Banning trade with illegal Israeli settlements is a start, but Labour must not stop there
Shortly before taking office, Andy Burnham, the new prime minister, apologised for our party’s initial response to Israel's war on Gaza, saying we got it wrong.
He was right to apologise, but in the face of overwhelming evidence of Israel’s genocide and war crimes, and the UK’s long complicity, it is far from enough.
Today, the foreign secretary has announced a sanctions regime banning trade with Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, a step that I and more than 140 Labour MPs have called for.
This is welcome and long overdue, not just because it puts pressure on the Israeli government, nor simply because it is what is required of us under international law, but also because it is only fair given the UK’s role in creating a situation where Palestinians are systematically denied their fundamental rights and subjected to the most violent repression by Israel.
A first step
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However, this would only be the first step in reversing the Labour Party’s weak position on the genocide in Gaza, the occupation of the West Bank and its refusal to stand up to Israel.
Given the UK’s history, it is also beyond time for us to right the wrongs that the British state has inflicted on the Palestinian people.
On 7 September last year, 14 Palestinians lodged a 400-page legal petition with the government. Written by two of this country’s leading human rights KCs with the help of historians of the period, it sets out the ways in which Britain breached international law in Palestine between 1917 and 1948, and it asks the government to look at the evidence, state plainly what was done, apologise for it in Parliament and provide meaningful reparations.
A year later there has been no reply.
In March, I was one of 45 parliamentarians who wrote to the previous prime minister urging him to provide one. This letter also went unanswered.
The UK promised a national home in a country whose population was overwhelmingly Arab, having already promised those same people independence, and then governed the territory for three decades under a Mandate it had no lawful authority to hold.
Palestinians were denied any meaningful say in how they were ruled, and when they rebelled between 1936 and 1939, the response was further tyranny.
A war that never ended
Villages were demolished, thousands were detained without appeal, prisoners were tortured, and at al-Bassa in 1938 there are strong grounds to conclude that British forces killed around 50 villagers in reprisal for a roadside bomb.
Given the UK’s history, it is also beyond time for us to right the wrongs that the British state has inflicted on the Palestinian people
Britain’s own colonial secretary privately conceded to the Cabinet that the police had committed atrocities and kept this from the House.
When the UK withdrew in 1948, it left behind a war it had helped facilitate and some 750,000 Palestinians dispossessed of their homes.
That did not end with the Mandate.
The people expelled are the grandparents of the refugees living in camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the occupied West Bank and Gaza today, and the instruments Britain perfected in Palestine - house demolitions, punitive raids, detention without trial and impunity - are in use in the occupied West Bank now, where the United Nations records Israeli settler violence at its highest level yet.
Munib Al Masri, the petition’s lead signatory, is now in his nineties. As a young child in Nablus, he witnessed the harassment and violence carried out during searches by occupying forces, and at 13 he was shot in the leg by British troops during a demonstration.
He and 13 other petitioners have now waited a year for a response from the UK government to their letter, adding further insult to the injuries they have suffered at the hands of the British state.
A necessary apology
In March 2025, a Foreign Office minister acknowledged the tragedy of the killing of 24 men by British troops at Batang Kali in Malaya in 1948 and accepted that official narratives portraying the victims as supporters of the insurgency were incorrect and had compounded their families’ suffering.
Danny Friedman KC and John Halford, who acted for those families, represent the Palestinian petitioners now.
Batang Kali was carried out under a Labour government and answered by a Labour one.
Palestine is the gap in that reckoning, and it is a Labour-shaped gap, because it was a Labour government that handed the question to the United Nations in 1947 and then walked away from what followed.
Labour members will arrive at conference next month expecting a government that leads on this issue rather than one that has to be dragged.
This is not just about what our party has got wrong over recent years, but what it has got wrong repeatedly throughout our history and the devastating repercussions that Palestinians continue to face because of these decisions.
This is why a full apology that covers the wrongdoing that successive UK governments subjected the Palestinian people to is necessary.
And an apology has to be matched with action: the government must look at how it can provide accountability, reparation, and investment in Palestine commensurate with the damage the UK has caused.
Banning trade with illegal Israeli settlements is a start, but we must not stop there: we have a very long way to go to address the UK’s deep-rooted complicity in the oppression of the Palestinian people.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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