War and Memory in the Middle East, and West London
FOR TWO WINTERS I LIVED IN GAZA, 2003 and 2004. It was the time of the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising against Israel. It was cold. Gaza did not get much rain, but winter was wet: and the houses were made to lose heat, not retain it. For a few weeks you might see puddles on the potholed streets that were usually so dustily dry; sometimes, really heavy rain flooded the roads.
Yet I was lucky enough to live in a large and very comfortable flat, even if sometimes I shivered on rainy nights. Now I shudder just trying to imagine–for actually I cannot imagine–what it must be like to be one of the countless thousands of Gazans living this winter without shelter, and with grief and despair.
Last Sunday, 26th January, after listening to the lunchtime news on the radio, I took a walk along the river Thames near my house in west London. It was raining and there were few others on the riverside path.
One of the main news items had been President Trump’s suggestion that the people of Gaza be moved from the territory. ‘You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing.’
My walk took me past my local church, St Nicholas in Chiswick. Like so many in the UK, it has memorials to soldiers killed in the First World War. The men from the area where I now live didn’t fight in Flanders, but in Jerusalem and Gaza.
The memorial even incorporates a cross carved from wood on the Mount of Olives: a piece of the Holy Land carried thousands of miles away from where it grew, making the same journey as the Christian faith itself.
That campaign may largely be forgotten here, eclipsed by the horrors of the western front.
But Britain’s involvement in Palestine during the First World War and after, when it governed under a League of Nations mandate, is not forgotten in the region.
During my two years in Gaza as a correspondent, I was regularly reminded of my country’s past as the pre-eminent political and military power in the Holy Land.
The people of Gaza–many of whom were refugees, or descendants of refugees, from the 1948 war that ended with the creation of the State of Israel–traced their dispossession back to the ‘Balfour Declaration’ of 1917.
That was a letter in which the British foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, expressed British government support for, ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.’
Nor was it just Palestinians who were angered by Britain’s history in the Holy Land. During the time I was there, the then Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, was said to have yelled at the British government envoy, Lord Levy, ‘This is not the British mandate!’
Now the United States is the main international power in the region, and Trump is returned to power with a new mandate of his own, he may seek to build on the Abraham Accords signed during his first term as president.
© James Rodgers
On a visit to Jerusalem in early 2014, I went to the British military cemetery on the Mount of Olives. The wooden cross had come from there. Not all the men from west London made the journey back.
For Britain, victory in the First World War was followed by the impossible task of trying to rule over the increasingly volatile land between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan.
This week, as then, people have been on the move. Gazans returning to the north of the territory, usually to find their homes in ruins; Palestinian prisoners released, as part of the ceasefire deal; heading in the other direction, small numbers of the remaining Israeli hostages seized on October 7, 2023, who must have known unbearable horrors.
Trump’s desire to go down in history as a peacemaker will not be helped if he blunders into the region as the British did a century ago. Driving out the dispossessed and traumatized people of Gaza will not deliver the kind of legacy for which he would wish.
This is my first post for a few weeks because I have been finishing my next book, on Russia and the West since the end of the Cold War. I sent the full first draft to the publisher earlier this week. It is due out later this year. More news on here in the coming months.
Last day working on the first draft, 25 January 2025