In the wake of the Arab revolutions gripping North Africa and the Middle East, it would be worth reminding ourselves of some of the factors that have frustrated the Palestinians from establishing a democratic government in Palestine. To a greater extent than in other Arab countries, the struggle for democratic government in Palestine has always been constrained by the Israel-Palestine conflict.
In 2006, Hamas won the legislative elections whilst many of its candidates were languishing in Israeli prisons. Instead of embracing the results the EU and the US swiftly reacted with sanctions and Israel imposed a blockade on the Gaza Strip. This response was justified on the basis that the Change and Reform List that the Palestinians had elected was opposed to recognizing Israel and signing up to the Oslo Accords.
This was not the first time that democracy had been deliberately thwarted in Palestine. Indeed it was British policy to preclude the establishment of representative government amongst the Arab population of Palestine when it ruled that country from 1917-1948. In this regard one may draw parallels between the Arab demand for self-government in 1936 which was opposed by both British Houses of Parliament and the election results in 2006.
When Britain was awarded the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine at the San Remo Conference in 1920 it had already committed itself to the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Namely, the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.
In 1917, Palestine had a population that was 93 per cent non-Jewish. In other words Britain had committed itself to establish a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine where Jews only formed 7 per cent of the population. The non-Jewish population that formed approximately 93 per cent of the population of Palestine in 1917 was comprised of Christians, Muslims, and other minorities who all spoke Arabic and self-identified as Arabs.
If Britain had established a democracy in Palestine in 1917 with the population ratio that existed then, political power would have by mathematical logic been vested in the Arab population of Palestine. For all practical purposes it would have defeated the objective of the Balfour Declaration. This is why in 1922 the Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill rebuffed the Palestinian Arab Delegation’s demand for self-government based on majority rule. As Churchill noted, ‘the creation at this stage of a national Government would preclude the fulfilment of the pledge made by the British Government to the Jewish people’.
In other words, those who drafted the Balfour Declaration were of the view that the Arab population of Palestine despite being the overwhelming majority of the population could not be allowed to prevent those Jews who it envisaged immigrating there from establishing their national home. In other words there was absolutely no intention to establish a system of democratic government in Palestine. As Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, explained in a memo to his colleague Lord Curzon: ‘Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land’.
It is important to note that Britain had an established tradition of supporting minority rule in its colonies. For instance Balfour favoured minority rule in Ireland because he viewed the Catholic nationalist majority as backward in contrast to the Protestant unionist minority in the north east of the island. This is why he was opposed to granting Ireland Home Rule without separating Ulster from the rest of the country. He told Parliament during the Second Reading of the Government of Ireland Bill in 1892 that he feared ‘the prosperous, advancing, and progressive minority [read Protestant and unionist] might have their interests seriously imperilled by the action of those who, as a matter of fact, are less prosperous and more backward [read Catholic and nationalist]’.
Consider also British policy in Southern Rhodesia and South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century. Britain did not enfranchise black Africans when the Union of South Africa was established in 1910. As Balfour told Parliament when the 1909 South Africa Act was being debated: ‘All men are, from some points of view, equal; but, to suppose that the races of Africa are in any sense the equals of men of European descent, so far as government, as society, as the higher interests of civilisation are concerned, is really, I think, an absurdity which every man who seriously looks at this most difficult problem must put out of his mind if he is to solve the problem at all’.
Hence it was hardly surprising that Britain did not have much of a problem with the fact that a white European minority was to rule South Africa after independence. Nor did it have much of a problem with the fact that in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia the white minority that formed 3 per cent of the population ruled over the 97 per cent black African majority from 1923 until 1980 when Zimbabwe was established.
Britain also had a historical tradition of reproducing its class system in its colonies. This began with the Princely States in British India where many an Englishman self-identified with the caste system as being akin to its class system at home. Britain also attempted to reproduce its class system in the Arab Kingdoms across the Middle East and North Africa as well as on the international plane. The establishment of A-, B-, and C-class League of Nations mandates in is an obvious example.
As the League of Nations made clear the mandates established in the Middle East, including Palestine, were A-class mandates. As opposed to B- and C-class mandates, A-class mandates were a sort of half-way house between a colony and a state. The mandates were administered as colonies, although the end goal was independence even though no date was set for when that might take place.
Unlike in the other A-class mandates the problem in Palestine was that a community which was not viewed as indigenous by the native majority was being encouraged to immigrate to Palestine to make it their national home. In other words, Britain was creating a situation where two communities—a predominantly Jewish immigrant community and a native Arab community—would desire independence over the same territory.
In order to establish the Jewish national home in Palestine, the Zionist Organization encouraged Jews to immigrate there in large numbers. For most of the years that Britain ruled Palestine at the mandatory power hundreds of thousands of Jews immigrated to Palestine due to a combination of European persecution and British and US immigration policies.
Jewish immigration and the purchase of large tracts of Arab land by Jews caused friction with the native Arab population who feared that Palestine’s Arab character was being prejudiced. This led to outbreaks of violence between Arabs and Jews. Britain often responded to the violence by clamping down on Jewish immigration.
This naturally upset the Zionist Organization who complained that in doing this Britain was in breach of the Balfour Declaration. It would call on Britain to continue its support for the establishment of the Jewish national home. In contrast the Arabs would argue that their civil and religious rights were being prejudiced by the high rate of Jewish immigration. They would call on Britain to establish self-governing institutions to reflect their majority in numbers.
In the 1930s things came to a head. The anti-Jewish policies initiated by the National Socialist Party in Germany led to a colossal increase in Jewish immigration to Palestine. The Arabs now feared that they would never attain independence. The Arab Higher Committee and the Supreme Muslim Council looked to Iraq which had just become independent, as well as to neighbouring Lebanon and Syria, which had been promised independence by France. Accordingly, they demanded that Britain establish a form of representative government in Palestine or they would go on strike.
In 1935 the leaders of five Arab political parties presented a memorandum to Sir Arthur Wauchope, the British High Commissioner, demanding the establishment of representative government, the prohibition of the transfer of Arabs lands to Jews, and the immediate cessation of Jewish immigration.
Although Wauchope was not in a position to repeal any section of the mandate, he was able to deal with the Arab demand for representative government since Article 2 of the mandate spoke of establishing ‘self-governing institutions’. Accordingly, Wauchope proposed the establishment of a Legislative Council with a large unofficial majority, comprised of five officials, two nominated representatives of commerce; eight elected and three nominated Muslims; three elected and four nominated Jews and one elected and two nominated Christians.
Although the Arab parties were not entirely happy with Wauchope’s proposal they accepted it. However, the Jewish leaders in Palestine and in the Diaspora categorically opposed the proposal and refused to accept it. They lobbied both Houses of Parliament in Britain to reject them which they did. As Lord Melchett, who in the 1930s was the Chairman of the Jewish Agency, told the Lords: ‘You cannot enfranchise an enormous electorate who have never used a vote in their lives and have not the remotest idea of how to use it’. In the Commons, Captain Cazalet concurred: ‘They [i.e. the Arabs] have had practically no experience whatever in representative Government or in the manner in which they should exercise the vote and, however you like to interpret the numbers of the proposed legislative council, as a matter of fact it will develop into an Arab majority’.
In other words, as the British saw things, the question of minorities and majorities was irrelevant. Rather, it was more important that a national community was trained in the art of self-government before being given the franchise.
Moreover, the whole policy of the Balfour Declaration was to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine. If political power was vested in the Arab population then that policy could not be implemented. Churchill explained his opposition to the High Commissioner’s proposals to the Commons in these words: ‘If you have an Arab majority, undoubtedly you will have continued friction between the principle of the Balfour Declaration and the steps that must be taken day by day and month by month to give effect to that Declaration and the wishes of the Arab majority. I should have thought it would be a very great obstruction to the development of Jewish immigration into Palestine and to the development of the national home of the Jews there’.
