How Britain helped steal Palestine
The day criminal Balfour gave Palestine to Zionists
On the 2nd of November 1917, Britain committed one of the most heinous crimes of the last century, lighting the fuse for one of the longest-running injustices of the modern era.
With a 67-word letter written by a British Foreign Secretary (who did not own Palestine) addressed to Lord Rothschild (who did not live in Palestine), Britain signed away the theft of Palestine to the Zionist cause. This paved the way for a colonial settler outpost on Palestinian soil and usurpation of the homeland of a people who had lived there for centuries.
Today, 109 years later, Palestine remains occupied. Gaza, suffering from three years of genocide, lies in ruins, whilst the West Bank is threatened by complete settler takeover and a Gaza-type genocide. Entire bloodlines have been wiped out. Millions of Palestinians under occupation, displacement, siege, imprisonment, and war.
And some will like to tell you the Balfour Declaration was merely a historical mistake. We should move on, leave history, forget, and forgive. Or that Britain should make amends for its historical wrongs by “helping Palestinians”: through aid packages, diplomatic statements, and carefully worded expressions of concern.
Balfour was not an accident!
Let us get this straight. No, Balfour was not a mistake or an accident! This was not a well-intentioned error that produced unfortunate consequences. What you need to understand is this was by design. Deliberate. Calculated. Premeditated. Pure colonial architecture and design.
This was imperial strategy written in black and white. Colonialism on an official letterhead. The same mindset that carved up Africa. The same mindset that partitioned India. The same mindset that occupied Ireland. The same mindset that believed powerful European states had the “God-given” right to draw lines on maps, hand away nations, and decide the future of people they neither represented nor respected.
A mindset built on racial superiority, imperial entitlement, and colonial power, the Balfour Declaration was simply the continuation of that mindset applied to Palestine. And its consequences are still being measured in Palestinian blood in 2026.
Britain built the Zionist project
Britain’s role in the destruction of Palestine did not end with the Balfour Declaration. The declaration was only the beginning. What followed was three decades of active British involvement in transforming the Zionist project from an idea on paper into a political, military, and demographic reality on the ground.
Britain did not simply make a promise. Britain helped deliver it. Indeed, under the British Mandate, Zionist immigration surged, settlements grew, land transfers accelerated, institutions expanded, and the foundations of a colonial settler state were constructed with British protection and supervision.
When the Palestinians protested the colonisation of their homeland, the Zionist invasion, and settlements, Britain brutally crushed Palestinian resistance. Tens of thousands of British troops were deployed. Villages were subjected to collective punishment, curfews, house demolitions, mass arrests, and military repression. That’s right, all these current-day IDF tactics started with the British in Palestine.
At the very same time, Britain was helping arm, organise, and train Zionist military forces. It provided intelligence, training, weapons, legitimacy, military experience, protection. The British established and supported the Special Night Squads, Zionist Settlement Police, and the Haganah (who form today’s IDF) — providing arms, equipment, training, and operational experience.
Palestinians were disarmed. Their resistance was crushed. Their people were imprisoned and their communities terrorised. Meanwhile, Zionist forces were armed, trained, organised, and equipped to expand their control. One side was systematically weakened; the other was deliberately strengthened. Sound familiar?
Britain did not just write the Balfour blueprint but funded it, protected it, armed it, and enforced it.
Outcome of Balfour, from Nakba to Gaza
The road from Balfour to the Nakba, from ethnic cleansing to occupation, occupation to illegal settlements, settlements to apartheid, apartheid to the siege of Gaza, and siege to today’s devastation was not an accident of history. It was built, step by step, policy by policy, decade after decade. Britain’s fingerprints can be found at every major stage of the journey.
The catastrophic culmination of this colonial project came in 1948 with the annexation of Palestine, the creation of the colonial settler colony and the Nakba. More than 750,000 Palestinians ethnically cleansed, expelled, or forced to flee their homes. Hundreds of Palestinian villages were destroyed. Families who had lived on their land for centuries became refugees overnight.
So the Gaza genocide we witness today is not an isolated tragedy. Gaza is merely the latest chapter of a colonial project set in motion over a century ago. Palestinians have been living the Nakba of Balfour for over 109 years.
Today, Britain continues to provide military assistance, political support, intelligence co-operation, and diplomatic cover while Palestinians continue to endure occupation, dispossession, and genocide.
When Gaza’s genocide was broadcast live as it was being reduced to rubble, images of dead children, flattened neighbourhoods, and desperate civilians shocked the world. Millions across the globe demanded an end to the genocide, demanded a ceasefire, demanded accountability.
Yet once again Britain stood alongside the Zionist genocide, next to the very power it helped create. When asked on LBC whether Israel had the right to withhold gas, electricity, and water from Gaza and Palestinians, then Prime Minister Keir Starmer outrageously replied that Israel “does have that right”. [1]
Who will hold Britain accountable?
So what exactly is being asked of us on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration?
To forgive? To forget? To move on? Or to hope that the very same political establishment that created this catastrophe will somehow solve it? No. Balfour is too serious for that. Palestine is too important for that. And the suffering of Gaza and Palestinians is too great for that.
What is needed is for Britain, Blair, Starmer, and other actors to be put in the dock and held accountable for their colonial wars and be made to pay the price for global misery they have caused.
For over a century, Palestinians have been told to place their faith in international institutions, negotiations, peace processes, and Western governments. Gaza exposed all such impotent institutions, legal precedents, and actors. All we have ever seen is more settlements. More dispossession. More occupation. More armed checkpoints. More concrete walls. More siege. More dead children. More Gaza.
The same states that speak endlessly about human rights have armed, funded, protected, and legitimised the structures responsible for Palestinian genocide and subjugation. The same governments that speak of international law ignore it when Palestine is concerned. And the same powers that created this reality continue to present themselves as neutral arbiters. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, “by the West, for the West”.
The arsonist cannot be trusted to put out the fire he started. So why would we expect the architect of this problem to become the source of the solution? On this 2nd November, remember what the Balfour Declaration really was. Not just a letter. Not a historical mistake. But the opening act of a catastrophe whose consequences are still unfolding today: the dead in Gaza; the refugees of Palestine; the generations raised under occupation. They are all part of the story that began with Balfour. And that is why we must never forget. Never minimise. Never sanitise. And never allow those responsible to escape accountability.
Islamic answer to imperial colonialism
Brothers and sisters, it is not only Palestine and the Palestinians but the world over suffering from global injustice, exploitation, greed, and lack of accountability and true leadership.
From riots in Europe, to calls for justice and reparations in Africa and Caribbean; from the misery of rising cost of living to the unprecedented profiteering of the capitalists; from starvation of Africa and Asia to the opulence and waste of Arabia… Capitalist anarchy, suffering, and injustice is rampant. What the world truly needs is Islam.
Why? Because it is only Islam that offers true justice, rule, and accountability, because it is from Allah (subḥānahu wa ta’āla), al-Hakīm (the All-Wise). The Khilafah is that manifestation of Islam, it represents something fundamentally different. A system in which rulers themselves are accountable not only to people but before Allah (subḥānahu wa ta’āla); a system where power is restrained by divine law, where oppression is a crime before God, and where rulers cannot simply rewrite morality to suit their interests.
The purpose is not domination. The purpose is justice. Not exploitation, protection. Not colonialism, accountability. Not rule for the benefit of the powerful, governance in service of truth.
Source: Islam21c
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