Britain

By Sabiu Abdullahi 

Tensions within the British government have come to the forefront as a ministerial aide, Paul Bristow, was dismissed from his position after calling for a permanent ceasefire in the ongoing Gaza conflict.

Bristow’s plea for a ceasefire conflicted with the government’s support for “humanitarian pauses” instead. 

The dismissal came in the wake of a letter Bristow addressed to the Prime Minister, urging for a lasting ceasefire to save lives and enable crucial aid delivery to the affected region.

His removal was swift, with government officials citing his comments as a breach of the principle of collective responsibility, wherein government members are expected to publicly support official policies regardless of personal beliefs. 

The internal discord was further highlighted during a recent session of Prime Minister’s Questions, where Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak advocated for “specific pauses” to facilitate aid delivery while firmly rejecting calls for a complete ceasefire.

Sunak emphasised Israel’s legitimate right to self-defence, underscoring the government’s stance on the matter. Bristow, a Conservative MP representing Peterborough, expressed his deep concern for his constituents, a significant portion of whom have been directly impacted by the conflict.

His questioning of the effectiveness of ongoing military actions in enhancing security or improving the situation resonated with a portion of the public. 

This incident reveals a rift within the UK government, raising questions about the nation’s diplomatic stance and the complex challenges posed by international conflicts.

By Ismail Obansa Nimah

Theodor Herzl must be restless in his tomb for what is happening in Palestine. He must have forgotten to remember that even though he succeeded in creating Zionism to champion his vision for a Jewish state in the heart of Palestine, the territory he uprooted people from and where he currently rests was never really his. In it were millions of good-hearted people, living a beautiful life in their homes, farms, families, freedom, peace and prosperity. Until all they had was brutally taken away by the entity Herzl created, the state of Israel.

The Jewish homeland chanted by Herzl since the first worldwide Jewish conference in 1897 and seen by thousands of Jews as their God-given right and as “a land with no people for a people without land”, is for the first time since its creation up in an unprecedented amount of flames.

The West championed the Balfour Declaration after the First World War. It gave the territory of Palestine to a foreign occupation to establish the apartheid state of Israel in total injustice and disregard for the basic human rights of the indigenous people of Palestine.

After the Balfour Declaration,  the Zionist movement gained momentum and confidence. Jews worldwide, particularly in Europe, began to migrate and seek refuge in Palestine. The Palestinians welcomed and gave refuge to the Jews escaping persecution, particularly during the second world war and the Holocaust by Nazi Germany. But to the Palestinian’s dismay, their kind gestures were met with a very painful backstabbing.

 Following the Second World War, the Israeli Declaration of Independence, formally the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, was proclaimed on 14 May 1948. That declaration triggered resistance from the Palestinian and neighbouring Arab states. It questioned how people’s lands and homes could be stolen from them that easily.

The resistance led to the first armed confrontation between Palestinians and the newly founded state of Israel, together with their allies, resulting in the 1948 Nakbah, which not only saw  78% of Mandatory Palestine become illegally occupied by Israel but also saw the expulsion and flight of 700,000 Palestinians, the subsequent depopulation and destruction of over 500 Palestinian village and geographic erasure, the denial of the Palestinian right of return, the creation of permanent Palestinian refugees in their lands, and the “tyrannical destruction of the Palestinian society, all of which has continued till date.

The events of 1948 uncovered fierce resistance across occupied Palestinian territories and other Muslim nations—one that gave birth to the likes of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Palestinian resistance fighters.

Since 1948, Israel has continued expanding its occupation and settlements in the Palestinian Territories. It thrashed the two-state solution and violated almost every international law in its systemic oppression, tyranny and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. It has carried out numerous indiscriminate attacks and killings of innocent Palestinians. The apartheid regime in Israel has illegally demolished thousands of Palestinian homes, destroyed heritages, desecrated religious sanctuaries, particularly Al-Aqsa Mosque, murdered countless unarmed civilians, including numerous children, women and the elderly and denied Palestinians basic human rights, including their freedom.

At the heart of the Palestinian resistance is the Gaza Strip (the headquarters of Hamas), which has endured decades of Israeli terror, bombardments and siege. The Gaza Strip is a densely populated area with a land, sea and air blockade by Israel since 2007. It is basically a prison.  Israel has carried out countless inhumane, unprovoked attacks across the strip, with the most deadly being in 2014 and the most recent occurring just five months ago. On average this year, 2 Palestinians have been killed daily by Israel across its occupied territories.

The hypocrisy of the Western powers fuelling the Israeli regime for decades has allowed successive generations of Palestinians to take bold and brave initiatives, like what is currently unfolding, to defend and resist the Israeli apartheid occupation. And it appears that the more fight they put to resist, the better they get at it. One may ask, what makes the Palestinians so different from the Ukrainians?