It was the failure to establish a representative system of government in Palestine which directly led to the proposal a year later to partition Palestine.
In this regard it is striking that the same arguments raised in the British Parliament to delay granting independence to the Palestinian Arabs in the 1930s are still invoked against Palestinian nationalists today: namely, the failure to accept the legitimacy of Zionism and the assumption that the Palestinians are not capable of creating a democratic society.
Consider the Quartet’s (the EU, the US, Russia, and the UN) Performance-Based Roadmap to a Permanent Two-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict which both Israel (with reservations) and the Palestinians agreed to in order to restart peace negotiations in 2003. It was predicated on the assumption that the Palestinians needed to be taught how to build a practicing democracy and act against terror. According to the Roadmap: ‘A two state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will only be achieved through an end to violence and terrorism, when the Palestinian people have a leadership acting decisively against terror and willing and able to build a practicing democracy based on tolerance and liberty’.
As part of the institution building process, which was to have begun in 2003, the Palestinians were to produce a draft constitution ‘based on strong parliamentary democracy and cabinet with empowered prime minister’. After this, an interim prime minister was to be appointed with a cabinet to act as an empowered executive.
In other words, the Palestinians were expected to adopt the Westminster model of parliamentary democracy. Although the era of colonialism supposedly came to an end with decolonization, the Roadmap is strikingly similar to the League of Nations mandate system in which those placed under mandatory tutelage had to earn their right to self-government incrementally through a series of steps supervised by the colonial power. Only this time the objective is not to build a Jewish national home, which already exists as the state of Israel, but to build a homeland for the Palestinian people.
Israel had made it clear that it will never accept any political party—even if it is elected in a democratic process and even if it is broadly representative of Palestinian public opinion—that refuses to recognise it. Yet recognising Israel in the eyes of most Palestinians means recognising the legitimacy of Zionism: it means recognising the legitimacy of partition, forgoing the right of return, and giving up on the idea of establishing a single unitary state with equal rights for all its citizens. This is precisely what the PLO did in 1988, and it is precisely what Hamas refuses to do now.
On the whole, British colonial policy was not concerned with creating democracies in the colonies. Rather, Britain sort control of the colony as an end in itself which it often accomplished by creating divisions between ethnic, religious, and tribal groups. Consider the kingdoms Britain established in Libya, Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq as well as the sheikhdoms, emirates, and kingdoms in the Gulf.
Although Egypt’s ruling family had been established by Mohammed Ali, it was Britain that pulled the strings in Egypt and the Sudan after 1882 through successive British agents like Lord Cromer, Sir Eldon Gorst, and Lord Kitchener. King Idris of Libya was appointed by Britain before he was overthrown by Gaddafi. Britain made the Hashemite family sovereign in Jordan and in Iraq, although a revolution brought Hashemite rule to a premature end in Iraq after King Faisal II was assassinated in 1958. Britain also made those sheikhs it had formed alliances with in the Gulf sovereigns—at first in order to prevent acts of piracy in order to protect its trade route to India and later to secure access to petroleum.
In addition, in places of white settlement Britain had a tendency to vest political power in minority communities that it self-identified with to the detriment of the native majority. This is what happened vis-à-vis the Protestants in Ireland, the Jews in Palestine, and the whites throughout southern Africa where political power was vested in the white minority rather than in the black majority in Rhodesia, South Africa, and South-West Africa (Namibia). Britain assumed that these communities, although a minority, were in a better position to assume the burden of self-government than the native majority because they were more ‘civilised’ than the native majority. If minority rule could not be assured, then Britain favoured partition to secure the rights and interests of the minority community by carving out for their benefit a separate geographic homeland.
Thus, the British understanding of self-determination was inimical to majority rule. What counted in the eyes of most British statesmen was the quality of government, not numbers. The shift towards majority rule in international relations did not take placed until decolonization during the contest between the US and the USSR.
Promoting democracy throughout the world is ostensibly an American and Europea tradition, which has become particularly prevalent with the end of the Cold War. But it was never a British tradition, at least not when it ruled the world.