From the Balfour declaration of 1917 to Tony Blair’s role as envoy, the UK has struggled to make meaningful progress towards peace in the Middle East
The former British prime minister Harold Macmillan once said that there was no problem in the Middle East because a problem has a solution. Keir Starmer is the latest incumbent in No 10 to try to prove Macmillan wrong through a plan that has been described by Downing Street as “pathway to peace” for Gaza and the wider region. The record of Britain’s previous interventions do not augur well.
The famous commitment drafted by the then British foreign secretary Sir Arthur James Balfour, to “view with favour the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people”, was integrated into Britain’s UN mandate over Palestine between 1923 and 1948 and paved the way for the birth of Israel.
But the declaration contained a key qualification: nothing should be done to prejudice the “civil and religious rights” of Palestine’s “existing non-Jewish communities”. Britain afforded Israel de facto recognition on 30 January 1949, in the last stages of the first Arab-Israeli war, and de jure recognition on 27 April 1950. For many Palestinians, the second part of the Balfour promise is yet to be made good.
