Partitions, Past and Present: South Asia and Palestine

posted on: Oct 21, 2026

Overview

The conflicts between India and Pakistan and between Israeli settlers and Palestinians are usually discussed separately, regarded as their own unique struggles in different regions and with different contexts. Yet both took shape as the British Empire withdrew from territories it had governed by division and left behind boundaries drawn in haste, and examining the South Asian case helps explain why the Palestinian one remains unresolved.

The East India Company gradually took control of large parts of the subcontinent during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. After the uprising of 1857, the British Crown assumed direct rule, which lasted until 1947 and shaped the administrative, legal, and military institutions of every successor state.¹

Colonial authorities sorted the population by religion, resulting in the introduction of separate electorates for Muslims in 1909. This gave political weight to a communal distinction that had been less harsh in daily life, a control strategy that many historians describe as divide and rule. However, they continue to debate how much blame belongs to British officials and how much to Indian political leaders who also organized around religious identity.

Partition and Its Aftermath

In 1947, the weakening British Empire brought forward the date of independence. A notable lawyer at the time, Cyril Radcliffe, who had never visited India before, was given roughly five weeks to draw borders through Punjab and Bengal. They were not announced until after the new states already existed.² Estimates vary, but roughly twelve to fifteen million people were displaced and hundreds of thousands³, by some counts as many as two million, were killed.⁴

The disputed status of Kashmir, whose ruler acceded to India in October 1947, produced a war almost immediately and further wars in the following years. Since both countries began testing nuclear weapons in 1998, every crisis carries a risk it did not carry before.⁵ In 2025, a militant attack in Kashmir was followed by an exchange of military strikes and by India’s decision to suspend the Indus Waters Treaty.⁶ This is a monumental shift, suggesting that the unresolved questions of 1947 continue to generate new confrontations nearly eight decades later. What remain as quieter consequences from the conflict are things like divided families, heavy military spending, and restricted travel.⁷

British Rule in Palestine

Britain took Palestine from the Ottoman Empire during the First World War and in 1917, issued the Balfour Declaration, which supported a national home for the Jewish people there while stating that the rights of the existing non-Jewish communities should not be harmed.⁸ Under the Mandate that followed, Jewish immigration and settlement on Palestinian land grew, driven in large part by persecution in Europe. Justifiably, Arab opposition grew with it, leading to the Great Palestinian Rebellion from 1936 to 1939, which British forces suppressed.⁹

In 1947, the United Nations proposed dividing the territory into Jewish and Arab states, a plan that Zionist leaders accepted and that Arab leaders rejected because it gave a minority of the population a large share of the land. Britain announced its departure and left in May 1948 without an agreed successor authority. This further destabalized the region and caused a war that resulted in around 750,000 Palestinians fleeing or complete removal altogether.¹⁰ This became a historic event Palestinians call the Nakba.¹¹

Israel had now emerged as a state and occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza in 1967. The settlement of the first two, the failure of the Oslo process, and the blockade of Gaza set the conditions for the conflict that occurred on October 7, 2023. Gaza’s health authorities report that more than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed since then, and although a US-brokered ceasefire took effect in October 2025, strikes have continued and the agreement’s later phases, including governance and reconstruction, have stalled.¹² 

Palestinians and many scholars describe the broader history as settler colonialism, marked by the tactics used by Israeli forces on Palestinian civilians. At the same time, Israelis and their supporters claim it as national self-determination for a people with ancient ties to the land and a need for refuge, and the disagreement over that framing is itself part of the conflict.

Drawing the Parallels

The two cases share several features, most notably, a departing imperial power that held both territories through division, boundaries drawn quickly by nescient outsiders, religious identity turned into a political category, and large displaced populations whose status remained unsettled. Disputed territory is another central theme, with Kashmir in one case and Jerusalem and the West Bank in the other, that has contributed to rising tensions and driven repeated wars. In neither place did the British departure include a lasting resolution.

The South Asian experience suggests that unresolved partitions do not fade with time but instead harden, perpetuating similar struggles in new generations. Those that are able to recognize the long-term impacts of imperialism in that setting see the same threads of division sown by occupation in Palestine. They assert the importance of addressing the genocide happening now. They draw attention to the struggle for liberation as a refusal to overlook the refugees, borders, and security of the people, and as a matter of preventing decades of further violence instilled by imperialism.

1. The Daily Star ↩︎
2. Al Jazeera ↩︎
3. Business Today ↩︎
4. Al Jazeera ↩︎
5. WION ↩︎
6. The South First ↩︎
7. Deccan Herald ↩︎
8. Al Jazeera ↩︎
9. Al Jazeera ↩︎
10. Dawn ↩︎
11. Al Jazeera ↩︎
12. Ahram ↩︎

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