Photo by CPA Media/Alamy

Seventy-seven years ago, 750,000 Palestinians were terrorised out of their homes and farms and villages in Galilee – from Tiberias, Beit She’an, Safed and the great Palestinian ports of Jaffa and Acre.

They were driven out with napalm and machine guns and machetes, and forced to flee from their groves of olive trees on to the barren dunes of Gaza where they remain. By the end of 1948, less than 15 per cent of Palestinians remained where they had always lived. More than 85 per cent had been ethnically cleansed, despite the promises of Arthur Balfour in his declaration that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”.

The Nakba – Arabic for “catastrophe” – happened because the politicians of this country enabled it. They enabled it with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which supported the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. They also enabled it with 30 years of British colonial rule in Palestine during which the indigenous inhabitants were disarmed and their leaders arrested and sent to prison camps in the Seychelles and Cyprus. The black and tans, notorious for their violence, were brought in on Churchill’s orders and unleashed on those Palestinians who tried to stand up against the erosion of their land.

The British, determined to suppress the revolt militarily, dispatched 25,000 soldiers and policemen to Palestine in 1938 – the largest deployment of British forces abroad since the end of the First World War. They established military courts, operating under “emergency regulations” that gave the British Mandate the legal trappings of a military dictatorship. The best account of what we unleashed on the Palestinians can be found in Caroline Elkins’s Legacy of Violence, a chilling study of British anti-insurgency techniques in our imperial colonies. Elkins shows how the British destroyed the houses of all those involved in attacks under the legal authority of the emergency regulations. An estimated 2,000 houses were destroyed from 1936 to 1940.

Combatants and innocent civilians alike were interned in concentration camps – by 1939, more than 9,000 Palestinians were held in overcrowded facilities; many endured violent interrogation or torture. Younger offenders, between the ages of seven and 16, were flogged. Over 100 Arabs were sentenced to death in 1938 and 1939, and more than 30 were executed. By the time the revolt was crushed in 1939, the Palestinian leadership had been so badly intimidated they were in no position to fight for their survival when the British finally pulled out in 1948, leaving the Palestinians to their fate.

This country has a historic responsibility – more than virtually any other – to see the actual establishment of a Palestinian state, not just the recognition of a Palestinian state that does not yet exist. It needs to work diplomatically to provide some protection for the Palestinian people who have suffered because our grandparents’ generation regarded the Palestinians as somehow expendable and unimportant.

You might have thought this shameful history would galvanise our government to atone for past mistakes. But the recognition of a Palestinian state, 75 years after we formally recognised the State of Israel, should be only the very beginning of the process of redress for our past betrayal.

Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month

Our leaders do not know the history of the sufferings of the Palestinians because their story is not taught in our schools. The BBC is too frightened to tell their story in documentaries or news bulletins. The British people are not taught the dark history of our responsibility for this mess.

Instead the UK is yet to properly sanction Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist administration. Bezalel Smotrich, its finance minister, has announced that “Gaza will be entirely destroyed”, and its population will “leave in great numbers to third countries”. Yet this government has done not nearly enough to distance itself from the most public of war crimes.

Until recently, our taxpayers’ money was being used to send the RAF to assist the genocide in Gaza with British-gathered intelligence, to enable Israel to kill yet more women and children with weapons and aircraft parts made in this country and freely exported to the IDF. More weapons for the IDF have left Britain under this government than under the Tories, and F-15 parts continue to be exported. The week after No 10 received Isaac Herzog, Israel’s president, the UN declared that a genocide is being unleashed in Gaza.

At this moment hundreds of thousands of Palestinians can barely get enough food. Human Rights Watch has said that Israel’s blockade “has transcended military tactics to become a tool of extermination”. According to one former Israeli general last week, Gaza’s total casualties stand at around 200,000. This is the greatest moral catastrophe of our time, the biggest moral failure of the West since World War II.

As we wake every morning to see images of yet more slaughtered innocents on our phones, it feels like this darkest of dark nights will never end. But it is in the blackest darkness of the night that we dream best.

We must continue to dream of freedom and justice and dignity and decency and human rights. To dream of a world where Palestinians are not burned alive in their tents or herded like cattle from refugee camp to refugee camp to their final slaughter. We must dream of a Palestinian state alongside Israel where Palestinians can live in safety and without fear. And we must work to make sure that our dreams of an actual Palestine will one day soon become a reality.

[See also: Born in chains]

Content from our partners