In the aftermath of Israel’s attack on Western aid workers (for the World Central Kitchen), former British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, called the growing calls for the UK to curb arms supply to Israel ‘shameful‘. England would stand proudly with the ‘only’ democracy in the Middle East.
In 2023, the Israeli Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, described the Gazan women and children cowering from Israeli airstrikes and artillery to be ‘human animals.’ This is the point where the ideologies of these two nations think alike.
In 1876, seated comfortably in his lavish, mountainous Abbottabad office, the Colonial chief secretary to the British Raj in Punjab, C.L. Tupper, wasted no opportunity in his routine communique with Lahore and London to describe the Pashtun-Afghan people as synonyms of ‘animals’, ‘backwards’, and ‘savages.’
“We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”
Yoav Gallant
What do Mr. Yoav Gallant and Mr. C.L. Tupper have in common? They were both pressed by their respective governments to root out dissenting voices that spoke for independence and freedom. Unfortunately for both officials, their task was to subjugate an entire people, rather than any single, pesky activist or ulema.
The Parallel of Land
While modern-day England is outspoken against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine (which the Kremlin says is to preserve the lives of ethnic Russians), the imperialist England of yore sought territories just to add more to its global piggybank. In 1846, the Treaties of Lahore & Bhairowal (after the First Anglo-Sikh War) paved the path to a subsequent annexation of the entire Punjab province by the British Empire in 1849.
This was the start of the British nightmare in modern-day Pakistan’s Norther-west Frontier (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) province. The British inherited ‘territories’ west of the Indus River, which included Peshawar and Jamrud, but farther west into the Koh-i-Suleiman, Khyber, and Hindu Kush ranges, the borders were ill-defined and sporadic (controlled by fiercely independent Pashtun tribes).
Simply stopping at the gates of Peshawar was not enough for the Englishmen. They had to take control of all land until they reached Khorasan, as part of their Forward Policy; the English ambition to install its own puppet regime in Kabul and its annexation into the vast British Empire (otherwise known as the ‘Great Game’ against the Russians). However, the Pashtun tribes never relented in both military and civil disobedience, willing to forego every necessity and luxury if it meant freedom.
Israel, a product of the Balfour Declaration, made to House Rotschild follows similar land-grabbing parallels to English colonialism. While the British administrators were often ruthless in implementing their decrees in the Indian subcontinent (see the court martial of Shah Bahadur), the closer proximity to reeling European powers after the First World War forced them to use the western-propped League of Nations to give themselves a ‘mandate’ to create a separate Zionist state.
The solution? The British exercised their divine right to dismantle existing governmental and political systems to enforce their wills. A separate Zionist state was carved out of Arabian territories (Palestine) to be shared between the existing Muslims and fresh-arriving Jews. The great leap of logic behind this ‘two-state’ system was that both groups could peacefully co-exist.
It appears that none of the administrators in Westminster had listened to the advice of C.L. Tupper, or from the court martial of the last Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah, that Muslims are a terrible, warmongering people (sure, why not?). Enclosed in the quote below are comments from the Court Martial administrator when the last Mughal Emperor was indicted and deposed (after the First Independence mutiny of 1857).
“The known restlessness of the Mohammadan fanaticism has been the first aggressor, the vindictive intolerance of that peculiar religion has been struggling for mastery, seditious conspiracy has been its means.’
British Court Martial of Bahadur Shah II, the last Mughal Emperor
According to British colonial overseers, the mastery of a land belonged to the Westerners through either divine right, or might is right (fancily called “Rules-based order” in the modern world). It was unthinkable that people who were born in India would want mastery over their own lands (The Brits used a divide & conquer approach where co-rebellions of Muslims & Hindus were blamed only on Muslims), which brings us into a direct parallel to their western shenanigans in Palestine & Gaza.
In a fashion consistent with Colonial England’s Forward Policy, the Israeli State has been adamant on its own policy of settling the entirety of Palestine using its fanatical, above-the-law, flash-mobs that the Western media exclusively and in admirable decorum calls “settlers”. Even when they meet any Western definition of being called Terrorists. You see, only Muslims can be terrorists.
The settlers, who among many terror incidents, have been guilty of burning Palestinian children alive, gunning down innocent villagers, and attacking civilians including women and children. There is a plethora of footage and evidence on the internet documenting the atrocities of Israeli settlers in their bid (immolations, lynching, murder, looting) to capture more land that is never reported on Western media (take a ponder on why!).
Much like Britain’s slow encroachment of Pashtun lands in the Frontier province (more on this in the next section), Israel has been illegally seizing Palestinian land to create its own settlements as part of an expansionist regime. The largest land seizure yet was declared in March 2024 (well over 10 km2, the largest grab since 1993), during the visit of U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken.
The Parallel of Laws
While the United Kingdom had not enacted universal suffrage during the late 19th century, it did have somewhat democratically elected Prime Ministers and governments for the period. The lawmaking bodies of England were evidently careful of representing their rich and masses, because the laws passed for British India were nothing short of archaic. An honorary mention would be the “Council of India Act” signed into law at 11th August 1869, essentially giving the London Westminster government complete control over all colonial affairs (crushing the hopes of staunch Indians like Sir Syed Ahmad Khan who wanted an Indian parliament).
If such a law was enacted in England, all the people would have petitioned for its repeal.
Sir Syed Ahmad Khan in correspondence with Mohsin-ul-Mulk
There is an unending, bloody trail of draconian laws that were enacted by the British Empire in Indian provinces, so it would be useful to focus on only a single province, as is the focus of this blog – The North West Frontier Province, or as it is better known, the Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR).
According to Robert Nichols, Professor of History at Stockton University (New Jersey), there was an unwritten subtext that even nominal political resistance against Britain was a crime in the Frontier province.
Here are only a few absolute gems of draconian laws:
- FCR.1887(Sec12): Decisions made by the British Commissioners cannot be challenged in a local court.
- FCR.1887(Sec37): Allows select ‘private persons’ (handpicked by the British commissioners) to arrest, prosecute, and grant death sentences on any ‘reasonable’ suspicion.
- FCR.1887 (Gazette Notification): All Europeans are exempt from all Frontier Crimes Regulations. This made FCR essentially a racial law (applicable ONLY to Pashtuns & Baloch). Could the Welsh or Scotts imagine having laws applied only to them?
- FCR.1887(Sec23): Permits collective punishment such as arrests, debarment, confiscation of all personal effects, of all members of a tribe (not even immediate family) of any accused (not proven guilty) person.
- FCR.1887(Sec33): As colonial Britain forcefully expanded its territories west, any Pashtun tribe or settlement within 5 miles of the demarcated frontline had be to abolished. Imagine being kicked out of the land your forefathers bought and cultivated across generations because the Europeans wanted more land.
- FCR.1887(Sec39&40): A suspect in a crime has to pay a surety bond to avoid arrest before any arrest is made. If you tick off the wrong people, your entire family will be arrested without cause.
- The 1889 revision of the FCR imported Sections 144 and 150 from the Indian Penal Code, which made unlawful all public assemblies and protests across the Frontier.
When some of the sane-minded British officers reviewed the sentences so amply being passed by local law and DC officers, they were baffled at the extent of unaccountability. The British DC officers would appoint their favourite locals (who were accepting of British rule, see divide and rule) to oversee criminal cases in Jirgas and wave through sentences of 3, 7, and 14 years on cases with zero or poor evidence.
You may by questioning them satisfy yourself as to whether their finding has been arrived at in an honest and intelligent manner or not, but you can rarely hope to satisfy yourself as to whether it is a correct one or not; nor, as Sir Dennis Fitzpatrick has said, does the Act require the presiding officer to do this.
H. C. Hanshawe, Offg. Chief Secretary to Government, Punjab, 1894
Imagine how many poor locals were harassed, thrown into prison, or hung from the gallows only because the British played favourites by handing over the entire law to Pro-British locals (who harboured personal conflicts). How many children were orphaned, land seized from surviving families, and life sentences passed for crimes that were never proven? While many would call this ancient history (easier to cope that way), parallels of these atrocities can be found in Israel’s conflict with Palestine & Gaza.
- Military Order 101: Applies to the West Bank, whereby civilians are subjected to Israeli military law, unlike the Israeli settlers who are still governed under Israel’s civil law. FCR only applied to local Pashtun and Balochi tribespeople, not to Europeans.
- Administrative Detention Orders: Palestinians are subject to detentions of up to six months without charges or trial. Parallels the FCR.37 and FCR.40 allowing for imprisonment without charge.
- Punitive Home Demolitions: The Israeli Supreme Court okayed the demolition of an innocent minor’s house falsely accused of killing an Israeli border guard. Collective punishment is a norm in occupied territories, FCR.23 and FCR.39 had the same purpose.
- Property Law and Settlement Expansion Policies: Israel has codified policies that allow for it to legally possess more Palestinian lands, a fact constantly protested by the UN.
