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........

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