By Tawfiq Al-Ghussein
3 Nov 2026
On 2 Nov 1917 Arthur Balfour wrote to Lord Rothschild that the British Government viewed with favour “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. The same letter promised that nothing would be done to prejudice “the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. Those communities made up about nine-tenths of the country’s population.
hey had a name, a language, towns older than London, newspapers, schools and a political leadership, and the document that settled their future described them by what they were not.
They answered at once. Muslim-Christian Associations were formed in Jaffa and Jerusalem in 1918 to oppose the Declaration. In December 1920 the Third Palestine Arab Congress, meeting in Haifa, demanded a national government elected by the people of the country. Palestinians asked for representative government before the Mandate had formally begun, and they kept asking for it for 30 years.
The newspaper Filastin, founded in Jaffa in 1911, had already given the country’s name to its own press. This was a people with a clear idea of itself, and the first thing the new order did was to refuse it a vote.
George Orwell was 14 that year. He would later write that “nomenclature plays a very important part in nationalist thought”, and that political speech in his time was largely “the defence of the indefensible”. He wrote very little about Palestine. Yet his two best-known novels, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), describe with unusual precision the system Palestinians have lived under for more than a century, one in which their rights are affirmed in principle and withheld in practice, and in which the institutions withholding them claim to be preparing for their eventual delivery.
Orwell’s own view of Zionism is the place to start, because he saw it more clearly than most of his contemporaries on the British left.
He had served five years in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, from 1922 to 1927, and came home with a lasting contempt for empire. His friend Tosco Fyvel, a Zionist who had worked in Palestine for the Histadrut and who succeeded him as literary editor of Tribune, recalled that Orwell regarded the Zionists as white settlers, comparable to the British in India or Burma, and the Palestinians as the equivalent of the Burmese.
Fyvel called this a crude simplification. Orwell opposed the creation of a Jewish state. The historian Giora Goodman, who has studied his views more closely than anyone, describes them as largely anti-Zionist and at odds with most of the British left, including several of Orwell’s closest friends.
White settlers—Zionism’s own leaders reached the same conclusion
Orwell’s reading was not crude. It was the reading the movement’s own leaders gave in private and, sometimes, in print. In 1923 Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of Revisionist Zionism, published The Iron Wall. “Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised,” he wrote, and he concluded that “Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population.”
Jabotinsky did not pretend that Palestinians would consent. He proposed a wall of force behind which colonisation could continue until they gave up hope. In the same essay he professed support for equal rights for Arabs and rejected their expulsion. He wanted equality on paper and a reordering of the country by force, which is the arrangement Animal Farm describes. The man who called himself a colonist and the English policeman who had served an empire agreed on what was happening. They disagreed only on whether it was right.
The practice matched the theory. In 1930 the British Government sent Sir John Hope Simpson to report on land and settlement. He found that land bought by the Jewish National Fund became the inalienable property of the Jewish people, and that under the Fund’s leases the Palestinian cultivator was, in his words, “deprived forever from employment on the land”.
The Histadrut (the Jewish trades union movement) in its campaign for “Hebrew labour” kept Palestinians out of Jewish farms and enterprises. A Palestinian family could lose its tenancy when an absentee landlord in Beirut sold the land, and then find that no Jewish settlement on that land would hire them.
Orwell’s published remarks on all this are few but pointed. In Antisemitism in Britain, written in February 1945 for the Contemporary Jewish Record, he observed that among enlightened people it had become de rigueur “to accept the Jewish case as proved and avoid examining the claims of the Arabs”. The decision, he wrote, was taken mainly because the Jews were in trouble and it was felt they must not be criticised.
In Notes on Nationalism, published in Polemic that October, he listed Zionism alongside Communism and political Catholicism as a form of the nationalist habit of mind, a habit he defined as “power-hunger tempered by self-deception”. He put Palestine on his list of subjects, with India, Poland and the Spanish civil war, that were never discussed on a reasonable level.
His critics have seized on one line from the 1945 essay, in which he wrote that many Zionist Jews seemed to him “merely antisemites turned upside-down”. In context it was part of a wider argument. In the same sentence he said that many Indians and Black people displayed the colour prejudices of empire in inverted form.
Europe’s debt to the Jews Britain paid off with Palestine
His point was that the nationalist belief that whole races are “mysteriously good or mysteriously evil” could take hold of anyone, the persecuted as well as the persecutor. He applied the same test to himself. Anyone who wanted to understand antisemitism, he wrote, should start by asking “Why does antisemitism appeal to me?”, and he did not believe it could be cured without curing “the larger disease of nationalism”. It was an unusual demand for a writer of his time to make of himself.
His opposition to Zionism also went together with concern for Jewish refugees. In Tribuneon 15 Nov 1946, with hundreds of thousands of survivors trying to reach Palestine, he asked why Britain did not invite 100,000 of them to settle in Britain itself. His target was British hypocrisy: a country that kept its own doors shut was settling Europe’s debt to the Jews with land that belonged to Palestinians.
What Orwell left on Palestine, then, was an instinct and a handful of sentences. The instinct, formed in Burma, told him that a European settler movement under imperial protection was a colonial project. He never wrote the essay that instinct demanded. Read against the history he left alone, his novels go a long way towards writing it for him.
Animal Farm is a fable of the Russian Revolution, and Orwell meant it that way. Its mechanism travels further. The animals drive out Mr Jones and paint Seven Commandments on the barn wall.
Over the following years the pigs amend them one at a time. “No animal shall sleep in a bed” acquires the words “with sheets”. “No animal shall kill any other animal” acquires “without cause”. Each alteration is small enough to explain away, and Squealer is always on hand to explain it. In the end a single commandment is left on the wall: all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
The principle of equality is never repealed. The pigs keep it in plain view. They have arranged matters so that it no longer binds them.
The West Bank has run on this arrangement since 1967. A settler and a Palestinian living a few hundred metres apart are governed by different law. The settler, an Israeli citizen, lives under Israeli civil law, votes in Knesset elections and, if prosecuted, appears before a civilian court. The Palestinian lives under military orders issued by an army commander, has no vote in the state that controls his land, and is tried in a military court where acquittals are rare.
Oslo—everything was constructed to make a fair solution unnecessary
Israel calls itself a democracy, and for its citizens it is one. For the millions it rules without their consent it is something else. The commandment stays on the wall.
The Oslo Accords added a second layer. The Declaration of Principles signed in 1993 provided for a five-year interim period, with talks on a permanent settlement to begin no later than the third year. The Palestinian Authority that emerged was given schools, clinics, municipal services and police in the main towns. Israel kept the borders, the airspace, the population registry, effective control of the aquifers beneath the West Bank, and roughly 60 per cent of its land, designated Area C.
Palestinians could manage local water supply, but new wells needed the approval of a joint committee on which Israel held a veto. Under the Paris Protocol of 1994 Israel collects the customs revenue owed to the Authority, and it has withheld that money whenever it wished to apply pressure.
Meanwhile the settler population of the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem, has more than quadrupled since 1993. The interim period is in its fourth decade. Like the commandment on the barn wall, the promise of a negotiated end has been preserved while everything around it was built to make it unnecessary.
Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language appeared in 1946, two years before the Nakba. It contains this sentence: “Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers.” He had in mind the expulsions in Central and Eastern Europe after the war. Two years later around 750,000 Palestinians took the same roads, and more than 400 of their villages were emptied and, in most cases, demolished.
Nineteen Eighty-Four develops the point. Newspeak, the official language of Oceania, exists, as the lexicographer Syme explains to Winston Smith, “to narrow the range of thought”. It has no need to forbid dissent. It removes the words in which dissent could be framed.
The new state built its own vocabulary with the same economy. In 1948 and the months after, tens of thousands of books were collected from Palestinian homes in Jaffa, Haifa, Nazareth and other towns.
Around 30,000 books, manuscripts and newspapers came from the houses of western Jerusalem alone, among them the libraries of educators and scholars such as Khalil Sakakini. The books gathered in Jerusalem and its surroundings were at first catalogued, where possible, under abbreviations identifying their Palestinian owners.
In the 1960s those personal identifiers gave way to a single designation, AP, for “abandoned property”. The owner’s name was replaced by a legal category. The National Library acknowledges that the collection is legally owned by the state’s Administrator General. The Absentees’ Property Law of 1950 then produced the category of “present absentees”: Palestinians who had stayed inside the new state, and in many cases held its citizenship, but were classed as absent from land they owned, which the state could then take. A man could stand in his own field and be, in law, absent from it.
The later lexicon works more quietly. Occupied territory becomes “disputed”. Imprisonment without charge or trial, renewable in six-month periods without limit, is “administrative detention”.
A wall that cuts villages off from their fields is a “security fence”. A war that has killed tens of thousands of people in Gaza is reported as a sequence of “operations”. Each term places what it names under the heading of procedure, security or dispute, where the question of whether one people may rule another indefinitely never has to be asked.
Orwell named the habit that sustains this. “A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency,” he wrote in “Notes on Nationalism”. Western governments have defended Ukrainian self-determination since 2022 in terms they have been slow to apply to Palestinians, and the inconsistency is rarely felt, because the vocabulary has already moved Palestine into a different category.
In Palestine, Israel’s bid to remove the people’s past has been physical
“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Winston’s job at the Ministry of Truth is to rewrite old newspapers so that the record agrees with the current line, and to send the originals down the memory hole.
In Palestine the attack on the past has been physical. After 1948 a government committee replaced the Arabic names of hundreds of sites with Hebrew ones, and the emptied villages disappeared from official maps. In 1982 the Israeli army carried away the archive of the PLO Research Centre in Beirut; part of it was returned in a prisoner exchange the following year. Since October 2023 Israeli strikes have destroyed Gaza’s universities, its libraries and the central archive of Gaza City, which held some 150 years of the city’s records.
Here Palestine departs from Orwell’s plot. In Nineteen Eighty-Four the memory hole works. Winston’s diary is found, and he is broken. Palestinians kept their diary. Families carried the keys of houses in Jaffa and Lydda into exile and passed them to grandchildren. They kept the deeds, the tax receipts and the Mandate land surveys that prove what was taken.
In 1992 Walid Khalidi and a team of researchers published All That Remains, a village-by-village record of more than 400 communities depopulated in 1948, with their populations, landholdings, schools and mosques, assembled from British records and the testimony of those who had lived in them.
Oral history projects in the camps of Lebanon, Syria and Jordan have recorded the voices of the generation that walked out. The names erased from the maps survive in the names of camp neighbourhoods, which are often called after the villages their residents came from. A people that remembers this precisely cannot be persuaded that its history did not happen.
Oceania is always at war, and the war is always somewhere else. Its real function is domestic. It justifies scarcity, surveillance and obedience.
Palestine’s permanent emergency has a precise British origin. The Defence (Emergency) Regulations of 1945, issued by the Mandate Government against Arab and Jewish insurgents alike, allowed detention without trial, the demolition of houses, deportation, censorship and the closure of whole areas by military order.
On 7 Feb 1946 some 400 Jewish lawyers met in Tel Aviv at a convention of the Hebrew Lawyers’ Union and denounced them as an assault on the basic rights of the individual and the safeguards of the law. Several of those provisions survived the end of the Mandate, among them the powers of administrative detention, house demolition and deportation, and they became part of the legal machinery through which Israel has governed Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. Powers denounced as tyranny when Britain used them against Jews became instruments of Israeli rule over Palestinians.
Attacks on civilians are crimes whoever commits them, including the killing of Israeli civilians on 7 Oct2023. No threat, however real, confers a right to rule another people without end.
Israel keeps its status intact—as an unlawful presence in the occupied territory
The International Court of Justice drew that line in its advisory opinion of 19 July 2024. Advisory opinions do not bind in the way a judgment between parties does, but they state the law, and this one found Israel’s continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory unlawful, restated that territory may not be acquired by force and held that the presence must end as rapidly as possible.
