I don’t accept Asa Winstanley’s reply to my review of his book. I shall be very brief in this response as I intend to write something else about the book in more detail at a later date.
Winstanley claims 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.” I would like to assure Winstanley this wasn’t the case. I read the book chronologically from front to back and I noted that Winstanley didn’t first mention the “Balfour Declaration” until almost two thirds into the book on pg.196 – I found this peculiar. Thereafter the defining document which laid the foundations for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine is only mentioned a handful of times if that. Specifically, as he says, on pg.236 where he very briefly explains what the document is.
The focus of Winstanley’s reply is mainly based around what he wrote between pages 49 and 53. In these pages Winstanley mentions Britain’s historical support for Zionism but within the context of Labour’s Party relationship with the Poale Zion group not within the context of the Balfour Declaration issued by the British government in 1917. So when he claims in these pages that Britain “began reneging on its pledge to hand Palestine over to the Zionist movement…” What exactly is the “pledge”? Keep in mind I’m reading the book in the aforementioned chronological order. Those of us who are au fait with some of the history should immediately recognise what this “pledge” is, but many more, probably the majority, simply do not.
Therefore, following from this, Britain didn’t merely “hand Palestine over”. It was a lot more than that. Britain as the imperial power flung open the doors of Palestine to Zionist colonisation from 1917 onwards while at the same time pinning the indigenous Palestinian population down. Britain laid the foundations for the Zionist colonisation and then the ethnic cleansing of Palestine when it crushed the Palestinian uprising of 1936-39. There is no mention in the book that the Jewish population in Palestine was no more than 80,000 in 1917, by the mid 1930s it was hundreds of thousands of newly arrived European settlers thanks to Britain. More so, I’m not convinced with the South African analogy. I mean was there a South African/Boers version of the Balfour Declaration issued by the UK government?
For a primer on how Britain laid the foundations for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine between 1917 and 1947 here is what I wrote over 12 years ago.
Churchill's Colonial Karma 