One year after ‘Britain Owes Palestine’, London shifts on the occupation but not on its own history

A year ago this week, a 400-page legal petition arrived on the desks of the UK Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary, the Defence Secretary and the Attorney General, setting out the case that “Britain Owes Palestine” over its unlawful conduct between 1917 and 1948. That conduct led to the Nakba and set in motion decades of colonial dispossession and illegal occupation, culminating in the crime of all crimes: the genocide in Gaza.

In the twelve months since, however, Britain’s declared position on the region it once governed has shifted further than at any point in decades: settlement goods are being banned from British shelves, the occupation of the West Bank has been declared unlawful, and ministers now use, in Parliament, the language of ethnic cleansing. What the government has not done is engage with the argument underneath all of it, that the injustice unfolding in Palestine today has its origins in what Britain itself did, and failed to do, a century ago.

The petition, Britain Owes Palestine, was submitted on 7 September 2025 to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, then Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper, Defence Secretary John Healey and Attorney General Richard Hermer. It was drafted by the human rights barristers Ben Emmerson KC and Danny Friedman KC, the international law academic Victor Kattan, and historians Professor John Quigley and Professor Avi Shlaim of the University of Oxford, and the campaign’s lead petitioner, the Palestinian industrialist and philanthropist Munib Al-Masri.

Watch: MEMO in Conversation with Prof Avi Shlaim

The petition sets out three grounds of unlawful behaviour. It argues that Britain acted unlawfully as an occupying power by imposing a Mandate it had no authority to impose, and by facilitating Jewish immigration into Palestine in breach of the law governing occupation at the time. It argues separately that Britain’s repression of the 1936 to 1939 Arab Rebellion, carried out through a system of martial law, amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity, including arbitrary detention, torture and the mass demolition of homes.

Thirdly, it argues that Britain’s own conduct contributed directly to the partition of Palestine and the events of 1948, establishing the country’s responsibility for the Nakba that followed. The petition asks the government to search its archives, reach a public and legally grounded conclusion on the evidence, apologise in Parliament, and consider reparations.

At launch, the petition carried the backing of more than seventy signatories, among them the Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran, the first British MP of Palestinian descent, the former shadow chancellor John McDonnell, and the actress Juliet Stevenson CBE. Over the year, that support grew further: forty-five additional cross-party MPs and peers signed an open letter backing the case, and more than thirty cultural and business figures added their names.

MEMO asked three of the people behind the case: Kattan, Friedman and Al-Masri. Between them, their answers trace the argument’s full shape, from the silence it has been met with, to the law Britain is accused of breaking, to what is owed and to whom.

“One year after the legal petition was submitted to the UK Government, setting out evidence that Britain committed war crimes in Palestine between 1917 and 1948, we’re still waiting for a response,” said Kattan, commenting on Britain’s silence. “In that time, the Government has never acknowledged that its actions in Palestine were morally or legally wrong.”

Owning up to its failures and taking responsibility for its policies are a key part of the restorative justice the campaigners are seeking from Britain, Kattan explained, because the policies of London, more than a century later, continue to constrain Palestinians.

“Britain’s Mandate policies transformed Palestine’s legal, political, and demographic character without authority,” said Kattan. “The petition contends that Britain’s repression during both the 1936–39 Arab Rebellion and 1948 abandonment, alongside obstructing the UN Palestine Commission and failing its occupation duties, left Palestinians exposed to foreseeable atrocities and expulsions. The consequences of which still constrain Palestinian rights and self-determination today.”

Friedman lays out the legal framework behind the petition in three parts. “The petition builds its case from primary-source evidence and tests Britain’s conduct against the international law applicable at the time,” he said. “It identifies three principal grounds of unlawfulness.

Firstly, Britain breached its obligations as a belligerent occupying power, secondly it unlawfully repressed the Palestinian population through a system of martial law, including conduct amounting to war crimes. Lastly, Britain’s own unlawful conduct contributed to the partition of Palestine and events of 1948, establishing a basis for Britain’s responsibility for the consequences that followed.”

None of that is resolved by a simple show of contrition, Friedman went on to explain. “An apology is necessary but not sufficient,” he added. “The Government should examine the petition and its evidence considering its commitments to confront wrongdoing in Britain’s colonial past in Palestine; identify and publicly release any relevant records held in The National Archives; and reach a frank, transparent and legally grounded conclusion under international law. Its response should be prompt, comprehensive, and public. It should acknowledge any wrongdoing established by the evidence and, in good faith, consider appropriate forms of accountability, reparation, and support for the Palestinian people and the State of Palestine.”

Al-Masri offers the weight of personal testimony that a campaign seeking to undo historical injustice requires. “My grandfather was shot under the Mandate and I was shot decades later by Israeli forces,” he recalled. “Our family’s story is not unique and it is replicated across Palestinian families. Across generations, it feels like the same story repeating of people violently denied self-determination and living under rules they did not choose. That continuity is no accident.”

Describing what accountability would mean for his family today, Al-Masri continued: “For my family and many Palestinians, acknowledgement means recognising that our displacement, the fracturing of our society, and the denial of self-determination did not happen by accident, rather they were foreseeable consequences of British policy.”

“It means being seen, being heard, and having the truth acknowledged about how policies enacted in our name shaped Palestinian lives across generations. In practical terms, acknowledgement and accountability mean opening the archives, confronting the full historical record, and being willing to ask what accountability and reparation are owed to people whose homeland was transformed without their consent and whose rights remain unrealised, and are being further eroded today.”

Two days after the petition’s anniversary, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband told the House of Commons that Britain now regards the occupation of the West Bank as unlawful in its entirety, and that the government agrees there is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians under way in parts of the territory, “perpetrated by settler terrorists.” He announced an import ban on goods from illegal settlements, to be introduced through a new sanctions regime within six to nine months, alongside further sanctions on extremist settlers and a ban on arms exports that materially contribute to the occupation.

On Gaza, where more than 70,000 Palestinians have been killed in the genocide, Miliband called the devastation “a stain on the conscience of the world and of this country too,” and said October 7 “cannot justify what has happened.” He noted that the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry had found increasing evidence that war crimes had been committed, while the government continues to await the International Court of Justice’s determination on genocide before drawing its own conclusion.

What the government has not done, in any of this, is address the specific claim at the centre of the Britain Owes Palestine petition: that its own conduct during the Mandate broke the law of the time and set in motion the dispossession and genocide that followed. Ministers can now call the occupation of the West Bank unlawful and sanction those who sustain it, while remaining silent on whether Britain’s own occupation of Palestine between 1917 and 1948 was itself unlawful.

For Kattan, Friedman and Al-Masri, that omission is the point. As Al-Masri put it, you cannot build a just future without telling the truth about the past. A year after his petition landed in Downing Street, Britain is still choosing which parts of that truth to tell.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.