Daniel Winston is an American-Israeli marriage and family therapist, lecturer, and author who studied with Dr. David Schnarch, creator of the differentiation-based Crucible Approach, from 1998 until Schnarch's death in 2020. He runs twelve-hour intensives for couples and has trained more than 150 senior therapists worldwide in the Crucible Approach. He also serves in the IDF reserves and volunteers as a Magen David Adom medic, with ZAKA, and on the Israel Police Search and Rescue Team. His website is DanielWinston.com.
Every few months, a British foreign secretary steps to a podium and pompously lectures Israel on international law. In September 2025, London recognized a "State of Palestine" with no agreed borders and no leadership that has renounced terror, and its diplomats routinely brand every Jewish home beyond the 1949 armistice lines illegal despite the Fourth Geneva Convention stating no such thing.
The tempting response is to say that Britain, with its long colonial record, is no better than anyone else. This is, after all, a massively colonialistic country that still holds the Malvinas, still keeps Gibraltar, and still clings to the Chagos Islands, whose native population it forcibly expelled. The International Court of Justice told Britain in 2019 to end its administration there, and this April London shelved the treaty that would have handed the islands back.
But even that uniquely truthful response about their hypocrisy concedes too much. Britain flagrantly violated its obligations under actual international law to the Jewish people when those obligations meant the difference between life and death, while Israel has always stood on the firmest legal, historical, and moral ground of any party to this dispute.
There is no comparison and Britain’s perennially preening posing truly deserves top billing in the theatre of the criminally absurd. Now to their criminality.
The Mandate for Palestine, confirmed by the League of Nations in 1922, recognized the historical connection of the Jewish people to the land and obligated Britain, in Article 6, to facilitate Jewish immigration and encourage close settlement by Jews on the land. That was the condition of Britain's authority. Britain promptly invoked a clause it had slyly inserted into the Mandate to close roughly three quarters of the territory to Jewish settlement and hand it to Emir Abdullah as Transjordan. The Jewish national home was cut by more than 75 percent before it had a chance to exist, thus making “Jordan is Palestine" a truly accurate historical description.
Then came the White Paper of May 1939, which capped Jewish immigration at 75,000 over five years and astonishingly made all further entry subject to Arab consent. The League's Permanent Mandates Commission found the policy inconsistent with the Mandate, and Winston Churchill denounced it as a repudiation of the Balfour pledge. Britain enforced it anyway for nine years.
The timing is what makes it eternally unforgivable. In 1939, the Nazi regime had not yet turned to systematic murder. Its policy was to drive the Jews out and rob them on the way. Through the Reich Flight Tax and punitive currency rules, Jews leaving Germany by 1938 were losing on average more than 90 percent of everything they owned, and after Kristallnacht the regime fined its victims a billion Reichsmarks for the destruction the mobs had inflicted on them. By the outbreak of war, roughly 400,000 Jews had escaped Germany and Austria. The exit from the Reich was open. What the Jews needed was a door on the other side.
Most of the democracies brutally denied them that door. The United States strangled its own quotas, filling the German quota to just 5 percent in 1933, and during the war it left 90 percent of the quota for places from Axis-controlled countries unused. That perfidious record is morally shameful and worthy of harsh condemnation but, technically speaking, America had no legal duty to admit Europe's Jews. Britain did.
When Britain shut that gate, it did not merely decline to help. It broke international law at the precise moment the gate mattered most.
On October 23, 1941, Heinrich Himmler banned Jewish emigration. That same month the first deportation trains left Berlin for the East, and within weeks German Jews were being shot in the pits outside Kaunas and Riga. While Britain may not have put the gas in the chambers, it certainly did its part to put the Jews there. It bolted the only lawful exit while that exit still mattered, and kept it bolted.
In March 1943, with the extermination already known to Allied governments, Secretary of State Cordell Hull pressed Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden to rescue Jews threatened in Bulgaria. Eden warned that such an offer would bring demands to do the same for Poland and Germany, and that "Hitler might well take us up on any such offer." The fear was not that rescue would fail. It was that rescue might succeed.
n that same spirit, Britain refused entry to the Struma until nearly 800 refugees died in the Black Sea, interned more than 50,000 Holocaust survivors behind barbed wire on Cyprus, and shipped the passengers of the Exodus back to Germany.
Israel's position, by contrast, rests on its own merits. Article 80 of the United Nations Charter preserves the rights established under the mandates. Under the principle of uti possidetis juris, a new state inherits the boundaries of the administrative unit that preceded it, and that unit was Mandatory Palestine. Jordan's 1950 annexation of Judea and Samaria was recognized by almost no one except Britain (and perhaps Pakistan and Iraq but that’s another story). But of course they did. In 1967, Israel took these areas in a war of self defense against the Arabs’ genocidal intent, displacing no lawful sovereign because there was none.
Beyond history and legality, the moral contrast is starker still. In 1951, Iraq froze the assets of every Jew who had registered to leave, repeating the formula of expulsion and plunder, and much of the Arab world followed suit. Britain closed the gates when Jews were desperate to flee, and Israel threw them open.
The Law of Return is the precise inverse of the White Paper. Israel absorbed the survivors Britain had imprisoned on Cyprus, more than 800,000 Jews ethnically cleansed from Arab and Muslim lands, the Jews of Ethiopia, and a million from the former Soviet Union, all while fighting for its life against multiple genocidal enemies.
Which brings us to the still outstanding debt. West Germany, the nation that built the death camps, accepted its obligation in the 1952 Luxembourg Agreement. Britain has never acknowledged its part, never apologized, and never paid a penny, even though in 2013 it compensated more than 5,000 Kenyans abused during the Mau Mau uprising, conceding that a colonial power can owe a debt for the way it governed.
Reparations should begin with a formal acknowledgment that the White Paper violated the Mandate and cost Jewish lives. They should continue with compensation to Holocaust victims who could not escape to Mandatory Palestine, and to the State of Israel, which bore nearly the entire exorbitant cost of absorbing, defending, and rehabilitating the very survivors Britain tried to keep out.
I live in Samaria, a short drive from Shiloh, where the Tabernacle stood for centuries, and from Shechem, where Joseph is buried. Our claim to this land was not issued by a colonial office or granted at a conference. It is written by the Creator in our scripture, buried in its soil, and carried in three thousand years of prayer facing toward it. The Mandate did not create that claim; it recognized and codified it into international law.
Britain was handed a sacred trust and betrayed it when betrayal meant death for countless Jews. Israel was handed a broken, partitioned remnant of what was promised under International Law and built a nation of refuge, law, and faith upon it. We do not need to measure ourselves against Britain, and we certainly must not accept its factually faulty and morally bankrupt judgment. Save your hypocrisy and faux morality for your inexcusably bloody tea time and pay your bloody moral - and financial - debt.