The political response came from a different body. In September 2024 the UN General Assembly, acting on the Court’s findings, adopted a resolution demanding that Israel end its unlawful presence within 12 months. That deadline passed in September 2025.
Animal Farm also holds a lesson that Palestinians have been the first to draw. The pigs begin as representatives of the animals and end as their managers, at the farmhouse table with the neighbouring farmers.
In the last scene the animals look from pig to man and from man to pig and can no longer tell which is which.
The Palestinian Authority is not Napoleon’s regime. It did not choose the conditions in which it governs. But for 30 years it has performed much of what the occupation requires: policing Palestinian towns, coordinating security with the Israeli army, detaining its critics and postponing indefinitely the elections called for 2021 that would have tested its mandate.
It issues passports, pays salaries and keeps records. It cannot stop a settler from burning an olive grove, open a crossing or prevent an army raid on the city where it sits. Administration without sovereignty is a delegated function. Palestinian critics, from Edward Said, who denounced Oslo in 1993 as an instrument of surrender, to the Palestinian lawyers and civil society groups who have pressed for elections since, have said so more sharply than any outside observer.
A national movement that can criticise its own leadership in these terms has not handed its politics to its managers.
This is where Orwell’s novels meet the history of the Mandate most directly. Britain governed Palestine for three decades under the authority of the League of Nations, whose Covenant called the well-being of such peoples “a sacred trust of civilisation”.
The Mandate instrument of 1922 incorporated the Balfour Declaration and obliged Britain to facilitate Jewish immigration and close settlement on the land. It contained no matching commitment to Palestinian self-government. Proposals for a legislative council came to nothing, in part because Palestinian leaders would not join a body whose terms required them to accept the policy that endangered them, and in part because the Zionist movement and its friends in Parliament opposed any representative chamber with an Arab majority. A movement that described itself as the national liberation of the Jewish people worked to deny the majority of Palestine the most basic institution of a free people, an elected assembly.
Palestinians did not accept this quietly. In April 1936 they began a general strike that lasted six months, among the longest in the history of colonial resistance. Shops in Jaffa and Nablus closed, ports stood idle, and villages that had never been consulted by the British Government organised their own committees.
Britain crushed the revolt that followed with the same emergency powers it would codify in 1945. When the Mandate ended in 1948, the distinction it had drawn, between governing Palestinians and permitting Palestinians to govern themselves, outlived it. The same distinction runs through military government after 1967, through Oslo, and into the current argument about who will run Gaza.
Liberal democracies can and do adopt the techniques and policies of totalitarian states
Orwell wrote about totalitarian states, and Palestine is a different case: a settler-colonial project carried out under the protection first of an empire and then of the Western alliance. Israel is not Oceania and Oslo is not the farm.
Orwell’s own Burma instinct, though, points to the right category, and his novels supply the mechanisms. He showed how a principle can survive as decoration, how a vocabulary can make a question unaskable, how the record of the past can be altered or burned, and how an emergency can harden into a constitution. Dictatorships have no monopoly on any of these. Liberal empires used them, and democracies use them now.
In Notes on Nationalism Orwell wrote that “there is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when ‘our’ side commits it”. He was describing the English intelligentsia of 1945, and he named Palestine among the subjects on which they could not think straight. Eighty years on, the description fits most Western governments.
It no longer fits the world. Britain, the author of the Balfour Declaration, recognised the State of Palestine in September 2025, 108 years after Balfour’s letter, joining more than 150 other states. Palestinians have been counted, registered, administered and negotiated over, and they have not been given the authority to govern themselves on their own land. Nor have they given up hope, which is what Jabotinsky’s iron wall was built to make them do.
They are still there, on the land and in the camps, in the courts and the universities, writing their own history in their own names. Orwell ended Nineteen Eighty-Four with a man who had learned to love his oppressor. The Palestinian story has not ended that way, and after more than a century of administration in place of freedom, there is no sign that it will.
Tawfiq al-Ghussein is a writer and researcher on settler-colonialism, religion and political violence, exploring trauma, nationalism and ethics.