

Did I protest about the Windrush Scandal, which saw the British government, yet again, go back on promises and invalidate and pursue black British citizens with illegal immigration enforcement? Did I stand in solidarity? I was appalled, but, no, I didn’t. And in failing to do so, I’m only half a voice for the people of Gaza.

There is a clear thread that connects the history I did and didn’t learn to this lack of action. If I had been taught colonial history from as soon as I started learning about British history, I would have learnt that many of the people that came to Britain from colonies and former colonies did so as citizens, not as immigrants. This shifts the lens on everything from immigration policies in the 1960s, through to today’s Brexit debate — and a deep, universal understanding of this would have made something like the immigration enforcement against the Windrush generation impossible for the British government to justify.

And there is a clear thread through my lack of understanding of British colonial history, my warped sense of self and my role in society. I’ve always imagined that, as a white British person, I could work on issues like social injustice and climate change with a clear purpose, fighting with and alongside those oppressed and dispossessed in the UK and around the world. That I can campaign and protest and raise money for and with Gazans with a clear heart. But I can’t. Being white British and working on the global social injustice and climate disaster is complicated as fuck. Being white British and calling out Israel’s colonial oppression is complicated as fuck. That doesn’t mean I should withdraw or retreat, but I’m going to try and do it with as much historical perspective and self-awareness as I possibly can.

Some reading and listening

Empireland: How Imperialism has shaped modern Britain, Sathnam Sanghera

The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World, Kahinde Andrews

Time’s Monster : History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire, Priya Satia

Many Struggles : New Histories of African and Caribbean People in Britain, Hakim Adi

The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain, Ron Ramdin

Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire, Caroline Elkins

Empire podcast, Anita Arnand and William Dalrymple