ABSTRACT
Towards the end of 1949, most of the Palestinians who had fled, or were expelled, during the previous year's war between the Israeli and Arab forces, faced their second winter in the camps of neighbouring countries and in the Gaza strip. British Labour Party figures who visited Palestine as guests of the Histadruth also helped its work by addressing meetings, writing articles and providing contacts. The Labour Party was committed to the 'humane' management of the colonies, to the notion that it was the duty of the imperial power and, by extension, of Western civilisation to develop the resources of the colonial world. The Labour party's response to the Nazi extermination, which precipitated its 1944 proposal that the Arabs move out of Palestine, was largely defined by the ideological ascendancy that Zionism had acquired in the Labour movement in the 1930s.
