Partition in Ireland, India, Palestine

Century of Endeavour

Partition in Ireland, India and Palestine

T G Frazer; Macmillan, London, 1984

(c) Roy Johnston 1999

This book was supported in its production by the New University of Ulster and the British Academy. It represents a British Establishment view of what happened in these three traumatic situations, without serious critical evaluation of alternatives. It could almost be regarded as a users' manual of 'divide and rule' procedures.

The concept of a State being based on the supremacy of a particular religious denomination appears to be deeply embedded in the British imperial political philosophy. The emergence of the Two Nations Theory in the context of the interaction between Gandhi and Jinnah in the 30s, and its subsequent development to the extent that Jinnah was weaned from support for the Congress, deserves further analysis. To what extent did the British actively foster it, as the Tories did with the Orangemen in Ireland?

The consequences of these policies of imperial disengagement are alas very much still with us in the year 2000, and in the case of Israel/Palestine and India/Pakistan are foci of global tension, in both cases with a nuclear dimension, fuelled by a rising tide of religious fundamentalism. Britain's partitionist policies, piloted so successfully in Ireland with the 1914 Tory coup d'etat against the Liberal Home Rule process, against the majority of the Ulster people, have sown dragons teeth of which world politics is now reaping the grim harvest.

I was moved recently to contribute the following letter to the Irish Times, which they printed on 25 October 2000:

Sir: do the Palestinians not realise that if they get their 'State' as projected, it will in effect be a 'Bantustan'? And do the Israelis not realise that they are building an Apartheid system? Will no-one stand up and call for a unified republic of Palestine-Israel, with capital Jerusalem, and equal citizens' rights for Jews, Muslims, Christians, whatever, and respect for minorities? Also, compensation for loss of property by Palestine refugee families, as Jewish survivors were compensated by Germany?

Roy Johnston / Dublin

I can only conclude that JJ's courageous attempt to pre-empt the Larne gun-running, which was implemented with all the resources of the Tory imperial establishment, in defiance of the Liberal government, was a timely reassertion of the Enlightenment principle of democratic citizenship in the context of the crisis of European imperialism. It is a pity that this small voice did not have more impact.

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