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.
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16 Comments
I’ve often wondered what P.M. David Lloyd George’s motives were, both personally as and politically, when he supported the Balfour Declaration. I do know he was in touch with the banking Rothschild family at the time.
I wonder whether any members of the Liberal Democrat History Group could give us a fuller explanation ?
Ironic that the first comment is anti semitic conspiracy theory.
Alex missed out the part of the Balfour declaration “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”
No doubt there were things done during the British mandate that were different to how they would do things now – the world was different.
“When Britain withdrew, 750,000 Palestinians were displaced in the war that followed” well yes: Israel was invaded by forces of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq determined to kill the Jewish population.
Those words at the beginning of the declaration were pretty disingenuous. It was obvious even at the time that they were incompatible with the rest of the declaration.
Excellent article, thank you Alex. Well said.
The fundamental question regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict centers on the definition of Israel’s borders. The United Nations has consistently recognized the pre-1967 lines as the basis for these boundaries.
For many Palestinians, this issue is deeply personal, rooted in the loss of ancestral land. Families hold title deeds to property in areas such as Haifa and Jaffa, which were taken by force, and there is a profound desire for acknowledgement of this historical dispossession.
Beyond this history, the current situation beyond the 1967 line is a major point of contention. The presence of nearly a million settlers, protected by the state, is widely viewed as a deliberate effort to prevent the establishment of a viable Palestinian state. Critics argue that this creates a system of inequality.
For peace to be achievable, the argument holds that Israel must definitively establish its borders. Simultaneously, Palestinians must be empowered to exercise their right to self-determination and govern their own state. While Palestine would require support in establishing robust democratic processes, no leadership can succeed while operating under the constraints of military occupation. Ultimately, the path to peace requires both the clear demarcation of Israeli borders and the realization of Palestinian sovereignty.
Very good article Alex.
Sorry to see @simonmcgrath downplaying the appalling behaviour of the British during 1936-9. This is well captured in the Award winning film https://www.bbc.com/bbcfilm/films/palestine-36 released in 2025.
I would also encourage him to read the Wikipedia account of the massacre at the village of Deir Yassin that kicked off the war of 1948 and how that massacre and what followed provoked the neighbouring Arab countries to intervene. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_Yassin_massacre
For peace to be achievable, the argument holds that Israel must definitively establish its borders. Simultaneously, Palestinians must be empowered to exercise their right to self-determination and govern their own state.
Isn’t that exactly what happened in 2005? Israel set defined borders for Gaza, withdrew all military occupation, and handed the entire territory over to the inhabitants for self-determination.
And what happened? The next year Hamas was elected to govern in a free and fair election; deadly rockets were regularly fired into Israel; and, eventualy, the massacre of October 2023 was planned and executed.
Fundamentally, the Palestinians need to prove that they are able to live peacefully alongside the Jewish state of Israel. Only then can there be a proper two-state solution established, with defined borders such that Israel renounces claims to any land outside its borders and the Palestinians renounce any claim on, or right of return to, land inside Israel’s defined borders.
Alex Cole-Hamilton sounds severe on Britain, in fact he’s far too kind. Britain repeatedly promised independence to the Arabs of Greater Syria (from the foothills of Anatolia to al-Arish in Sinai) from 1915 onwards, even in November 1918 alongside equally deceitful France. It took care not to publish the Balfour Declaration (November 1917) in Palestine until 1920, when it was in firm military control. Balfour’s words ‘civil and religious rights’ were deliberate. Had he intended equal rights with Jewish settlers, he’d have used the term ‘political rights’. As he told his colleagues, there was barely a promise he’d made he had not intended to break. Perfidious Albion, then, all the way.
It is for this reason we now need candour and acknowledgement from our government, and a commitment to putting right what it can through the enforcement of international law.
A very good article reminding us of why the British have a special historic responsibility to support a Palestinian state, human rights & self determination.
So refreshing to see that history recognised. ‘Absent from the wider public consciousness’ is certainly the case.
Alex reminds us of the historical reasons why British prime ministers need to take responsibility for the awful consequences of our failures during the Mandate period. But as we’ve all seen, Sir Keir Starmer has left the political arena totally oblivious of the fact that he is probably the most morally bankrupt prime minister we have ever had. Seventy two thousand (at least) Palestinians lives have been sacrificed in his support for an Israeli state which has used accusations of antisemitism to shut the mouths of critics, and to keep Starmer on side. I am ashamed to be British, and anyone who isn’t should be.
Let’s hope the new parliament, led by Andy Burnham, reflects the wishes of the British people, and tells Benjamin Netanyahu enough is enough. We don’t enjoy watching the brutal suppression of Palestinians in Gaza or anywhere else.
@Simon McGrath
“ Ironic that the first comment is anti semitic conspiracy theory.”
I don’t understand this statement. There is no disagreement that the Balfour Declaration was made in a letter to Lord Rothschild as a leading representative of the Jewish community in the UK. So is the conspiracy theory that the Balfour Declaration was payback for his services to the war effort? And what is antisemitic about making that suggestion in any case?
I don’t know what is more shocking here. That the leader of this Party in Scotland has such an extraordinary one-sided view of the Mandate period – or that the moderators have allowed through a classic antisemitic conspiracy theory in the comments and that it remains on the site despite Simon McGrath exposing it, and that it is now being endorsed.
This is an ancient charge against the Rothchilds and by extension all Jews, from antisemites. It mirrors other charges against the Rothschilds in relation to other historic events that antisemites do not like. The Lib Dem History group can look at this until the cows come home but they won’t find any evidence because there isn’t any. It is just another trope that is used against Jewish people to suggest that we wield untrammelled power behind-the-scenes to influence world events. And we all know where that one ended
Simon McGrath 17th Jul ’26 – 6:13pm…… No doubt there were things done during the British mandate that were different to how they would do things now – the world was different…
The things that Israel has done to the Palestinians in recent years makes anything done under the British mandate pale into significance…Gaza, Settler violence in the West Bank, removal of Palestinian basic human rights, state sponsored expansion in Jordan and Lebanon, etc…
Israel is THE rogue state in the ME!
….’insignificance’…..
Liberal values require consistency. One of the strengths of Gavin’s article is that it applies liberal principles consistently. It criticises settlement expansion, supports Palestinian elections, endorses a negotiated two-state solution, and acknowledges that Britain made mistakes while rejecting simplistic historical narratives.
Liberalism should resist the temptation to divide history into heroes and villains. In trying to resolve any conflict, how far back should we go? Different starting points produce different narratives, different framing. In most conflicts, peace comes when all sides accept something close to the status quo and, from that point on, become good neighbours.
Liberalism should instead defend democracy, compromise, accountability, and equal recognition of the legitimate national aspirations of both Israelis and Palestinians. That balanced approach is far more likely to contribute to peace than narratives that look backwards to assign exclusive blame to one side. After all, attempts to overturn the broad status quo are unlikely to be accepted by one side or the other making lasting peace even harder to achieve.