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UK Protestors Can't Hide Their Ignorance
(Telegraph-UK) Nigel Biggar - The widely broadcast pro-Palestinian protests in the U.S. have inspired some Oxford students to pitch their tents outside the Pitt Rivers Museum, decrying Oxford University's historic complicity in the British Empire's "disastrous colonial legacies" in Palestine. It remains dismaying that 301 Oxford academics and staff have signed an online letter declaring their support of the students' demand that the university disinvest from "Israel's genocide in Gaza." The signatories represent a fraction of the 15,000 professors, research staff, and doctoral students at Oxford. Yet, what should still dismay is that highly educated grown-ups in one of the world's leading universities have got their history, ethics, and law so wrong. The simplistic postcolonial stereotype of "colonization" comprises the invasion and seizure of land from native peoples by rapacious settlers. But before 1914, the land in Palestine on which Zionists settled had been purchased from Arab landlords. Moreover, many of the settlers were refugees from murderous pogroms in Russia. In 1922 the League of Nations mandated Britain to administer Palestine, in order to build a new independent Arab state and a Jewish homeland out of the ruins of the irredeemable Ottoman Empire. After Britain unilaterally withdrew from Palestine in 1948, invading Arab armies attempted to crush the infant State of Israel in 1948-9. When Arab troops occupied Jerusalem, Jews were forced out, and about 900,000 more were driven from Arab countries. Thus, the actual history of Zionist settlement in Palestine cannot be squeezed into the simplistic postcolonial template of "colonization." As for ethics, the large-scale killing of civilians by itself doesn't amount to a violation of the laws of war. Most of the Anglophone West regards the war to defeat genocidal Nazism in 1939-45 as morally justified. Yet one estimate has it that British and American bombers killed over 350,000 non-combatants in Germany. Air raids over France killed 70,000 French civilians. When there are sufficiently compelling reasons for fighting - say, self-defense against a manifestly genocidal Hamas - those civilian casualties may be, tragically, justified. That's why the laws of war don't forbid the killing of non-combatants as such, but only their intentional and disproportionate killing. The writer is Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford.