Zionists, Trained by the British Military, Started Murdering and Removing Palestinians in 1936.

Even before the British Mandate expired on May 14, 1948, Zionist paramilitaries were already embarking on a military operation to destroy Palestinian towns and villages to expand the borders of the Zionist Nation-State of Israel that was to be born.

Note: Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide” in his 1944 book “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe”. The term “ethnic cleansing” surfaced in the context of the 1990’s conflict in the former Yugoslavia and is believed to come from a literal translation of the Serbo-Croatian expression “etničko čišćenje”.

In 1935, a sudden arrival of 62,000 European Jews in Palestine aggravated Palestinians, who had long opposed the British-assisted influx of Jewish settlers.

Palestinians made straightforward demands: regulate European Jewish immigration, restrict land sales to Jewish settlers, end the British mandate, and give Palestinians independence like other British colonies. They feared the erasure of their history and identity.

Tensions boiled over into the “Arab Revolt” from 1936-1939. In April 1936, Palestinians launched a general strike, boycotting Jewish goods, and protesting British rule and Jewish immigration. This was suppressed violently by the British, who arrested many, demolished homes, and continued oppressive practices. By late 1937, the Palestinian peasant resistance movement had begun, focusing its aggression on British forces.

The Palestine Mandate, established by the League of Nations, was seen by the Palestinians as another form of British colonialism. As Arthur Balfour noted in 1919, there was no intention to consult the existing inhabitants of Palestine.

The idea of creating a Jewish state in Palestine arose from the wish to address Europe’s “Jewish problem”, pushing the issue onto Palestinians. The British previously labeled Native Americans as “savages”, while the Zionist Nation-State of Israel refers to Palestinians as “human animals”.

To establish a Jewish state, displacing the local population was essential. This goal was allegedly justified through biblical narratives suggesting Jews were merely returning home after centuries in exile.

The concept of a homeland for the Jewish people, particularly the Land of Israel, is a recurring theme in the Tanakh. However, it is important to note the modern political concept of a “homeland” or nation-state, as we understand it in the 20th and 21st centuries, is not directly addressed in the Tanakh. Rather, the Tanakh refers to the land in religious, spiritual, and covenantal terms.

The creation of the “State of Israel” in 1948 was the result of a relatively simplistic Declaration, Mandate, and UN Resolution. In sum, the “national home for the Jewish people” was born out of an abbreviated political process which finds its footing in some form of consent and assertions of implied and inherent authority on little more than empty air.

After suppressing the “revolt”, British Zionists left the Palestinians vulnerable and unprepared. Zionists, on the other hand, morphed into a powerful semi-state force. By 1948, their military strength dwarfed the remnants of Palestinian resistance and Arab armies. The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians became a foregone conclusion.

The British aggressive actions against the Palestinians led to a loss of 14-17% of the male adult population through death, injury, imprisonment, or exile. The repercussions were catastrophic, with thousands killed, wounded, or displaced.

The Mandate for Palestine

After World War I, the League of Nations granted Britain the Mandate for Palestine, which included present-day Israel, the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Jordan. The British were tasked with facilitating the creation of a Jewish homeland, in accordance with the Balfour Declaration, while safeguarding the rights of the non-Jewish communities.

A British Mandate was created in 1923 and lasted until 1948. During that period, the British facilitated mass Jewish immigration. Palestinians were alarmed by their country’s changing demographics and British confiscation of their lands to be handed over to Jewish settlers.

Special Night Squads

By the second half of 1939, Britain had massed 30,000 troops in Palestine. Villages were bombed by air, curfews imposed, homes demolished, and administrative detentions and summary killings were widespread. These measures would later be inherited by the Zionist Nation-State of Israel and normalized as state policies against Palestinians.

To crush the revolt while aiding the Zionist enterprise, the British collaborated with the settler community and formed the Jewish Settlement Police, which by 1939 included 21,000 Jewish members.

They also created a British-led “counter-insurgency force” of Jewish militants named the Special Night Squads which, alongside Settlement police, terrorized Palestinian villages. Within the Yishuv (pre-state settler community), arms were secretly imported and weapon factories established to expand the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary which later became the core of the Israeli army.

The Special Night Squads were established in 1938 under the leadership of British Captain Orde Wingate, who was a strong supporter of the Zionist cause. They included British soldiers, Haganah members (the main Jewish paramilitary organization in Palestine at the time), and some Palmach members (the elite strike force of the Haganah). The squads were trained in aggressive patrolling, ambushes, night raids, and counter-insurgency tactics. Their operations often took place at night, aiming to surprise and eliminate the Palestinian freedom fighters.

The experience gained by Jewish members in these squads contributed to the development of the Haganah’s military expertise, which would become crucial in the subsequent years leading up to the establishment of the “State of Israel”.

From 1936 to 1939, 5,000 Palestinians were killed, 15,000 to 20,000 were wounded and 5,600 were imprisoned.

The so-called mandate system, set up by the Allied powers, was a thinly veiled form of colonialism and occupation.

The system transferred rule from the territories that were previously controlled by the powers defeated in the war - Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria - to the victors.

The declared aim of the mandate system was to allow the winners of the war to administer the newly emerging states until they could become independent.

The case of Palestine, however, was unique. Unlike the rest of the post-war mandates, the main goal of the British Mandate there was to create the conditions for the establishment of a Jewish “national home” - where Jews constituted less than 10 percent of the population at the time.

Upon the start of the mandate, the British began to facilitate the immigration of European Jews to Palestine. Between 1922 and 1935, the Jewish population rose from 9 percent to nearly 27 percent of the total population.

There is no doubt that the British Mandate created the conditions for the Jewish minority to gain superiority in Palestine and build a state for themselves at the expense of the Palestinian Arabs.

When the British decided to terminate their mandate in 1947 and transfer the question of Palestine to the United Nations, the Zionists already had an army that was formed out of the armed paramilitary groups trained and created to fight side by side with the British in World War II.

More importantly, the British allowed the Jews to establish self-governing institutions, such as the Jewish Agency, to prepare themselves for a state when it came to it, while the Palestinians were forbidden from doing so - paving the way for the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Although the Balfour Declaration included the caveat that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”, the British mandate was set up in a way to equip Jews with the tools to establish self-rule, at the expense of the Palestinian Arabs.

The Balfour Declaration is widely seen as the precursor to the 1948 Palestinian Nakba - the ethnic cleansing of Palestine - when Zionist armed groups, who were trained by the British, forcibly expelled more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland.