William Dalrymple is a British historian and bestselling author who specialises in the history of empires and their legacy. He has covered the Middle East and South Asia in his writings, and he has also been vocal on Britain’s historic responsibility in the Middle East, including in the Israel-Palestine conflict.
He is an advocate of the recognition of a state of Palestine “given how our grandparents’ generation treated the Palestinians as expendable,” he said in an interview with Al-Ahram Weekly at his home in Scotland.
You have written several books on the British colonial presence in parts of Asia, particularly focusing on India and South-East Asia. How did you become interested in Palestine?
Just by travelling there. When I was 20, I think, I paid my first visit to Palestine. I went on a journey after having received a grant from my university to hitchhike on the route of the Crusaders, as if I were a mediaeval historian studying the Crusades. I ended up travelling through France, Italy, across the Balkans, through Turkey, down to Syria, Jordan, and then crossed the Allenby Bridge for the first time, in 1985, and on to Jerusalem. I immediately fell into the company of Palestinians in East Jerusalem.
I became interested in the whole business of Eastern Christians. I went back in 1994 and wrote a book called From the Holy Mountain, which was about the different Middle Eastern Christians, starting in Mount Athos (the Greek Orthodox descendants of the Byzantines), in Istanbul, the Suryani in eastern Turkey, the many different Christian groups in Syria, in Jordan, and in Palestine, Israel, and to the Copts in Egypt. The book came out in 1998 and involved four or five years living in the Middle East and travelling through it. I also spent a lot of time in Egypt, going all the way from Alexandria down to Assiut in Upper Egypt. I became aware of the politics but also of the arts and the different religious strands in the region.
After the Holy Mountain was published, I very consciously moved towards India and away from the Middle East, partly because I found so much of the politics so upsetting. Anyone knows that when you get emotionally involved in the politics, particularly the Palestinian conflict, it is a burden.
I remember once talking to Mahmoud Darwish about this. He told me that “I wish I could just write love poems that were not political. I wish I could write about landscapes and old age. I’m sick of politics, I don’t want to be primarily a political poet.” I very much feel the same way he did. Feeling passionately about the Palestinians takes a toll on one’s life. But at this moment I feel that we have no option.
What kind of impact did your first encounter with Jerusalem have on you?
After travelling there and talking to Palestinians and Israelis and beginning to understand the basics of the situation there, a very important moment for me was being given a book and asked to review it by a Palestinian novelist called Soraya Antonius, who is the daughter of George Antonius, the great author of The Arab Awakening [an early book on Arab nationalism]. Soraya’s book was called Where the Jinn Consult, which was about the Nakba in Palestine. Until then, I was completely ignorant about what happened. The issue had never come across in my education. Hers is a very beautiful book, and I strongly recommend it.
That was the first time I became aware of the scale of horrors of what happened to the Palestinians, of what they had suffered, of what it meant to suddenly become stateless, to lose your house, to lose your bank account, to lose everything that had given you security and roots in the world. To suddenly find yourself stateless and penniless. Reading her book got me into reading and learning more about the subject. So, I’ve built my awareness and understanding partly by reading and partly by travelling, and partly by conversations with people I encountered.
You first travelled to the region in 1985. Could you explain why you didn’t have any information or education about what had happened to the Palestinians in 1948 during the Nakba?
I should say that I attended a Roman Catholic school. And you might have thought that a Catholic education might have informed [me] at some point about the existence of the Palestinian Christians, but it really didn’t. I remember, in fact, geography books that I studied when I was about 10 or 11 years old which was the first time I probably came across textbooks on the state of Israel. They were very much giving the line that there was a desert that was made to “flower and bloom” by the creation of the state of Israel.
I remember the pictures and the words in those books all those years later. It was the first time that I came across the story. We were literally taught that it was a desert and that brilliant desert farmers that came along planted olive groves, etc. I was from the generation that was given not just a lack of information about the Palestinians, but who in many ways were actively misinformed about the history. And I think many of my contemporaries or compatriots just don’t know about this or the real history. What I see is that there is a combination of ignorance, prejudice, and a lack of education.
For the Palestinians who were Nakba survivors and their descendants who ended up living in Western countries, this is particularly painful, since their narrative was always denied. Only now is the Palestinian side of the story being more widely heard. Why do you think this happened?
