The Miliband statement: moral clarity, political realism

The Britain Palestine Project applauds the British Foreign Secretary’s statement to the House of Commons enacting policies to combat the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, by banning trade with settlers and their produce and introducing bars to financing settlement expansion. The whole package, writes BPP Chair Tim Livesey, shows moral clarity and political realism, and may prove greater than the sum of it parts—there is no turning back.

Britons’ overwhelming Yes to Miliband, No to Israeli occupation

The logical and non-contradictory reasoning of most British people is that it is right that the UK is acting against the Israeli settlers and the whole settlement scheme, and that they believe a two-state solution is the way forward. Brian Brivati, BPP Executive Director, reports.

Three years on–and there is much more to do

Sir Vincent Fean, former British Consul-General to Jerusalem and BPP Trustee, reflects on the Palestinian killings of 7 Oct 2023 and the Israeli genocide of Palestinians that followed, and declares that change imposed on Israel from outside—and end to arms deals and the UK-Israel trade agreement, for example, and stern preventive action on settlements, especially the looming E1 project—is the main way forward.

Why our Jerusalem Consulate is vital

Richard Burden writes that it is regrettable and illegal that Israel has downgraded the British Consulate-General in East Jerusalem—but what that mission does and what it stands for are what is important.

BOOK REVIEW

The brutal transformation since 7 Oct 2023 of Gaza’s landscape into a place no longer liveable, no longer fertile, echoing the Israeli aims of the Nakba of 1948, is recorded and analysed in forensic detail by the Israeli-born creator of Forensic Architecture. Review by Don Macintyre.

 

 

 

Events and podcasts

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Listen on Spotify

Choose from more than 150 BPP podcasts available on Spotify, featuring expert guests from a wide range of professional fields.

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Listen on Substack

Many of our podcasts are also available as videos on Substack. Click to visit BPP Substack.

News and commentary

Why Israel’s planned closure of the UK mission in East Jerusalem is illegal under international law

Israel has no rights in international law or under UN Security Council Resolutions to close down the UK’s Consulate-General in East Jerusalem, as it has said it intends to do on 8 Oct 2026 in reprisal for Britain’s new measures against trade and financing by British concerns with and in all the illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine territory. The occupied territories are all, including annexed East Jerusalem, beyond Israel’s jurisdiction. BRIAN BRIVATI, BPP Executive-Director, explains in detail the legal positions. Also, The Guardian of 28 Sept 2028, reports on the advice given to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, supporting these findings, by former Attorney-General Dominic Grieve.

Liberal Zionism is dead

The eminent British-Israeli historian  and writer, Avi Shlaim, says Israel’s military excesses in Gaza and the West Bank, and the increasing Jewish-Israeli animosity against the Palestinian population of Israel, have proved that Zionism is incompatible with democracy.

7 Oct: Did Netanyahu know in advance—and do nothing?

Two Israeli investigative journalists write in a new book based on Palestinian,  regional Arab and Israeli Intelligence that the President of the United Arab Emirates warned the Israeli leader in September, 2023, that a massive, Hamas-led breakout military operation from the Gaza Strip was planned for the very near future. Netanyahu, they write, did nothing, claiming that the main threat to Israel lay on the West Bank.

Sami Abu Salem: to stay or to leave? Israel holds the door

Sami Abu Salem, our man in Gaza since before 7 Oct, 2023, talks to Mike Joseph about the dire choices posed by Israel’s genocidal war: how can Palestinians unify or think of rebuilding in the face of the Israeli blockade, of food, goods, fuel, reconstruction materials and medicine, and Israeli blackmail—withholding funds from the West Bank Palestinian Authority against Palestinian rejection of the International Courts? And what future for Sami and his children? To stay…or to leave? The burning question for any Gazan parent.

Britain’s silence on its shameful Palestine record

The UK should acknowledge its brutal historic role in the crushing of Palestinian Arab rights between 1917 and 1948, and its responsibility for its crucial part in creating the Zionist state of Israel in Palestine. It is vital Britain does this if it is to play a serious role in resolving the Palestine-Israel issue, writes John McDonnell, MP, in Tribune.

Israel’s army deliberately targets children, finds UN inquiry

A powerful UN commission report says that Israel’s soldiers in Gaza and the West Bank deliberately target children, with the aim of making family life untenable and thus helping pre-empt the creation of a viable Palestinian state. Israel’s attempted dismissals of the charges as ‘blood libel’ and ‘antisemitism’ just do not stand up. BPP Executive Director, Brian Brivati, reports.

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History

Two Zionists who saw the Arabs as partners in Palestine

How two Sephardic Jewish Zionists advocated that Muslim Arabs and Jews should work together ‘for the advancement of Palestine’ in the early 20th Century—with Sephardic Jewry as the ‘bridge’. From the Jerusalem Quarterly.

The second ‘Nakba’ of 1967

The details of how Israel’s armed forces terrorised and expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza during and after the 1967 war, and crushed and near-emptied the Golan Heights of its Syrian population. The settlement programme began almost immediately.

