The British fingerprints of empire, colonialism and White supremacy are all over present-day Palestine amid the dispossession and oppression of the Palestinian population today — as it is in many other parts of the world. It is occurring with the full consent of Western nations, particularly within the Anglosphere. This consent, however, goes back many decades. In fact, more than a century.

But don’t listen to me. Read the actual thought and words of Sir Winston Churchill in this regard below. It was Churchill who conveyed the following to the Royal Palestine Commission of 1936, which was formed in response to the Arab-Palestinian revolt and its six-month-long general strike during the time of the British (colonial) Mandate for Palestine.

Churchill himself, of course, more importantly sought to repudiate the Palestinians and their increasing call for civil rights and belonger status as the indigenous population in Palestine to be respected and honoured by the colonial power. This at a time when the British were clearly tilting the scales in favour of the growing numbers of Jewish immigrants arriving from Europe under the umbrella of the Zionist project.

When reading it, Churchill makes a reference to the dog in the manger. This reference represents the Palestinian population — non-White and non-European — who lived in Palestine alongside the small Jewish population there at the time and had for a number of centuries.

The pre-eminent idea that animated Churchill for decades until he died was not only the continuation of the empire that brought great wealth and global hegemony to Britain but also the idea or ideology centred on the supremacy of Whites — particularly the so-called Anglo-Saxon race in the parlance of the time. In his late 19th-century Eurocentric world view, the two ideas that formed his ideology were not mutually exclusive but were tied firmly at the hip and powerfully reinforced each other.

The early European proponents of Zionism, an ethnic nationalism ideology, would take their cues from such people as Churchill — their mentors in the cruel art of colonialism and the necessary subjugation of the so-called native inferior races. And who better to mentor them than the British, the masters of colonialism and rulers of the land they sought to colonise.

Churchill in his own words before the Palestine Commission

“I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time.

“I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the red Indians of America or the Black people of Australia.

“I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race — a higher-grade race, a more worldly race, to put it that way — has come in and taken their place.”

By the late 19th to mid-20th century, the Zionists of Europe in increasing numbers were migrating to Palestine to begin their own colonial adventure. They would take their cues for how they would deal with the “dogs in the manger” from the likes of Sir Winston Churchill.

Those fingerprints are still there today. If you look closely, they can be found on the walls of the old, now largely destroyed Palestinian homes and villages ... amid the continuing genocide in Palestine. Haunting us. Even now.

This is the world that our parents and grandparents were born into. A world where might makes right. We now realise it has never gone away.

Where are the vaunted Western values or its fealty to international law?

So, yes, I declare once more that Gaza is where Western liberal democracy went to die as mothers wail and their children starve.

• Rolfe Commissiong was the Progressive Labour Party MP for Pembroke South East (Constituency 21) between December 2012 and August 2020, and the former chairman of the joint select committee considering the establishment of a living wage