I think there are several factors here. One factor is the history of anti-Semitism and our guilt and responsibility for the Holocaust, which is an important thing that we do need to know. And it is a historical fact that the Holocaust took place, that six million Jews were killed. But the fact is that they weren’t killed by the Palestinians, and they weren’t killed by the Arabs. They were killed by the Germans. But it is the Arabs and Palestinians who have paid the price. There is rightly a great sensitivity and a sense of guilt in Europe about this. That is one factor.
A second factor, I think, is that while there was a large-scale immigration of Pakistanis, Indians, and Caribbean families into Britain in 1950s, there was never a substantial Palestinian population here. The Palestinian refugees did not come here [Britain]. They went to Gaza, they went to the West Bank, they went to Beirut. We have never had the constituency of a Palestinian group exerting any pressure. Democracies work by groups who are passionate about subjects that pressurise their MPs. Now the subject has started to gain traction among the Muslim population of Pakistani descent who are starting to change the prevailing old narrative. Up to now there hasn’t been a big enough democratic pressure from the Palestinian side.
But we are talking about education and history. Can anyone say that the Palestinian narrative was falsified?
It’s not only about Palestine. There is an absence of teaching in our schools about any of Britain’s imperial responsibilities.
I think that at a popular level of school education one could say that there is an absence rather than misinformation. But in terms of the general historical record, I think there has been an active effort among Israeli historians to erase Palestinians from the historical record, as much as there has been a record on the ground to bulldozing, destroying Palestinian villages, and of expelling and ethnically cleansing Palestinians from the landscape.
Let’s go back to the contradictory promises which are at the root of this conflict today. Palestine was promised at the same time to the Arabs who fought on the ground alongside the British troops to expel the Ottomans [in World War I] and to the Jews through the Balfour Declaration. Seen from the Arab perspective, there was an obvious betrayal, since they were convinced they were fighting for their own liberation from the Ottomans, just to see themselves once again colonised.
The British entry in the Middle East was via World War I. And during that time, through a series of accidents, Britain entered a conflict with the Ottomans, which was not a given. It is very easy to imagine a slightly different set of circumstances, whereby the Ottomans didn’t enter the war at all. They were late to join, and they took the side of Germany. There was every possibility that the Ottomans could have entered World War I on the side of the Allies or just remained neutral. All these are entirely feasible historical possibilities.
By the end of the war, you had a situation in which the British had promised Palestine – or promised greater Syria, to be accurate – to three different groups. First to the French, with the Sykes-Picot Agreement, secondly to the Sherif of Mecca, and thirdly to the World Zionist Congress. In the end, again through a series of accidents, thanks to Chaim Weizmann who had access to [then UK prime minister] Lloyd George and to [then UK foreign secretary Arthur Balfour], and thanks partly to anti-Semitism – Balfour didn’t want Jews settling in Britain and believed in stereotypes about the Jews – he was persuaded to back the idea of a Jewish homeland [in Palestine]. But it was very clear that he didn’t understand or have any knowledge of the makeup of Palestine at this point. The Balfour Declaration airily speaks about the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, as if it were a Jewish majority area.
But that was not the whole story, and Britain played a role in allowing the problem to grow to the situation we have today. How did it do so during its Mandate in Palestine?
I think it is very probable that there would be no Israel-Palestine conflict had it not been for flat-footed, ignorant British interventions towards the end of World War I.
When he made the Balfour Declaration, Arthur Balfour had never been to Palestine. He knew very little about its history, knew no Arabs socially, and seemed to be completely ignorant about the makeup of Palestine. At the time when he was growing up, when Zionist immigration to Palestine was still in its infancy, probably about five per cent of the Palestinian population was Jewish.
At the time of the declaration, in 1917, the population was about 10 per cent Jewish. Another 10 per cent was Christian Palestinian, who are often ignored, but who are the descendants of the very first Christians, many of them no doubt converted from Judaism in the early centuries of Christianity. And then the remaining 80 per cent of the Palestine population was Muslim. We know quite clearly from various notes taken by the Peel Commission a generation later that there were initial signs of tension in the region.