 With the seeming cowardice stance of the Arab Nations in their pursuit of a normalisation agenda at the expense of the Palestinians, it became increasingly clear that if the Palestinians would achieve anything at all, then they would either have to fight bravely and indeed as they currently are or die trying but retaining their honour and dignity with them.

This recent attack has sent a clear message to the world that if peace and stability must be achieved, then attention must be paid to the oppressed and not the oppressor. A man who has already lost so much would not mind throwing all that is left to defend his honour and dignity. The Palestinians have been stretched too thin, and they, more than anyone, have all the right to defend themselves in this war that the creation of Israel started.

Ismail Obansa Nimah wrote via nimah013@gmail.com.

By Huzaifa Dokaji

When people reflect on the fall of the Sokoto Caliphate in 1903, they often conjure up images of British soldiers armed with the formidable Maxim gun on the left, juxtaposed with local inhabitants wielding swords, bows, and arrows on the right, fervently chanting “Allahu akbar.” Unfortunately, this portrayal does not align with historical reality. The foot soldiers were mainly Africans, while Europeans primarily served as commanders and strategists rather than frontline combatants. The bulk of the invading forces were drawn from previously subjugated regions, frequently comprising individuals from the target community itself.

As demonstrated by Philip Afaedie’s PhD thesis, The Hidden Hand of Overrule: Political Agents and the Establishment of British Colonial Rule in Northern Nigeria, 1886–1914, individuals such as Adamu Jakada established their reputations and livelihoods by providing valuable intelligence to European forces. In the case of Kano, for instance, Ciroman Kano Abdu Lele, the son of Emir Kano Tukur (reigned 1893–1895), supported the British invasion in exchange for their promise to restore him to the Kano throne, which his family had lost after the Kano Civil War (1893–1895), known as the Basasa (of course they didn’t honour the agreement after the war!). Others, driven by diverse motivations, also aligned themselves with the British cause.

As recounted by Baba of Karo to Mary Smith (see Baba of Karo: A Woman of the Hausa Muslim), people in rural areas, fed up with pervasive political and social corruption, celebrated colonial conquest with a popular song, “Nasara kun dade ba ku zo ba”. The Resident of Kano also noted in an intelligence report to the British acting High Commissioner on July 9th, 1903, that the peasantry embraced British conquest due to their deep-seated resentment towards their rulers. “Nasara kun dade ba ku zo ba” carries more profound implications than its composers may have intended. Scholars like Murray Last (1967), Rudolph Ware (2014) and Paul Lovejoy (2016), along with others, have shown us how and why the Sokoto Jihad was one of the most important political and social revolutions of the 19th century, thanks to the egalitarian nature of its goals. However, Nasara kun dade ba ku zo ba demonstrates how such ideals were lost by the closing decade of the century, prompting common people to seek refuge in the hands of Christians. Nevertheless, the intellectual class remained committed to their quest for an egalitarian society through the Islamic ideological vehicle.

M.S. Umar’s seminal work, Islam and Colonialism: Intellectual Responses of Muslims of Northern Nigeria to British Colonial Rule, has powerfully shown us how such intellectuals reacted to British colonial conquest and the various strategies they adopted to challenge it. They saw it as temporary—God’s wrath upon an erring community. Defining the conquest as a temporary setback, the grand vizier of the Sokoto Caliphate equated it to the shaving of a beard.

In his poems titled Nuzhah and Intisaf, Sheikh Yahya an-Naffakh (b. 1898 and known as Malam) described the British conquest as the ‘triumph of absurdity’ caused by scholars who have replaced ‘the humility of Knowledge with the stupidity of ignorance’ and rulers who have exchanged ‘the wisdom of governance with the arrogance of past glory’. Malam himself came from a family that was a victim of such crass anarchy. The winning side of the Kano Civil War imprisoned his father, who was a legitimist. A young Malam secured his release by writing a petition to the Resident of Kano, Mr. Palmer, advocating against the unjust imprisonment.

Although oral traditions suggest that Dan Fodio prophesied the fall of the Caliphate to European Christians, it is more plausible that news of their encroachment reached Sokoto through traders and pilgrims travelling the trans-Saharan trade routes, ultimately reaching Mecca. For instance, in the early 19th century, the influential Lagos trader Madam Tinubu sent a letter to the Caliph of Sokoto, Bello dan Fodio, informing him of European activities along the coast. Furthermore, Paul Lovejoy’s research on Umar el-Fellati reveals that Fellati witnessed the British occupation of Egypt in 1882 and even acted as a double agent, providing the British with information about the Caliphate while simultaneously reporting on British activities in Northern Africa.

Huzaifa Dokaji is a PhD student and teaching assistant at the Department of History, State University of New York at Sony Brook. He can be reached via huzaifa.dokaji@stonybrook.edu.