Palestinian industrialist Munib Al Masri’s eyes watered as he stepped out of Downing Street, the emotions of an eight-decade search for justice etched on his face.
The 91-year-old had lived through the British occupation of Palestine and, aged 13, was shot at by British officers during a protest, causing lifelong pain.
Decades later, he was outside the Prime Minister’s residence, handing over a 400-page legal petition seeking an apology from the UK for its historical wrongs in Palestine.
This includes the tens of thousands of Palestinians he saw trickling into his native town of Nablus after they were displaced by the end of the British mandate in 1948, when the Israeli state was proclaimed.
“Everyone used to live in peace,” Mr Al Masri told a small crowd that had gathered to watch the handover of the letter and petition. “Then British rule saw dispossession of our people from their homes, and brutal crackdowns on all kinds of protest”.
In a wheelchair next to him was his grandson Munib Al Masri, who was paralysed from the waist down in 2011 as a student after being shot at by Israeli forces during a Nakba day march on the Southern Lebanese border.
Prominent British Israeli historian Avi Shlaim and international law expert Dr Victor Kattan, who helped draft the petition, also walking with him to hand over the petition.
“I learnt about the Balfour Declaration at school, and its taken me 83 years to get to the door of Downing Street to hold Britain to account,” Mr Al Masri said. “It was a great day, thank you to the people of the United Kingdom for your support. Truth will prevail, all we want is the truth.”
The petition was over four years in the making, and Mr Al Masri – who struck a long friendship with the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat – enlisted some of the UK’s top jurists to work with him.
British barrister Ben Emmerson KC, who represented Ukraine in a series of cases against Russia following its annexation of Crimea in 2014, had previously been in Nablus talk about the petition.
Danny Friedman KC, and solicitor John Halford represented the families of the victims of the Batang Kali massacre in colonial Malaya in 1947, which the UK apologised for earlier this year.
The petition is also signed by 13 Palestinians who contributed their own witness testimonies of their displacement or that of their families.
The petition’s letter to Mr Starmer, seen by The National, says the UK is legally required under UK law to address the petition and its requests.
“By occupying Palestine in 1917, reneging on undertakings made to the Arab people, and self-granting its Mandate in 1922, Britain transformed the legal, political and demographic character of the territory without authority to do so,” it said.
It recalls an earlier promise by the Ministry of Defence under the former Conservative government in 2023, which “undertook to properly consider” the petition during a BBC report.
It also points to Mr Starmer, and Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy and Defence Secretary John Healey’s stated commitment to international law.
The petitioner said they do so in “hope – the hope that the Government’s response to their petition will be consistent with the letter of international law and the courage to uphold it.”
Solicitor John Halford of Bindman’s LLP, who is representing Mr Al Masri, told The National that the UK government has the option to apologise without doing anything else, as it did earlier this year for the Batang Kali massacre in colonial Malaya in 1947.
But they would still be required to make reparations under international law. If the UK government chose to do so, this was likely to take the form of international aid, support with state building and loans, Mr Halford said.
Yet the sums the UK is currently willing pay as part of its overseas aid to the Palestinian Territories are dwarfed by the scale of Gaza’s needs.
The estimated recovery and reconstruction needs for Gaza had reached $53 billion as of October 2024, according to the World Bank’s Gaza and West Bank Interim Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment. Whereas the UK committed to provided £129 million in aid for the year 2024/ 2025.
Mr Al Masri was born in Nablus and educated at schools in Lebanon and university in Texas.
In his witness statement included in the petition, he recalled how his first grade teacher, Ragheb Malhas, told the classroom of the Declaration and its implications.
"The people of Nablus therefore never doubted that the British were there to help the Zionists and not the Arabs, nor that the approach of the British was discriminatory and fundamentally unjust," he wrote.
Life in Nablus “became increasingly chaotic and dangerous” in the years leading up to the Nakba in May 1948," he wrote.
“From my family home, my brother and I watched planes buzzing overhead – old German Messerschmitts smuggled out of Europe after the Second World War – which were repurposed to support the Zionist incursion."
He first met Mr Arafat in Algeria while working with Philips Petroleum and later served as a minister in the Jordanian government. Arafat came regularly to his home “stay for dinner and talk politics, affirming the will of our people to not just survive, but live in dignity.”
“Yasser Arafat’s steadfastness, passion and vision of uniting Palestinians living around the globe and marching us home, victorious was infectious,” he wrote in his witness statement.
His fortune was made through the Edgo Group, an engineering company serving the oil and gas industry that he founded and managed from London. He lived in the British capital from the late 70s to the early 1990s before returning to Nablus.
His children, including two sons who came with him outside Downing Street, went to school and university in Lebanon, before being displaced again by Israel's invasion in 1982.
In 1993, “anticipating the challenges the new government foreshadowed by the Oslo Accords would face”, he founded the Palestine Development and Investment Company, with the aim of boosting the Palestinian economy.
He became a minister with the newly formed Palestinian Authority in 1994.
A prominent investor in Palestine’s economic development, Mr Al Masri told The National that any plans for rebuilding Gaza should be led by the Palestinians themselves.
“The Palestinians are able and capable to rebuild Gaza, to rule Gaza,” he said.
“We start with Gaza, we go to Jenin and Tolkarem refugee camps and the diaspora who have been there for almost 70 years, living in desperate ways in few cents a day outside, seven million of them,” he said.
