The ignorant (or brainwashed) useful idiots who call for the destruction of Israel, claim that the British Mandate that granted Jews a homeland was not only a mistake, but an original sin.

In reality, it was a brief moment in history when the world recognized Jewish suffering, and believed that they deserved a haven in a land where Jews had continually lived for millennia. Little did they know what more horrors would be visited upon Jews in the years to come.

It is true that the colonial powers of the 19th and early 20th centuries arrogated to themselves the right to carve up Africa and the Middle East by paying little attention to the different warring tribes, cultures, and regions they forced into tense relationships when they imposed artificial borders in the region. But of course, such attitudes, conquests, and invasions existed for thousands of years. To blame only the most recent examples is to distort history.

The British Mandate was the product of the reshaping of much of the world after World War I. It went beyond the wording of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and recognized the historical connection of the Jews to the Holy Land, and understood that Zionism meant reconstituting their national home. We have the British to thank for this. But sadly, things went downhill from there.

Critics of Israel deny all the past historical powers that were actual colonizers of the land (like Egypt and Jordan), and forget that Israel accepted a Palestinian state in 1947 and 1948. But the Palestinians and five Arab countries rejected it, and tried to destroy Israel and all the Jews in it. That’s the reason there is no Palestinian state today.

And, in fact, much of the British policy during this period was meant to favor the Arab community.

There were riots, attacks on Jewish civilians, and the notorious Hebron massacre of Jews in 1929. The British felt they had to appease the Arabs, so they began to restrict Jewish immigration. The Jews were divided between the pacifists and the fighters. The first member of a Jewish underground group, Shlomo Ben Yosef, was executed by the British in 1938. The British White Paper of 1939 virtually closed the door on Jewish immigration precisely at the moment when a haven might have saved hundreds of thousands from Nazi barbarity.

The post-war foreign secretary of the UK’s Labour government was the notorious Ernest Bevin, who was adamantly opposed to the idea of a Jewish state. He pushed the Mandate authorities to take a very hard line and enacted the Defense (Emergency) Regulations which suspended Habeas Corpus, established military courts, and prescribed the death penalty for carrying weapons or ammunition illegally and for membership of illegal organizations.

In 1946, Michael Eshbal and Yosef Simchon were arrested by the British and sentenced to death. The Irgun began a policy of reprisals. Five days later, they kidnapped five British officers in Tel Aviv, and another one the following day in Jerusalem. Two weeks later, when Eshbal’s and Simchon’s sentences were commuted to life imprisonment, the officers were released.

A year later on, April 16, 1947, Dov Gruner, Yehiel Dresner, Mordechai Alkahi, and Eliezer Kashani, were executed by the British. In May 1947, 41 prisoners broke out from Acre Prison. Six of them were killed and seven others were rearrested. Among the organizers, Avshalom Haviv, Yaakov Weiss, and Meir Nakar were tried by a military court and also sentenced to death. All these names are unknown to the vast majority of Israelis today.

The Irgun retaliated by capturing two British soldiers and announced that if their men were put to death, they would do the same to the British soldiers. The High Commissioner Alan Cunningham gave the order and the Irgun men were executed. The day afterwards, the bodies of the two British soldiers were discovered hanging from olive trees. The Irgun admitted the killings.

Ernest Bevin did whatever he could to stop the Jewish state. He plotted with the Jordanians and negotiated “the Portsmouth Treaty” with Iraq (signed on January 15, 1948) undertaking to withdraw from Palestine and ensure a swift Arab occupation of all its territory to destroy the Jewish state. As the British withdrew, they handed over their hardware to the Arabs.

We owe a lot to Britain as the first state to recognize the right of the Jews to their own homeland, regardless of their ulterior motives. Rarely is a conflict all black and white. It wasn’t then, and it isn’t now. If Arab Nationalism can be justified, why can’t Jewish Nationalism?

The Bible says, “The poor will never cease from the land.” And neither will enmity and conflict, whether they are external or internal. I don’t have a solution, only optimism. But the Balfour Declaration and League of Nations were essential elements in establishing a Jewish state after 2,000 years. And despite our present mourning, that is still a reason to celebrate.

The author is a writer and rabbi, currently based in New York. 

The post Here’s What Really Happened with the British and Mandatory Palestine first appeared on Algemeiner.com.