Wealthiest Palestinian to demand apology from UK for alleged British Mandate abuse
Munib al-Masri, a former politician and confidante of Yasser Arafat, to submit dossier to London claiming arbitrary killings, torture, other crimes against Arabs during the 1930s
A prominent Palestinian businessman and former politician is set to demand an apology from the UK for alleged war crimes committed against Arabs during the British Mandate.
Munib al-Masri, known as the West Bank’s wealthiest man, plans to submit a 300-page dossier of evidence alleging abuse while the British ruled today’s Israel and Palestinian territories from 1917 to 1948.
The dossier includes details of arbitrary killings, torture, the use of human shields and carrying out home demolitions as collective punishment, according to The BBC.
Al-Masri claims the actions were formal policy for British forces stationed in the region at the time. He plans to demand a formal acknowledgment from the UK and an apology for the alleged crimes.
The 88-year-old was a close confidante of Yasser Arafat and has been a firm supporter of the two-state solution.
He was shot and injured by British soldiers as a boy in 1944.
“I saw how people were harassed,” al-Masri told The BBC. “We had no protection whatsoever and nobody to defend us.”
Al-Masri will present the dossier to the British government later this year. Two senior international lawyers are reviewing the evidence for al-Masri. They are Luis Moreno Ocampo, a former chief prosecutor for the international criminal court, and former UN special rapporteur Ben Emmerson.
Emmerson told The BBC the evidence shows “shocking crimes committed by certain elements of the British Mandatory forces systematically on the Palestinian population.”
The British Ministry of Defense told The BBC the evidence will be “reviewed thoroughly.”
In one incident described in the dossier, British troops in 1939 allegedly confined men in a barbed wire pen during a weapons search for days without sufficient water or food, causing 13 to die of dehydration.
In another incident in 1938, British troops put Arab men on a bus and forced it to drive over a landmine, killing the passengers, the dossier claims.
The events took place during an Arab rebellion against British rule and Jewish immigration between 1936 and 1939.
The period saw violence and high tensions between Jews, Arabs and British troops, who struggled to maintain control.
Al-Masri made a fortune of over $1 billion in the oil and gas industry from his home base in Nablus. He has been a strong advocate of a two-state solution, denounced violence and sought to foster unity among Palestinians, including by holding talks with the Hamas terror group.
In the 1990s, he served as a minister in Yasser Arafat’s cabinet and remains an admirer of the late Palestinian leader, who is venerated among Palestinians but widely seen in Israel as an unreformed terrorist.
In an op-ed published in The Times of Israel in 2014, entitled “Like Arafat, I recognize the Jewish tie to Israel,” al-Masri described the former PLO chief’s relationship to Israelis and the Jewish people as “complex,” but said he “wholeheartedly” agreed with Arafat’s approach.
In 2012 he blamed Israel for the failed peace process, saying that Israelis “want to have the cake and eat it too. You don’t want to share the cake.”
In 2020, al-Masri filed a lawsuit against the British government for the Balfour Declaration, London’s 1917 declaration of support for a national home for the Jewish people.
Tensions between the UK and the Palestinians have climbed in recent weeks after UK Prime Minister Liz Truss said she was reviewing whether to move the British embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
