'The phrase "British Mandate of Palestine" is as commonplace in Western and Zionist scholarship on Palestine as to be inoffensive and therefore barely given a second thought. Indeed, a quick internet search of this seemingly innocuous term reveals some two million results of wildly varying quality and usefulness.

There was, however, no such thing as "British Mandate" of Palestine; it was and remains a purely European/Western colonial construct, an abstraction with real and disastrous consequences. In reality, the Palestinian people never consented to be occupied by British colonials, never agreed to have their ancestral land partitioned and given away to other Europeans, and never asked to be "civilized" by an imperial government which was completely ignorant of their language, culture and history. The same could be said of "French Mandate" Syria and Lebanon or "British Mandate" Iraq.'

Read more: From Balfour to Obama: Colonial Thinking on Palestine