This year, both Britain and France have signalled that they may recognise a Palestinian state. On the surface, this is presented as a forward-looking gesture to promote peace. Yet history casts a long shadow: these are the same powers that once divided the Middle East on paper in secret agreements, deciding the fate of millions without consulting the people who lived there.
The Sykes–Picot Agreement of 1916 was a backroom deal between Britain and France to divide up the Ottoman Empire’s Arab territories after World War I. It was the epitome of imperial arrogance: maps redrawn in European capitals, ignoring the wishes and identities of the people who lived there. Palestine was earmarked for “international administration” — in other words, not to be entrusted to any local sovereignty, Arab or Jewish.
From that point until the mid-20th century, the arc of British and French policy in the region was one of control, partition, and managed dependency. What followed after Sykes–Picot (from the Mandate system to restrictive immigration quotas and broken wartime promises) set the stage for deep mistrust of outside powers.
And yet, in 1948, something remarkable happened in the same territory they once marked up in pencil: an indigenous people re-established sovereignty in their ancestral homeland.
The End of British Imperial Rule
The British Mandate for Palestine (1920–1948) was a direct descendant of Sykes–Picot thinking. Like other mandates administered around the world — for example, Britain in Palestine, Samoa under New Zealand, and Iraq under British control — it represented imperial governance under another name. By the late 1940s, the world was in the throes of decolonisation: India, Pakistan, Burma, and others were breaking free from British rule.
When Israel declared independence on 14 May 1948, Britain was not “granting” statehood; it was withdrawing, often reluctantly, after years of obstructing Jewish national aspirations. The new Jewish state was not imposed by Britain or France — it was created in defiance of them.
Return of an Indigenous People
The Jewish people are the indigenous people of the Land of Israel, with over 3,000 years of continuous cultural and historical connection. The Zionist movement was not an imperial export; it was a reverse migration. In reviving Hebrew, re-establishing Jewish governance, and renewing ancient agricultural practices, Israel restored indigenous sovereignty that had been absent for nearly two millennia.
Liberation from Centuries of Foreign Rule
From the Romans to the Byzantines, from Arab Caliphates to Crusaders, from the Ottomans to the British, the land had been under foreign control for almost 1,800 years. Israel’s independence was the first time in modern history that the land was governed by its indigenous population.
That is not colonisation — it is the textbook definition of decolonisation.
A Unique Anti-Colonial Struggle
Unlike other independence movements, Israel’s founders were not European colonists. They were refugees and survivors, escaping Nazi-occupied Europe, surviving the Holocaust, and fleeing persecution and expulsions from Arab lands, with nowhere else to go but their ancestral homeland.
How the Narrative Was Flipped
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the Arab League reframed Zionism as “Western imperialism” to align Arab regimes with the anti-colonial bloc. This framing ignored demographic reality — today, over half of Israeli Jews descend from Middle Eastern and North African communities. It also inverted the truth: the departure of Britain in 1948 was the end of Western imperialism in the Land of Israel, not its continuation.
From Sykes–Picot to Today
The irony of Britain and France now threatening to “recognise” a Palestinian state is hard to ignore. These are the same powers whose secret deals and colonial administration denied both Jews and Arabs genuine self-determination for decades. Recognition of statehood is not inherently wrong — but when it comes from capitals that once claimed the right to decide the fate of the Middle East over tea and maps, it carries the scent of history repeating itself.
Instead of acting as external arbiters once again, Europe’s former colonial powers might reflect on the lesson of Israel’s founding: that enduring sovereignty is achieved when local peoples take ownership of their own destiny, not when it is conferred — or withheld — by Paris or London.
A Call for Intellectual Honesty
If decolonisation means restoring indigenous self-determination, Israel is its most vivid 20th-century example. Britain and France’s imperial structures ended in 1948; the Jewish people reclaimed their homeland after millennia of foreign rule.
To deny this reality is to perpetuate the distortions of a Cold War propaganda line. To recognise it is to acknowledge that the arc from Sykes–Picot to today is not about colonial imposition, but about the slow and uneven process of undoing it.
The creation of Israel was the undoing of Sykes–Picot — replacing European-drawn borders and mandates with the reality of indigenous self-rule. It was, and remains, a decolonisation success story, even if that truth is inconvenient to those who prefer the map to reality.
