In the past year Britain has recognised Palestinian statehood, sanctioned violent settlers and extremist ministers, and committed £10 million to support Palestinian Authority frontline services.

However, one line in Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper’s recent statement caught my attention. Discussing Palestinian governance, she said simply: ‘Palestine should be run by Palestinians.’ She is right but the problem is that Britain spent three decades ensuring that this did not happen. When Britain controlled Palestine between 1917 to 1948, the rights of Palestinians were not accidentally overlooked but rather deliberately set aside. Britain has never acknowledged that suffering nor how the methods of control and coercion it implemented laid the groundwork for many of the ills perpetrated by the Israeli government today.

This is the central question that the Britain Owes Palestine campaign has placed before the Government in a legal petition drafted by leading KCs and historians.

The petition sets out a disturbing history absent from the wider public consciousness. In 1917 The Balfour Declaration committed Britain to supporting a Jewish national home in a land that was over 90 percent Arab, without the consent of those who lived there. In the decades that followed, Britain denied the Palestinian majority any meaningful democratic voice.

The UK’s failure to advance conditions for a two-state solution before the end of the Mandate laid the groundwork for decades of violence.

Today, if we are serious about a long-term solution, with Arabs and Jews living peacefully side by side, we need to be full throated in our support for the holding of free and fair legislative and presidential elections across the occupied territories, which President Abbas has now confirmed for November 2026 and early 2027. These elections would be an opportunity to wrest power in Gaza away from Hamas and deliver peace and security for both sides.

We also need to empower the moderates in both Israeli and Palestinian society and draw power away from the extremes – including by progressing multilateral plans for the disarming of Hamas, and by ensuring and applying sanctions to Netanyahu and extremist ministers in his cabinet. And we need to ban all UK trade in goods and services with the illegal settlements across the occupied territories, recognising that they constitute one of the major blockers to a two-state solution.

However that also means reckoning with Britain’s own past failures.

When Palestinians rose up in the Arab Rebellion of 1936 to 1939, Britain responded with collective punishment, military courts, and methods its own Colonial Secretary privately admitted to Cabinet were police ‘atrocities’ deliberately concealed from Parliament. At least 5,000 Palestinians were killed and 15,000 wounded.

When Britain withdrew, 750,000 Palestinians were displaced in the war that followed — an expulsion the petition describes as foreseeable, avoidable, and a direct consequence of Britain’s abdication of responsibility. Parliament then passed legislation retroactively immunising every British official from prosecution for acts committed during the Mandate.

Britain is responsible for what it did, and its impacts today. Look to Palestine today and fixtures of Britain’s mandate, are in use by the Israelis. A country that now purports to champion Palestinian rights while simultaneously refusing to engage with a legal petition on its own acts of suppression, is not applying its principles consistently. You cannot be an honest broker for a cause you helped to destroy without first acknowledging what you did.

Last September, I led a debate in the Holyrood chamber on Palestine. The Liberal Democrats are in no doubt that the actions of the Israeli cabinet and IDF are in breach of international law and that the Government should implement a full arms embargo and targeted sanctions against Netanyahu’s Government. The Scottish Parliament voted 65 to 24 in support.

Scotland has always been willing to use its voice on questions beyond our devolved capabilities. That voice should now press for something more: an honest British reckoning with the history that helped create the conditions we are now trying to remedy.

Despite nine months passing since the petition was handed to the UK Government, and 45 cross-party MPs and Peers writing to the Prime Minister calling for a response, there has been none. The lead petitioner, Munib Al Masri, was shot by British soldiers as a teenager. He and thirteen other Palestinians, whose families were shaped directly by Britain’s Mandate era actions, are still waiting.

Britain should not only ask itself what more it can do for Palestine now. It should ask what its role is in creating the crisis today. I am calling on MSPs across every party to join me in demanding that the UK Government finally respond to the petition, engage honestly with Britain’s Mandate-era record, and recognise that peace built on selective memory is not a peace that will hold.

* Alex Cole-Hamilton is leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats.