Historian William Dalrymple on Gaza - transcript & video

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Best-selling writer and historian William Dalrymple spoke about Gaza and Palestine, and about Britain's historic responsibility for the situation there. His speech introduced 'A Golden String: William Blake in Words and Music ' a fundraising event for Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) at St James' Church, Piccadilly, London on 30 May, 2025.

An ICN transcript of the full text follows:

Seventy seven years ago this month, 750, 000 Palestinians were terrorised, raped, and brutalised out of their homes and farms and villages, in the Galilee, from Tiberia, Betshean, 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 olive trees on to the barren sands dunes of Gaza where they remain. At the end of 1948 less than 15 per cent of Palestinians remained where they had always lived.

85 per cent had been ethnically cleansed, despite the promises of Lord Balfour that (quote) 'Nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.'

The Nakba happened because the politicians of this country enabled it. They enabled it with the Balfour Declaration and they 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 outside the country. This country has a historic responsibility, more than virtually any other, to see the establishment of a Palestinian state and to provide some protection for the Palestinian people who have suffered what they did because our grandparents' generations regarded the Palestinians as somehow expendable and unimportant.

You might have thought that this shameful history would galvanise our government to atone for past mistakes and make good for past failures. Far from it. For 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 frighted to tell their stories in documentaries or news bulletins.

The British people are not taught the dark history of our responsibility for this mess. Instead, we as a country still provide diplomatic cover for Netanyahu's extremist administration, which has made its intentions entered clear. Smotruch, Netanyahu's finance minister, said last week open television: " Gaza will be entirely destroyed , and its population will leave in great numbers to third countries."

Yes this government has done nothing. It is complicit with the most public and visible of war crimes. Our taxpayers' money is still being used to send the RAF to assist the genocide in Gaza with British gathered intelligence to enable the murders to kill yet more women and children with aircraft parts made in this country and freely exported to the IDF.

Shamefully, more weapons for the IDF have left Britain under Starmer than under the Tories.

At this moment , half a million Palestinians are facing starvation. One million can barely get enough food. Human Rights Watch has said that Israel's blockade has transcended military tactics to become a tool of extermination.

But you cannot suppress the truth. Everyone here in this church tonight knows about this slaughter. More than 60,000 innocents have been killed , and maybe as many as 100,000. This is one of the great moral catastrophes of our time, arguably the biggest moral failure of the West since the Second World War.

There is darkness all around as we wake every morning to see images of yet more slaughter innocents on our phones. It sometimes feels like this darkest of nights will never end.

Yes it is in that darkness that we dream best, and our dreams are not fantasy, they are an urgent reality. We dream of justice and freedom and dignity and decency and human rights. We dream of a world where Palestinians are not burnt alive in their tents. Ae dream of a world where they are not herded like cattle from refugee camp to refugee camp to await their final slaughter. We dream of a Palestinian state, supported by our government, where Palestinians can live in safely and without fear. We dream of freedom for Palestine. Thank you.

Watch the video, filmed by Andrew Catlin and Richard Heslop. Edited by Sam Sharples here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSpSrRa8bdA