(Jerusalem Post) Col. Richard Kemp - At a cost of 168,000 casualties, British Empire forces freed the land of Palestine from the malignant rule of the Ottoman Empire in a defensive campaign from 1915 to 1918. Had our troops not secured victory, the Turks would have maintained dominion over that land and there could never have been a Jewish state. Yet the British government published a White Paper in May 1939 slamming the door on Jewish immigration into Palestine. Liberal Party MP James Rothschild observed at the time, "For the majority of the Jews who go to Palestine, it is a question of migration or of physical extinction." We don't know how many Jews perished in the Holocaust who might have escaped to Palestine but it certainly runs into the hundreds of thousands. It is to Britain's eternal shame that our nation played a role in sending Jews to the Nazi ovens. At the same time, had the British Army under General Montgomery not succeeded in halting Rommel at El-Alamein in 1942, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, would have achieved his desire to see Jews herded into gas chambers in Palestine and across the Arab world. A serving British general led the illegal Jordanian invasion of the newly declared State of Israel in 1948. Britain armed the Arab aggressors and denied munitions to Israel, even continuing to hold fighting-age Jews in Cyprus long after British forces had withdrawn from Palestine. On Tuesday, President Trump will announce his proposals for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Predictably, Al-Husseini's successors in the Palestinian leadership have rejected it even before it's been published. Britain, which played such an important part in the re-creation of the Jewish state, yet also made too many disastrous missteps, should get behind the president's proposals, which represent the only realistic hope for long-term peace and stability between the two peoples. The writer is a former commander of British forces in Afghanistan.
2020-01-27 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive