Palestine and the colonial question: Lessons for Malaysia (Part 1/2)

Three things happened in 1948.

Israel declared itself a state.

The British Mandate in Palestine ended.

And the British colonial government declared a so-called ‘emergency’ (1948-60) in Malaya.

In 1948 too, Henry Gurney finished his term as chief secretary of the British administration in Palestine and became the British high commissioner in Malaya.

Counter-insurgency experience gained in Palestine would have helped inform British tactics against the communist-led anti-colonial forces during the so-called Emergency. Just as participants in the Arab revolt were labelled ‘terrorists’ in Palestine, Malayan anti-colonial insurgents were also labelled terrorists.

Clearly, there is a British colonial link between Palestine and us.

Several key points relate to this.

Palestine deserves our unified solidarity, not our dividedness

The struggle of the Palestinians is not about religious identity. It is not about Islam in conflict with Judaism, nor Islam in conflict with Christianity. 

Islam is an extremely important foundation of strength and steadfastness for the Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation. But that does not make it a conflict between Muslims and Jews.

As we know, Jews have historically been treated far better by Muslim rulers than by Christian ones. When European Jews needed to escape Christian oppression, they sought refuge in Muslim lands. And the Nazi Holocaust happened in Europe, not Palestine.

There are Palestinian Muslims, Christians and Jews. They are ancient and diverse and have long coexisted. They speak not just Arabic but also Hebrew, Armenian and Aramaic. That is not a problem.

The big problem is Zionism, which is neither religion nor ethnicity but a political nationalistic ideology. It masquerades as the champion and protector of the Jews. 

Zionism is destructively colonialist, continuing with the Western imperial pattern of dispossession and erasure of Indigenous peoples – from the Americas to Australia and Tasmania to Africa to Palestine. It encapsulates what Western imperialism has done to millions of non-white people for centuries.

So, when Palestinians, who are majority Muslim, resist their own erasure, it is against Zionist colonial subjugation, and not against Jews, nor against Christians.

For us in Malaysia, we have to be careful not to colour the situation through our own lenses of polarised ethnic and religious identity.

It would please the Zionist propaganda machine for us in Malaysia to be divided along ethnic lines in our response to Palestine – for example, to wrongly see it as mainly a Malay Muslim issue, or to project it as such, wittingly or unwittingly.

The British ruled Malaya by keeping its people ethnically divided and compartmentalised, and we inherited those structures of communal division.

But Palestine deserves our unified solidarity, not our dividedness.

A shared though not identical history of colonisation     

This leads us to the second point: Palestine and Malaysia share a history of colonisation, albeit not identical.

Malaysia’s formal colonisation ended in 1957. Palestine’s settler-colonisation is ongoing and becoming more deadly.

In Palestine, Britain was the midwife that birthed the Zionist state of Israel. It wanted what a future governor of Jerusalem would later describe as a “loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism”.

An outside population, backed by British imperial power, settled in Palestine. These settlers displaced the indigenous people and established political and military control over their land without their consent.

In the case of Malaya, we were a colony whose natural wealth the British extracted to the extent of being a major prop to their empire.

More pertinently, British divide-and-rule methods divided the people of Malaya. They created separate economic roles, separate spaces, separate schools, separate fears and political channels.

The British colonial authorities deliberately divided us along ethnic lines. Our shared experience of colonial domination was obscured by the cultivation of communal or inter-ethnic differences.

We inherited a structure where ethnicity became our primary language for rights, representation, fear and bargaining. We have continued to run with that ethnicised legacy – even intensified it.

This is where we can take a lesson from the Palestinian struggle for freedom. The Palestinian resistance is anchored in Palestinian identity. Thus, you will find powerful positions of resistance from Christian Palestinians just as you will from Muslim Palestinians. 

The point is there is no divide. They are united in a common identity as a nation of Palestinian people fighting for liberation from the ongoing Zionist colonial domination of their land.

Does this strike a chord with us? In our own history? Where we stood together in cross-ethnic resistance against colonial rule?

The answer is yes.

Part 2 to follow.

This article is based on a forum of the same title held on 10 October 2026 at the Kuala Lumpur and Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall. The author was part of the panel of speakers.

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