Britain must remember and reckon with its role in Palestinian exile

Tomorrow, governments around the world will mark the 75th anniversary of the 1951 Refugee Convention. There will be speeches about the international community's proudest post-war achievement: a binding promise that those fleeing persecution would never be left without protection.

Palestinians, the world's longest-standing refugee population, have spent those same 75 years largely outside the Convention's full protection, with the descendants of the 700,000 displaced in 1948 still without a home.

This is the product of decisions taken by states, and no state bears greater responsibility than Britain for the chain of events that produced it.

The Britain Owes Palestine campaign reckons with this history and has submitted a 400-page legal petition to the UK government on behalf of 14 Palestinian petitioners.

The campaign’s lead petitioner, Munib al-Masri, was born in Nablus in 1934. As a child, he witnessed punitive British Army operations during the Arab Rebellion. As a teenager in 1947, he was shot in the leg by British troops at a demonstration. He then watched the chaos of Britain's withdrawal and the arrival in Nablus of thousands of people expelled from their homes in the Nakba, the "catastrophe" in which around 700,000 Palestinians were driven from or fled their homes.

Munib’s life spans the entire arc this anniversary invites us to examine. It also traces Britain's culpability in a crisis that has never ended.

Britain built the conditions for catastrophe

The refugee crisis of 1948 did not appear out of nowhere. For three decades, Britain governed Palestine under a Mandate built on irreconcilable promises: independence pledged to the Arabs in the Husayn-McMahon correspondence, a "national home" promised to the Jewish people in the Balfour Declaration, and a sacred trust to the existing population under the League of Nations Covenant, an obligation Britain failed to honour.

As the campaign’s legal petition sets out, Britain transformed the legal, political and demographic realities of Palestine without the consent of its people and without lawful authority.

Britain suppressed the Arab Rebellion of 1936–39 with emergency measures and military operations that involved war crimes and crimes against humanity. Then, in 1947–48, Britain walked away, abandoning the population it was legally obliged to protect and leaving it exposed to foreseeable atrocities and mass expulsion.

By the time Britain left in May 1948, the conditions for the Nakba were firmly in place. Britain did not merely fail to prevent one of the world's most enduring refugee crises. Its decisions helped to create it.

A supposedly temporary regime

When states gathered to draft the 1951 Convention, the displaced Palestinians already constituted one of the largest and most visible refugee populations in the world. The Convention as originally drafted only covered those persons displaced by events before 1951 and was confined to Europe; only a 1967 Protocol made it universal. Palestinians, displaced in 1948, did not fall within its terms, which is why states placed them in a separate institutional regime of their own.

In December 1948, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 194, supported by Britain. It affirmed that Palestinian refugees wishing to return to their homes should be permitted to do so, with compensation paid to those choosing not to return, or for loss of or damage to property. It created a Conciliation Commission and instructed it to facilitate the refugees' repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation, and the payment of compensation. A year later, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) was established to provide relief and assistance to those same refugees in the meantime.

Article 1D of the Convention reflected this separate arrangement. Its first paragraph placed any refugees already receiving protection or assistance from other UN bodies, in practice the Palestinians under UNRWA, outside the Convention's scope. But its second paragraph contained a promise specific to them: if that protection or assistance ceased without their position being definitively settled, Palestinians would be entitled, automatically, to the same Convention protections available to every other refugee.

The separate regime was meant to guarantee continuity of protection for Palestinians, arguably even heightened protection, not to strand them outside the law.

The reality has been the opposite. The Conciliation Commission, the body charged with delivering return and compensation to Palestinians, has been effectively inoperative for decades, its inability to make progress noted by the General Assembly year after year.

UNRWA, left to carry the responsibility alone, has an assistance mandate but no power to secure the durable solutions of return, restitution and national protection that the wider refugee regime promises everyone else. States and national courts have too often read Article 1D as a blanket exclusion of Palestinians, ignoring its second paragraph, so that Palestinians alone among the world's refugees find themselves outside the protective framework built for all others.

Britain was not a bystander to this architecture. It was the power whose Mandate produced the displacement, and the sponsor of the very resolution that promised return and compensation. It wrote the pledge, then watched the machinery built to honour it wither. The exception that has defined Palestinian lives for three-quarters of a century is part of Britain's legacy too.

What we are asking for

The Britain Owes Palestine petition’s requests are, by any standard, modest for the scale of the wrongs it documents: that the government consider the petition and its evidence seriously; search the government’s archives and release what remains hidden; respond fully and publicly; acknowledge the wrongful acts committed between 1917 and 1948; offer an official apology delivered by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons; and investigate, in good faith, what forms of reparation are appropriate.

Successive British governments have said they are committed to the rule of law, including international law, and to honest reckoning with the colonial past. Britain also regularly invokes the Refugee Convention and refugee rights in its foreign policy, lecturing other states on their obligations. It cannot credibly do so while refusing to engage with a documented account of its own role in producing the world's most protracted refugee crisis and the protection gap that still defines it.

Recognition of the State of Palestine, which the UK has moved towards, is welcome but not sufficient. Recognition addresses the future; it does not repair the past. The damage done to the integrity of Palestine and to the Palestinian people between 1917 and 1948 requires its own answer.

Anniversaries are useful when they prompt honesty. As the world marks 75 years of the Refugee Convention, Britain has an opportunity to show that its commitment to refugee protection is more than rhetorical by engaging seriously with the people its own record left outside the law's protection.

The petitioners, some of whom lived through the Mandate's final years, are still waiting. They should not be forced to wait any longer, and their descendants should not have to wait another 75.

Victor Kattan is legal advisor to the Britain Owes Palestine campaign and Assistant Professor in Public International Law at the University of Nottingham School of Law. He is also the deputy director of the Nottingham International Law and Security Centre.

Follow Victor on X: @VictorKattan

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab.