Wikipedia describes the conflict between Palestine and Israel as “one of the world’s most enduring conflicts” and goes on to explain its history as follows:

Following the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948, the Arab League decided to intervene on behalf of Palestinian Arabs, marching their forces into former British Palestine, beginning the main phase of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. The overall fighting, leading to around 15,000 casualties, resulted in cease-fire and armistice agreements of 1949, with Israel holding much of the former Mandate territory, Jordan occupying and later annexing the West Bank and Egypt taking over the Gaza Strip, where the All-Palestine Government was declared by the Arab League on 22 September 1948.

So how can Britain be blamed for the conflict? The Balfour Declaration of 1917 stated that:

His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to achieve the fulfilment of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which may prejudice the civil or religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status of Jews in any other country.

In his book Hope in Israel Palestine: Stories of Hope; Prospects for Peace, John Howard says that

From the beginning of the Mandate period [in 1917], British one-sidedness was evident in the formation of the ‘Jewish Agency’. This council was to work under the British Administration for Palestine, and its brief was to establish the conditions that would be conducive to the setting up of a ‘Jewish National Home’ in Palestine.

There was no equivalent body for the benefit of Palestinians. This caused huge resentment in the Arab communities, seeing the British action as colonisation and as a deliberate policy of land transfer.

Throughout the period – indeed into the early years of the existence of the State of Israel – British policy was driven by the desire to further the interests of Britain and its colonies, rather than the interests of those living in the land of Palestine.

By 1936 it was clear that, not only did the Palestinians feel deeply threatened by the British policy and the large scale Jewish immigration that resulted, but that the British government knew this.

The combination of British colonial attitudes and Britain’s ongoing support for Zionism created much of the background for the enmity evident between the new State of Israel and its Arab neighbours.

With the benefit of hindsight…it is difficult to imagine how Britain could have done more to divide the residents of Palestine and then set them up to fight each other.

In Balfour’s Shadow: A Century of British Support for Zionism and Israel, David Cronin writes:

By the time that Herbert Samuel’s five year term as High Commissioner ended, the proportion of land owned by Zionists had increased by more than 60 per cent. Promises of compensation to Palestinian peasants evicted from their holdings were frequently broken. More than 8,700 Palestinians were expelled from 22 villages in the Marj Ibn Amer, a region in the Galilee, now known as the Jezreel Valley, in the first half of the 1920s. Thanks to Samuel’s policies, the dispossession of Palestinians had gained a momentum that has not yet stopped.

The British administration in Palestine institutionalised racism. Palestinians employed on public roadworks were paid little more than half what Jews got “for equal output”, Arthur Wauchope [the High Commissioner at the time] informed the Colonial Office. He tried to explain the discrimination by claiming that “the Jewish standard of living demands higher payment, whereas Palestinians were thankful for their lower wages”.

By the time they had decided to quit, the British had already created the conditions necessary for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. As they prepared to leave, the British authorities displayed a nonchalant attitude toward the continued acquisition of arms by the Zionist forces.