A new legal petition has called for the UK to accept responsibility for the situation in Israel-Palestine and allow access to historic information on the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinians.
The 400-page petition, titled “Regarding Britain’s responsibility for wrongs and reparations in Palestine” and initiated by the Britain Owes Palestine campaign, documents alleged unlawful acts and systemic abuses during the period of 1917 to 1948, from the signing of the Balfour Declaration (in which the UK promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine to the Zionist movement) to the end of the British Mandate on Palestine that saw the creation of Israel.
It argues that the UK’s governance of the territory – captured from the Ottoman Empire during World War 1 – denied the Palestinian Arab majority meaningful self-governance and established a political system that entrenched apartheid and ethnic cleansing.
The use of emergency powers to suppress the 1936 Arab Rebellion, the petition says, made violence and collective punishment “legal” in name while removing access to the court system.
The petitioners are made up of people affected by the events with which the petition is concerned, either “directly because they lived through them, or indirectly, because their parents and grandparents did and, consequently, the courses of their own lives were fundamentally impacted”.
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Aside from an official apology in Parliament, the petition calls for the release of previously undisclosed archives, a full public response, acknowledgement of wrongdoing, and the consideration of reparations.
“The petitioners are fourteen people who speak for themselves and their extended families. But all Palestinian people in the world today remain affected by Britain’s wrongs described in this petition,” reads the text.
“In that respect, the lives of the petitioners are reflective of Palestinian global civil society.”
The year 1948 is referred to by Arabs as the “Nakba”, or catastrophe, and saw more than 700,000 Palestinians driven out of their historic homeland and the widespread destruction of villages, homes and Palestinian institutions by Zionist militias.
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Palestinians who remained in what became the State of Israel were subjected to military rule until 1966.
In 1967, Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza and continues to occupy them to this day, leaving millions of Palestinians living under conditions that many rights groups describe as apartheid.
The current UK government has been staunchly supportive of Israel in its recent genocidal war against the Gaza Strip, which has seen more than 70,500 Palestinians killed and the majority of the enclave reduced to rubble.