The Mandate: Imperial governance disguised as a legal framework

Tawfiq al-Ghussein examines the principles and procedures of the British Mandate for Palestine: were they intended to constrain imperial power, or reinforce it?

McMahon, Sykes, Lloyd George, Balfour and contradictions and concealments in British Palestine policy 1915-1917.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement happened 110 years ago, in contradiction to the McMahon letters of agreement promising postwar independence for the Arabs to their Hashemite leader, Emir Hussein, a year earlier. Sykes-Picot was followed in 1917 by the Balfour Declaration, contradictory promises and policies that sealed the fate of Palestine  in favour of a Jewish-Zionist state, and wrote off any real and unified Arab national independence across the region once the Ottoman Empire had been defeated.
Herbert Samuel, high commissioner

How the first High Commissioner rigged Palestine for the Zionists

Herbert Samuel, Britain’s first – and Zionist – High Commissioner in Palestine, was able to deploy the contradictions and vagaries of the Balfour Declaration to the eternal advantage of the Zionists, right from the start.

The hidden history of British war crimes in Palestine

Victor Kattan explores Britain’s violent legacy in Palestine under the Mandate, arguing that many of the policies and practices still shaping the region today were rooted in British colonial rule.

Disappeared—under a British-made law

Palestinian university student Layan Nasir was seized by Israeli troops in the West Bank town of Bir Zeit four years ago, for no obvious reason, and has been in and out of custody, inside Israel, until a few days ago. We tell her story, her author cousin visits the Anglican Church service celebrating Layan’s release, and a former UN Human Rights Special Rapporteur explains how the British Mandatory regime introduced these punitive laws, which the Israelis inherited.

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Videos

Britain in Palestine 1917–1948

We investigate the contradictory promises and actions which defined British Mandatory rule in Palestine and laid the groundwork for the Nakba (the catastrophe) and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. This is essential viewing for understanding Britain’s legacy in the region and the situation on the ground today.

From the Nakba to Camp David

Our second BPP film traces the calamitous history of the Palestinian people from the Zionists’ eviction of them from their homeland between 1947 and 1949, through the 1967 Israeli invasion and occupation of the remaining Palestinian lands in Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank in 1967, and to the betrayal of the Palestinian case and cause in the Camp David agreement of 1979 when Egypt made a separate peace with Israel, brokered by the United States.

Origins of the Israel-Palestine conflict

The Balfour Declaration was published on 2 November 1917. It stated the intent of the British government to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine. William Dalrymple (historian and BPP patron) and Anita Anand (historian) are joined by Tom Segev (Israeli historian and writer) to discuss the declaration and the ensuing British mandate for Palestine.

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Campaigns and fundraising

Email your MP: ban UK trade with illegal Israeli settlements

Illegal settlements are a war crime. UK trade with them must stop. Use our template to urge your MP to support a full ban on UK trade, services and investment linked to illegal Israeli settlements – and to uphold international law.

'Stop trade with settlements' graphic

Stop Trade with Settlements – Campaign Launch

The Britain Palestine Project is proud to support the launch of the international campaign to ban trade with Israel’s illegal settlements, backed by a new report: Trading with Illegal Settlements.

Recognition is the beginning

Palestine: UK must act against genocide and settlements following recognition

Recognition is a vital first step, but it must be given real meaning through action. Britain’s historic responsibilities, and its obligations as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, require more than symbolic gestures.

Read full statement here
Britain owes Palestine

Britain owes Palestine – a lot

Our Chair’s response to 14 Palestinians who have filed a legal petition demanding the British Government account for systematic violations of international law during its occupation of Palestine (1917–48). The Britain Palestine Project urges the Government to meet its historic responsibilities.

Britain Palestine Project Shop

Every item helps amplify the message that recognition must lead to real progress.

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Reviews

BOOK REVIEW: The Administration of Palestine: Authority Unresolved

How the Palestinians’ right to self-determination has been consistently ignored and denied during the past 100-plus years, by the British, the Israelis and the Western ‘International Community’. Mike Scott-Baumann examines this seminal volume, The Administration of Palestine, by Palestinian author and historian TAWFIQ Al GHUSSEIN.

BOOK REVIEW: The Arab Awakening

George Antonius, one of the great chroniclers of Arab Nationalism, described the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the subsequent surge of British-supervised Jewish immigration into Palestine as “the persecution of one people in an attempt to relieve the persecution of another.” In the Times Literary Supplement of 26 Nov 1938, Harry Pirie-Gordon reviewed Antonius’s seminal volume The Arab Awakening.

Beware the mattress

An Israeli author reveals how European security agencies clubbed together to help Mossad’s assassination squads hunt down and kill Palestinian suspects.

BOOK REVIEW: A History of Palestine in Five Fruits

Ian Wellens’s A History of Palestine in Five Fruits tells the story of Palestine through olives, dates, oranges, aubergines and watermelons, tracing the deep relationship between its people and the land.