By Dr Brian Brivati, Executive Director, Britain Palestine Project (writing in a personal capacity)
12 Sept 2025
In the 1930s, British soldiers smashed down the door of a family home in Nablus and struck the mother inside with a rifle butt. Her young son, Munib Rashid al-Masri, never forgot the sight of her blood. Eight decades later, Masri, now 91, is among the Palestinians petitioning Britain to accept responsibility for the harms inflicted under its Mandate and for the consequences that still shape Palestinian life. ‘Britain Owes Palestine’ is a legal petition asking the UK Government to do seven things:
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- Consider the petition and evidence in line with government commitments to review wrongdoing in Britain’s colonial past.
- Search for and release all relevant documents still withheld from the UK National Archives, and take them into account.
- Form a view with frankness and transparency, consistent with commitments to the rule of law.
- Respond fully and publicly to the petition.
- Acknowledge wrongful acts during the Mandate and promote public understanding of their consequences.
- Issue an official apology, delivered in the House of Commons by the Prime Minister.
- Explore appropriate forms of accountability and reparation, including investment in the Palestinian people and state.
The petition is asking for judgment rather than punishment. Accountability and reparations rather than virtue signally rhetoric or postures. Bearing witness rather than redacting the past.
From 1917 to 1948, Britain ruled Palestine, from 1923 under an international Mandate granted by the League of Nations, ostensibly to prepare Palestine and the |Palestinians for independence. Instead, Palestinians remember a pattern of broken promises and repression, the prevention of statehood alongside the promise of a national home for the Jews of the world.
The petition claims Britain “caused irrevocable damage… that continues to this day,” citing the Balfour Declaration’s contradictions, the unlawful nature of the Mandate itself, violent suppression of the 1936–39 revolt and the chaotic withdrawal of 1947–48. By abandoning the Arab majority to foreseeable atrocities and expulsions, it argues, Britain was a bystander to if not a perpetrator of the Nakba.
The petitioners contend this is not simply history. They seek acknowledgment, apology, access to archives and reparations – the clearing of a moral, truth and financial debt that has accrued for more than 75 years.
Britain, if it responds, is likely to deny liability. Officials could invoke intertemporal law, arguing that its actions must be judged by the standards of the time, when colonialism was not outlawed. They would stress the passage of time: those directly responsible are long dead, and reopening such claims could invite a flood from across the former empire. The growing number of apologists for, even defenders of, Empire will cite context: British administrators were trapped between Jewish refugees seeking a homeland and an Arab population resisting dispossession. The Arab revolt, the Holocaust, the UN partition plan and regional war, they will argue, overwhelmed Britain’s capacity to act.
London failed the Palestinians even by the norms of the post-First World War era
That these defences are not fanciful is shown in the extent to which the petitioners – and their legal teams – anticipated them. Masri warns against dismissing the record as “just history,” insisting that Palestinians still “live and die with the consequences.” The petition reviews Britain’s conduct “from a contemporary, that is to say 1900 to 1948, legal perspective,” concluding that it was both unlawful and immoral.
By the norms of its own era – League of Nations obligations, the Hague Conventions, even Britain’s promises – London failed in its duty. Silence since then, they argue, is no exoneration: there is no statute of limitations on accountability. The petition echoes other claims for justice after Empire and the petitioners site an excellent summary of these as part of their website, see HERE
Judgment, punishment and the grey zones of history
How does one hold a state accountable for an atrocity? A person can be tried and punished; a nation is a diffuse continuity of institutions and citizens which is still, in the case of the UK, the same regime under the monarchy that it was at the time of Empire. You must put the United Kingdom in the dock because you do not have Nuremberg trial defendants because the state is still the same state.
Primo Levi, reflecting on justice after Auschwitz, distinguished judgment from punishment. Punishment satisfies the demand for retribution; judgment is the sustained act of remembering, acknowledging and assigning responsibility, even when formal penalties are impossible. He warned us not to confuse the two.
Giorgio Agamben extended this point: in the modern era, “judgment is itself punishment.” To pronounce a deed wrongful before history is to impose shame and stigma, a verdict that carries its own penalty. Britain’s officials of the 1930s cannot be tried today, but Britain’s role can still be judged—and that judgment, publicly recorded, would be a kind of sentence in itself.
But can a state bear shame as an individual does? West Germany chose to: through memorials, reparations and education it lived out a decades-long performance of remorse. Britain, by contrast, has mostly evaded judgment for its empire in the Middle East. A few episodes— aspects of the Slave Trade, Bloody Sunday and torture in 1950s Kenya—have drawn acknowledgment, apology or compensation, but Palestine has remained largely unexamined. The result, as Munib al-Masri puts it, is that “unacknowledged wrongdoing begat further wrongdoing… Britain’s wrongdoing on a colossal scale needs to be recognised… and Britain needs to say that it is sorry and why.” Judgment deferred, he suggests, is justice deferred.
