Balfour’s Shadow: A Century of British Support for Zionism and Israel by David Cronin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Extremely well-researched and bloody depressing, this book explains exactly how culpable the UK is in the human rights horror show that is the State of Israel. From the Balfour Declaration, which was opposed by the only Jewish member of the British Cabinet, to the joint manufacture of weapons tested on Palestinians with Israeli companies and the stifling of peaceful actions of Palestinian solidarity, successive UK governments have enabled Israel’s Occupation and Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

Chaim Weizmann repeatedly told the British that a Jewish Palestine would be a British Palestine and, apparently, the British believed it, possibly because they saw Jewish immigrants to what became Israel as the equivalent of Protestant immigrants to Ireland. The connection between the colonisation and mistreatment of Ireland, and the colonisation and mistreatment of Palestine, was so strong that members of the notorious Black and Tans went from ‘policing’ Ireland to ‘policing’ Palestine, with violence, collective punishment, and concentration camps.

The hope in this book is that despite the rampant Zionism of politicians, the general population of the UK is anti-Zionist, to the point that Israel sees the UK as the centre of the BDS campaign.

The horror is that this is a book published in 2017 and no matter how awful the actions of the British and the Israelis it documents, no one could have imagined the extent of the genocidal campaign Israel is currently carrying out, in 2024. God forgive us.



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