![](https://i.imgur.com/CLvY2jA.png")
03-10-2023, 09:39 AM
1 hour ago
By Tom Bateman
Middle East Correspondent
Eid Haddad's parents were teenagers when they witnessed the full force of Britain's presence in Palestine in 1938.
"They saw the troops coming in and attacking people. My father told me that one of the men was hit on his head with a wooden hammer used to mince meat called [in Arabic] a modakah, and he died," says Mr Haddad.
"A man and his son were hanging tobacco leaves to dry them. They were just shot in the back."
"It was chaos," he says.
His parents lived in al-Bassa, a Palestinian village subjected to collective punishment by British forces, who called their actions at the time "punitive measures". These would target whole villages if troops faced attacks by armed rebels operating in the hills.
......
During the First World War, as Britain invaded and captured the territory from the crumbling Ottoman Empire, it drew on growing forces of national self-determination. It made competing promises over swathes of the territory to Arabs, who sought independence across the region, and to the Zionist movement which sought a Jewish home in Palestine.
The British and French consolidated their control with so-called "mandates" to govern handed to them by the newly founded League of Nations - a body which was dominated by the two imperial powers.
In Palestine, Britain's policies ultimately set rival national movements on a collision course before it launched a brutal crackdown on an Arab uprising in the late 1930s. British forces would later face rebellion from Zionist militias, amid a series of chaotic policy reversals which saw the UK renege on immigration promises and turn back refugee boats of Holocaust survivors who had earlier escaped Nazi-occupied Europe.
......
Meanwhile the French Mandate hived off Lebanon from Syria to create a strategic beachhead and imposed new boundaries over the whole territory in the early 1920s, before an Arab rebellion which they also ruthlessly suppressed. They split areas by ethnicity and religion in what historian James Barr told us was a "very straightforward and cynical" attempt to divide and rule.
In the years after the Second World War, Britain and France pulled out. In Palestine, London knew its withdrawal would turn an escalating territorial conflict into regional war, as the State of Israel was declared and Arab armies invaded.
......
During the conflicts of 1947-8 at least 750,000 Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes in what Palestinians call the 'Nakba' or 'catastrophe'.
......
The fragile sectarian climate between Christians and Muslims left in the wake of French rule of Lebanon was destabilised with the addition of Palestinian refugees. It was further aggravated during the rise of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), the armed group that launched attacks on Israel. The country also had powerful officials who still favoured regional pan-Arab alliance with Syria and Egypt - a movement which drew its roots back to rebellion against the mandates and earlier.
Lebanon later plunged into sectarian civil war.
......
From Europe, Mr Haddad describes how he has never been able to return home.
He says: "It feels like a big piece of myself is missing. I feel just like an island in an ocean which is totally foreign to me."
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-66984152
......
By Tom Bateman
Middle East Correspondent
Eid Haddad's parents were teenagers when they witnessed the full force of Britain's presence in Palestine in 1938.
"They saw the troops coming in and attacking people. My father told me that one of the men was hit on his head with a wooden hammer used to mince meat called [in Arabic] a modakah, and he died," says Mr Haddad.
"A man and his son were hanging tobacco leaves to dry them. They were just shot in the back."
"It was chaos," he says.
His parents lived in al-Bassa, a Palestinian village subjected to collective punishment by British forces, who called their actions at the time "punitive measures". These would target whole villages if troops faced attacks by armed rebels operating in the hills.
......
During the First World War, as Britain invaded and captured the territory from the crumbling Ottoman Empire, it drew on growing forces of national self-determination. It made competing promises over swathes of the territory to Arabs, who sought independence across the region, and to the Zionist movement which sought a Jewish home in Palestine.
The British and French consolidated their control with so-called "mandates" to govern handed to them by the newly founded League of Nations - a body which was dominated by the two imperial powers.
In Palestine, Britain's policies ultimately set rival national movements on a collision course before it launched a brutal crackdown on an Arab uprising in the late 1930s. British forces would later face rebellion from Zionist militias, amid a series of chaotic policy reversals which saw the UK renege on immigration promises and turn back refugee boats of Holocaust survivors who had earlier escaped Nazi-occupied Europe.
......
Meanwhile the French Mandate hived off Lebanon from Syria to create a strategic beachhead and imposed new boundaries over the whole territory in the early 1920s, before an Arab rebellion which they also ruthlessly suppressed. They split areas by ethnicity and religion in what historian James Barr told us was a "very straightforward and cynical" attempt to divide and rule.
In the years after the Second World War, Britain and France pulled out. In Palestine, London knew its withdrawal would turn an escalating territorial conflict into regional war, as the State of Israel was declared and Arab armies invaded.
......
During the conflicts of 1947-8 at least 750,000 Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes in what Palestinians call the 'Nakba' or 'catastrophe'.
......
The fragile sectarian climate between Christians and Muslims left in the wake of French rule of Lebanon was destabilised with the addition of Palestinian refugees. It was further aggravated during the rise of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), the armed group that launched attacks on Israel. The country also had powerful officials who still favoured regional pan-Arab alliance with Syria and Egypt - a movement which drew its roots back to rebellion against the mandates and earlier.
Lebanon later plunged into sectarian civil war.
......
From Europe, Mr Haddad describes how he has never been able to return home.
He says: "It feels like a big piece of myself is missing. I feel just like an island in an ocean which is totally foreign to me."
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-66984152
......
