The two nations go back a long way.
History records that the relationship has often been far from warm.
IF ONE were to ask the average late-20th century consumer of news about the historical relationship between Britain and Israel, the response would most likely go little further than a vague reference to the Balfour Declaration and British Mandate. The assumption is quite wrong. Yet working against their own political masters in Whitehall, British officials based in the Middle East began conspiring to marginalise the Zionists in their quest for a state. Driven by a vision of an Arab fertile crescent under British domination, they took control first of the British military administration in Palestine, and then of the civilian administration which followed in the early 1920s. Several months later, the British treachery against the Zionists culminated in the publishing by colonial secretary Malcolm MacDonald of his notorious White Paper, an apparent death knell to the Zionist dream of a Jewish state.