- Permit Regime: When one member of a Frontier tribe was accused of a crime, the British would blockade their villages, and cut off their access to Peshawar (the Winter capital of Pashtuns) and other cities, effectively forcing the villages into famine and poverty. Israel consistently plays with its own permit regime to punish innocent Gazans and Palestinians, by depriving them of work.
The condition that the Gazan people have been in since October 2023 can only be described as lawless. The Western world hailed ICC’s arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin as progressive, yet Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrest warrant was challenged – talk about double standards!
Meanwhile, Israel has consistently been accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The Israeli military has been massacring Gazan civilians, destroying children’s hospitals and educational facilities, bombing refugee camps and designated safe zones, and organising a genocide with complete Western support. What’s hypocritical is that a dubious missile (contested on whether it was Russian or Ukrainian) that destroyed an external structure of a children’s hospital in Kiev, Ukraine received far more western outrage than the destruction of children’s hospitals in the Gazan strip (and the decomposing Gazan babies found therein).
The pretend-laws that Israel follows in occupied territories draw a startling parallel to what colonial Britain followed in India. It could even be argued that Israel’s wholesale, open slaughter was the only natural evolution of the FCR.
The Parallel of Tyranny
The defeat of the Indians in the First Independence War of 1857 unbarred the gates of prejudice and open enmity against Muslims by the British, which showed in the strategy of deprivation for Muslim communities. Because the Frontier tribes refused to accept British rule in the region (and became a hindrance to Britain’s Forward Policy), the tribes were excluded from all public investments.
While Frontier courts and jirgas were passing unfair sentences to unproven accused, the worse fate for many Pashtuns was not going to prison, but where they would be going. To break the tribal resistance, the British chose to send Frontier prisoners to the Andaman colonial prison system. A prison system completely and utterly removed from Pashtun life. Located on the eastern side of the Indian Ocean, the Pashtun prisoners were socially, linguistically, and culturally alienated as a collective punishment. In analogy, it would be comparable to sending a British prisoner to a Russian prison.
Civil infrastructure, schools, and hospitals were either delayed or not built in the Frontier, because the British civil administration was conditioned to avoid helping (e.g., punishing) the local populace. Because the Punjab province was complacent in British rule, it was granted the University College Lahore in 1868, but Peshawar did not get a college (Islamia College) until 1913.
By keeping the Muslim masses uneducated and illiterate, the risk of long-term resistance was lower. This stance was the claim to fame for many Muslim-Indian educationists and philosophers, including Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and Nawab Abdul Latif, who believed that resistance to British rule could be mounted when Muslims have well-educated, literate leaders; leading to the creation of many reputable institutions such as the Mohammedan Literary Society in Calcutta.
Much like the Frontier, the British also feared growing resistance from the Persian-influenced Sind province, and thus annexed its Muslim majority population into the Bombay Presidency in 1843 (placing them under Hindu rulership), converted the region from Persian speakers to Sindhi speakers, closed educational facilities, and plummeted literacy rates to record low by 1880. Indeed, by that time less than 4% of students learning English in the Bombay Presidency were Muslims.
The British administrators had already beheaded the future of Sindhi people for centuries to come (the region still suffers from poor literacy rates today) and planned to do the same for the Frontier Pashtuns. A parallel for the same can be drawn for what Israel is doing to the occupied Palestine today. Gazan children can no longer go to school, are not learning on any academic fronts, and their teenagers are busy picking up the bloodied corpses of their families and loved ones.
With an increasingly illiterate young population, Gazans stand at the risk of having no credible leaders in the future. The British culled the Muslims, once the ruling and literate class of India, and now Israel is doing the same to the Gazans. When these children, who have spent their formative years in warfare and depravity, demonstrate resistance in the future, the Westerners will point and laugh at their illiteracy and adherence to baser human instincts.
I dare say that Mr. C.L. Tupper and Mr. Yoav Gallant have both been partially right. Israel has created tyrannical laws and systems designed to diminish the Muslim spirit in Palestine, the same way the British did in Imperial India. Both men left no stones unturned in their desire to create “human animals”.
The Nazis are infamous for the Jewish holocaust. The British, despite the massacres, tyranny, and near-genocide of entire Indian races, are famous for their Fish & Chips. That fact alone should tell who controls the narrative in the modern, rules-based world. Click here to read more posts on Israel & Western imperialism.
I’m an author & journalist from Islamabad, Pakistan. I explore authentic, credible stories of colonialism and modern-day Imperialism from the West. I also write stories of marginalised, unheard voices that live in slums and indigence. Voices that are rarely heard in the modern literature.
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