Levi also spoke of the “grey zone”: spaces where the lines between victim and perpetrator blur. In the camps, this was the world of capos and informers. In Mandate Palestine, too, the landscape was not black-and-white: some Palestinians worked for the administration, others resisted; some British officials sympathised while enforcing harsh policies including counter-insurgency operations that are revered within the modern IDF.
Britain’s likely defence will stress this complexity. Yet acknowledging grey zones does not absolve; it sharpens judgment. To note that British officers in 1936-39 believed brutality in suppressing the Arab revolt would restore order does not make the burning of villages less criminal. Moral ambiguity complicates responsibility but does not erase it.
‘Memories of blood and British soldiers give human texture to the record and stitch Palestinians back into history
If punishment is out of reach but judgment is essential, how do we arrive at understanding? Levi insisted on the role of testimony. He himself bore witness, but noted a paradox: the “true witnesses” were the Muselmänner—the utterly broken prisoners who could no longer speak, who then died. Agamben calls this the aporia of testimony: the fullest truth lies with the voiceless, leaving survivors as imperfect proxies.
Palestine presents a similar dilemma. The best witnesses to Mandate violence are gone. What remain are fragments: survivor accounts of massacres like Deir Yassin, refugee statistics, scattered archives. Munib al-Masri’s memories—his mother’s blood, British soldiers warning of “Zionist gangs”—give human texture to what might otherwise be dry record. Each testimony stitches Palestinians back into history, countering their erasure as faceless victims.
Agamben reminds us that testimony also requires an audience. For decades, Palestinian voices were ignored and absent from the peace talks and deals. The petition seeks to change that, demanding that London open its archives at the Public Records Office so hidden truths can become part of the record. This is structural witnessing: not only personal memories, but state-enabled truth-telling.
Acknowledgment without closure
What, then, would a response consistent with Levi and Agamben look like? It would begin with apology. As Masri notes, “The need for knowledge and understanding of the root causes… has never been more pressing.” An apology must be paired with truth-telling: a commission or inquiry, educational reforms to place the history of Palestine into the history curriculum and out of the debating-competing-truths format we see in our schools, perhaps memorials to honour those who suffered.
Material reparations are fraught but not unthinkable. Contributions to refugee relief or Palestinian cultural and educational institutions would signal accountability, not closure. The key is framing: reparations accept responsibility.
Above all, Britain must resist the urge for closure. Levi and Agamben remind us that reconciliation lies not in drawing a line but in integrating truth into memory. Germany chose that path; Japan has often faltered in its relationship with its militaristic past. For Britain, acknowledgment would mean accepting discomfort, admitting wrong and keeping the history alive so it cannot recur even as it recurs.
Levi warned: “What happened could happen again… It can happen everywhere.” The current Israel war on Gaza is not a replay of the 1930s it is much worse. It is part of the continuing Nakba. A genocide, famine, crimes against humanity, war crimes, forced displacement and decades long illegal military occupation are all happening in Palestine now: the unfinished business of 1948 and 1967.
Britain’s refusal to face its role, Masri laments, has been “a very serious and enduring obstacle to progress.” To admit fault would not solve the conflict, but it would clear some of the fog of grievance and allow human needs to come into sharper focus.
At his home in Nablus, Masri—once the boy who saw his mother struck, now an elder statesman—frames his petition not as vengeance but as a call for recognition.
The seven requests begin with a simple plea: acknowledgment and apology. It is, in Levi’s sense, a demand for moral justice: not a verdict or a payout, but the dignity of being seen. It would also give real meaning to what happens after the recognition of the State of Palestine by the UK and others at the end of this month.
Recognition is the beginning of the process of the UK and other western powers engaging finally with reality on the ground of the Palestinian State. The ‘Britain Owes Palestinian’ campaign might focus some of that attention firmly onto how to roll back the settlements and how to ensure that Gaza is once again governed as part of a unified State of Palestine.
The act of witnessing by Britain is both minimal and maximal: minimal, because no apology can heal the original wound; maximal, because to say “this was wrong, and we are sorry” is to transform remorse into memory. It does not close the book; it writes the past into our consciousness. Judgment, not punishment, remains possible. And in judgment, Britain might finally honour not the mandate of empire, but the mandate of memory.
This post is written in a personal capacity and does not represent the views of the BPP.