Why Britain could face demands to pay reparations to Palestinians

Tension has been growing ahead of the Commonwealth Summit in Samoa this week, with conversations surrounding the biennial event dominated by demands from Caribbean leaders that Britain would pay reparations for its colonial past.

Initially, the British government insisted The issue was left off the agenda, saying he would not pay reparations or apologize.

Defying British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, leaders of 15 Caribbean nations called for a statement to discuss reparations.

The Commonwealth is a voluntary association of 56 countries, mostly former British colonies.

Now Starmer appears to have significantly changed his position, saying Thursday afternoon in Samoa that he is “open to discussing non-monetary forms of restorative justice for slavery.”

This would not live up to the demands that many have made.

However, the British chancellor Rachel Reeves He warned on Thursday that paying monetary reparations would cripple Britain economically.

How much Britain owes in total is a highly controversial issue, with the American Society of International Law and the University of the West Indies claiming the country owes a staggering amount. £18.8 billion in compensation for slavery and colonialism.

The controversial report carries considerable weight, as it was led by International Court of Justice (ICJ) judge Patrick Robinson.

Meanwhile Joshua Setipa from Lesotho, a leading candidate for the next Commonwealth secretary-general, has suggested that Britain owes India “more money than it has”.

India now has a bigger economy than Britain.

A Downing Street source has reportedly He suggested that while a monetary payment remains off the table, Britain could implement remedial measures such as restructuring financial institutions and providing debt relief to countries.

Felipe DavisThe Prime Minister of the Bahamas said: “For me, I don’t know if money, alone, could adequately compensate for the mistakes of the past. The ghost that haunts us today cannot, in my opinion, be dispelled with a monetary gift.”

A draft of the summit’s final communiqué No makes direct reference to reparations, but says leaders “agreed that the time has come to engage in a meaningful, truthful and respectful conversation to forge a common future based on equity.”

“I don’t know if money alone could adequately compensate”

– Prime Minister Philip Davis

All of this raises questions about who else could claim that Britain owes reparations from outside the Commonwealth, not least because the issue of reparations owed by another country was raised by the government. ICJ in July of this year.

That case concerned Israel and the Palestinians – with ICJ judges decision in its advisory opinion that Israel must pay reparations for the damage caused by its occupation.

However, in recent years there have also been calls for Britain to also pay reparations to the Palestinians.

If Britain pays any kind of reparations to other countries, it may well face new demands from the Palestinian Authority as well.

Palestine and the Commonwealth

No Middle Eastern country chose joining the Commonwealth when it was established in 1949, after much of the British Empire had been dismembered.

But after the 1967 war, with Israel occupying Palestinian territory, the Commonwealth summit communications He usually discussed the Palestinian question, until the 1990s.

By contrast, this year’s summit communiqué will not address Israel’s ongoing war against Gaza or illegal settlements in other occupied Palestinian territories, which the ICJ ruled in July are illegally occupied.

This takes the Commonwealth far away from its important role during the anti-apartheid campaign in South Africa, when expelled the Commonwealth country in protest against its policies.

In 1997, under the leadership of Yasser Arafat, the Palestine Liberation Organization He requested that the Palestinian Authority become a member of the Commonwealth.

This was based on a historical connection with Britain, as Britain controlled Palestine with a British mandate for decades before the State of Israel was created and around 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their lands.

But while Commonwealth leaders said they welcomed the possibility, deferred the decision.

The issue has not been raised again at Commonwealth summits and Britain itself still refuses to recognize the State of Palestine.

Academic David Erdos suggested before the summit that the Commonwealth “should explicitly reiterate its welcome to potential Palestinian membership and set out a realistic path to achieving it that is in no way dependent on Israel’s actions or other factors, including the degree of state recognition.”

But the Commonwealth requires member states to be democratic and respect the rule of law, which would likely require significant reforms by the Palestinian Authority.

Meanwhile, the discussion around reparations compares with previous calls for Britain to apologize and pay reparations to the Palestinians, although they have been less friendly in tone than the Commonwealth’s demands.

Ask for a British apology

In 2017, the Palestinian Authority threatened sue Britain if it did not apologize for the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which set out the British goal of creating a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. The Conservative government responded by stating that it was “proud” of the statement.

Then in 2020, the Palestinian billionaire industrialist Munib al-Masriwho had been a close friend of Arafat, announced that he intended to sue the British government over the Balfour Declaration and the crimes he said Britain committed during the Mandate.

The background to this was that during World War I, British officials in private He promised Sharif Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca, that if he rebelled against the Ottoman Empire he would be granted an independent Arab state.

Peter Shambrook demonstrated in a book published last year that the promised state included Palestine.

Hussein duly rebelled, but the British refused to keep their end of the deal and the Balfour Declaration contradicted their promise.

In 2022, Al-Masri revealed had produced a 300-page dossier compiling evidence of British abuses against Palestinians during the Mandate, including arbitrary killings, torture and home demolitions as collective punishment.

The billionaire himself had been shot and wounded by British troops as a child in 1944.

“I saw how people were harassed” by the British, he said. said the BBC. “We had no protection or anyone to defend us.”

Attorney Ben Emmerson KC, former UN special rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism, saying The evidence showed “shocking crimes systematically committed by certain elements of the British mandatory forces against the Palestinian population.”

British historian Matthew Hughes documented in a 2019 book how “British soldiers and police detained 528,000 people, for varying periods of time, from days to years, some imprisoned more than once, in different places, and this total, which exceeds the entire male population Muslim of Palestine in 1938, omits any arrests from December 1936 to August 1937.

“It is equivalent to 37 percent of the entire population of Palestine in 1938.”

Seeking an official apology, al-Masri presented the file to the British government in late 2022.

But no apology has been made.

The demand for reparations

Many have criticized calls for a British apology.

Jose Massadprofessor at Columbia University and MEE contributor, argued in 2022: “Instead of filing lawsuits to obtain an unlikely apology from an unrepentant colonial power like Britain, the proper course of action should be to demand reparations for the crimes committed and the destruction. work of the British against the Palestinian people.”

In September 2023, shortly before the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called on Israel, the United States and Britain to pay reparations to the Palestinians.

Politics of Deception: Britain and Palestine, 1914-1939

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“(We) will persist in our pursuit of accountability and justice before the relevant international bodies against Israel due to the continued Israeli occupation of our land and the crimes that have been and continue to be committed against us; as well as against Britain and the United States for their role in the fateful Balfour declaration,” he said.

“We ask for reparations, we ask for compensation in accordance with international law.”

Shawan Jabarin, director general of the human rights NGO Al-Haq, and Ralph Wilde, a law professor at University College London, said Britain is obliged to pay reparations for its conduct during the Mandate.

“By not provisionally recognizing the Palestinian state in the 1920s,” they said wrote After Abbas’s speech, “instead, by holding onto the territory for a quarter of a century to allow the Balfour promise to be fulfilled, the United Kingdom violated international law.”

They added that any state that was a member of the League of Nations at the time now has the ability to bring a case against Britain to the ICJ, “to ask the Court to provide the reparations requested by the Palestinian people.”

This legal opinion is disputed, but indicates that Britain could face such a legal challenge in the future.

The British government continue assisting Israel militarily in various ways during the current war, with hundreds of UK military flights over Gaza assisting Israel.

In a speech to the summit on Friday, king charles He appeared to reference calls for reparations by saying that “none of us can change the past,” but countries can find “creative ways to correct enduring inequalities.”

Palestine remains off the summit agenda.