Global leaders have a selective view of sovereignty. It matters, as long as it’s in their interests | Kenan Malik

Sovereignty matters. Except when it doesn’t. And it doesn’t when another people’s sovereignty gets in the way of your nation’s needs. Then sovereignty (for any other country or people, at least) becomes so much dust blowing in the storm. It is something to which the peoples of the Chagos Islands and Gaza can attest.

Last year, Britain finalised an agreement to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, a shabby deal at the end of a sordid history of British rule. Much of the criticism of the deal is equally shabby.

Britain wrested the Chagos archipelago from French rule in 1814 and administered it from Mauritius, 1,300 miles away, another colony snatched from France. When Mauritius gained independence in 1968, Britain retained the Chagos Islands for itself, having already reconstituted them as a new colony – the “British Indian Ocean Territory”. “The primary objective,” according to a confidential government memo, was to ensure that “they could be used for the construction of defence facilities” – notably an American naval base on the island of Diego Garcia – and to “be able to clear it of its current population” without facing “political agitation”. Britain had, in the words of a Foreign Office lawyer, to “maintain the fiction that the inhabitants of Chagos are not a permanent or semi-permanent population”, because otherwise their “democratic rights will have to be safeguarded”. By 1973, acceding to American demands, Britain had forced out all the Chagossians, who were banished to a wretched life of exile in Mauritius and Seychelles, with a sizeable number ending up in Britain.

Under a process begun by the Conservatives in 2022 and completed by Labour, Britain will now transfer sovereignty of the islands to Mauritius, except for Diego Garcia, home to the US military base. This will remain under UK control, under a 99-year lease agreement, for which Britain will apparently pay £90m a year.

The one people who have had no say in all of this are the Chagossians themselves, who were brought to the islands as slaves and indentured labourers, forced after emancipation to work on plantations under a “feudal” regime, as a Foreign Office memo put it, forbidden from owning any property (which allowed Britain to maintain the fiction that they were not permanent residents), forcibly deported into poverty, and now being handed to Mauritius, a country in which they have faced discrimination and ill-treatment. As Chagossian activist Rosy Leveque has observed: “The same two states who treated my family like cargo are once again negotiating our community’s future without the involvement of the actual community itself.”

The failure to consult Chagossians has been picked up by critics of the Mauritius deal. For most critics, though, it is a minor issue, compared with their real concern, the “self-inflicted blow to the UK’s security and strategic interests”, as a recent Policy Exchange report put it. “We have just handed sovereign British territory to a small island nation that is an ally of China,” the shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick, told the foreign secretary, David Lammy. “In whose interests does he think he serves: those of the global diplomatic elite or those of the British people and our national interest?”

On both sides of the debate on whether British or Mauritian sovereignty should prevail over Chagos, the rights of the Chagossians are largely ignored. Such selective attention to sovereignty is not unique. Consider Gaza. There is something very 21st-century post-politics about Donald Trump’s plan to bring peace to the Middle East by “relocating” Palestinians in Gaza and turning a mass graveyard into a holiday complex.

It is tempting to dismiss this as something very Trumpish, a narcissistic property magnate’s “America first” view of international relations. It is, though, an argument that speaks to a deeper vein of contemporary thinking. For Trump, the relationship of Palestinians to Gaza is transactional. Gaza is not “home” to those who live there, nor Palestine to the Palestinians. They could live anywhere because they possess no collective national identity of their own.

It’s a view espoused by hardline Israeli politicians, from Benjamin Netanyahu to Itamar Ben-Gvir. “There is no such thing as a Palestinian nation. There is no Palestinian history,” Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has insisted. Palestinian nationalism is artificial, runs the argument, whereas the Jewish claim to the land is deeply rooted in a history reaching back thousands of years. Palestinian identity, the historian Rashid Khalidi has observed, like all identities, whether Jewish or American or English, “is not an essential transcendent given”, but has been “constructed”, evolving over time, and assimilating different strands. A distinctive Palestinian sense of nationhood, he argues, emerged towards the end of the Ottoman empire, and has been recast many times over the past century, especially in response to the formation of the state of Israel. Neither the recency of the construction of Palestinian national identity, nor its degeneration with the rise of Hamas, denies Palestinian feelings about their collective being, nor the legitimacy of their aspirations to be treated equally with Jews within Israel/Palestine.

The aspirations of Palestinians and Jews could be embodied in two states, with equal powers, or through a single state with equal status and rights for both peoples. Today, though, Palestinians live either as citizens of a state within which, according to Israel’s nation-state law, “the right to exercise national self-determination… is unique to the Jewish people”, and where, in the words of the former justice minister, Ayelet Shaked, that Jewishness must be maintained “even if it violates rights”; or under occupation in the West Bank; or, until the current war, all but occupation in Gaza.

Denying the legitimacy of Palestinian aspirations as a people makes the “relocation” – the ethnic cleansing – of Palestinians acceptable, as well as the destruction of Gaza in the first place, in the name of “self-defence”. As the former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir claimed almost half a century ago, since Palestinians “did not exist” as a people, it could not be that “we came and threw them out and took their country away from them”.

It’s true that, even with the brutality and humiliation they face, Palestinians fare better under Israeli rule than Jews would in a Hamas-run Palestine. That is no argument, though, for repudiating Palestinian rights or dismissing their aspirations. From the Chagos Islands to Gaza, discussions of sovereignty today are as much about denying certain peoples their autonomy as about asserting one’s own.