The Palestinians, quite understandably, showed anxiety about the level of immigration in Palestine. The original team that issued the declaration had no concept of what they called “the non-Jewish communities” in Palestine; they were dismissed as if they were a small minority when, in fact, they were the overwhelming majority of the population. They were at least 90 per cent of the Palestinian population. As early as the 1920s, there was widespread recognition in Britain that the ignorance of the British political establishment of that region and of its makeup had laid the foundations for the conflict, which, of course, is raging every day today.
It was British policy that led first to the massive immigration of European and some Middle Eastern Jews into Palestine and then put down, very violently, Palestinian resistance to that immigration. It is only now, I think, that it is coming out… the sheer horror of the British anti-insurgency techniques which were used by people like Orde Wingate and Arthur “Bomber” Harris. In the case of Harris, he strafed Palestinian villages and bombed them from the air. In the case of Wingate, he led night raids and developed torture techniques like an early version of waterboarding which would leave no subsequent injuries to illustrate what had taken place.
So, what you get with the Palestinian revolt in the 1930s is that it was not only put down with extreme violence and torture, torture of the sort we, my generation, have come to associate with the Gestapo, but never thought that our own people had inflicted on their subjects, their colonial subjects, the subjects of their Empire. At the same time as bombing, strafing, torturing, frightening, terrorising the Palestinians into submission, they disarmed the Palestinian population, exiled its leadership to places like Cyprus and the Seychelles and trained up the underground of the Jewish population in military techniques of torture and subjugation.
Orde Wingate is now recognised as one of the fathers of the Israeli army in a memorial put up in London. [Britain was responsible] both in terms of creating a very large Jewish population in the Mandate of Palestine, then by organising violence and the subjugation of those who resisted it. Then finally, and most critically, they walked out and left Palestine, providing absolutely no safeguards for the indigenous Palestinian population.
If one reads political writings from the early 1920s, by people like Tawfiq Canaan, one gets the impression of a very cosmopolitan world, one that was internally very coherent, with very established traditions in each different urban centre. In those days, people often identified, as well as by their religious identity, by their city. So, there were the Jerusalemites, for example. And that was a way of identifying with their geographical identity. These cities were very mixed. They all got on very well.
How can we right these wrongs today?
After the Nabka in 1948, 75 per cent of the indigenous Palestinian population were made refugees. Many of those went to Lebanon and to Beirut to refugee camps there. Some were internally displaced to places like Nazareth, then into the West Bank, but the great majority went to Gaza. It is the refugees of 1948 who are the parents and grandparents of the kids we see every morning on our screens [today].
So, there is a direct responsibility of the British in all that is happening. The great tragedy is that while we are now very well educated about the horrors such as the Holocaust, the deaths of six million Jews in concentration camps at the hands of the Nazis, almost no one has learned about the suffering of the Palestinians. So, there is inherently at large in Britain an extreme sympathy with the position of Jews who suffered for centuries, with that culminating in the Holocaust, but a complete lack of awareness of the horrors suffered by the Palestinians at British hands.
The public is completely ignorant about who the Palestinians are, why they are in Gaza in the first place, why they are suffering, what their grievances are. And the less well educated [people are], the more they tend to assume that Palestinians are troublemakers, terrorists, and so on.
I think Britain has a massive responsibility to right the wrongs and Britain is unaware of its responsibility. People do not know in this country about the Balfour Declaration or about the makeup of Mandate Palestine. The Nakba is a word which draws a blank stare from 99 per cent of British people. Not only is there nothing in their school education, but the BBC does nothing to educate them in terms of documentary; there is massive ignorance about this.
You said earlier that you are preparing a podcast on Gaza. Can you tell us more about it?
We have already had a 20-part Ottoman series all the way from the Seljuk Turks through to the creation of Saudi Arabia in the 1920s. So, our Empire podcast already dived into the matter, and we had one episode on the Balfour Declaration. But it seems that there is a great need for more in-depth knowledge of Palestinian history. So, we decided to have 12 hours, 12 parts, on the history of Palestine, right from the Peleset and Palashtu to our times.
[It is available] on all podcast carriers, Spotify, Apple, and so on, and it is called Empire Pod.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 11 September, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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