Britain created the template for Israel’s occupation. It must own up to its crimes in Palestine
Police search Palestinians in August 1929 during the British mandate amid protests against the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people
Tahir Ali writes in Middle East Eye on 29 April 2026:
The recent report that Israel has brought no prosecutions for the killing of Palestinian civilians in the occupied West Bank since the start of this decade is a stark indictment of the failure of justice, accountability and the international rules-based order.
Just last month, 10 Palestinian civilians were killed in the occupied West Bank by Israeli settlers and police, including a mother, father and their two young sons who were shot in the head while coming home from a shopping trip.
But what the report finds is not an aberration. It is the latest expression of a familiar and deeply damaging pattern: violence carried out against the Palestinian people by an occupying power, followed by silence, delay and impunity.
That pattern has a disturbing precedent in Britain’s own occupation of Palestine between 1918 and 1948. During the Arab Rebellion of 1936-39, British authorities did not merely respond to unrest; they constructed a legal and military framework that normalised collective punishment, arbitrary detention, and coercive force while restricting access to the courts.
In effect, the law was not used to restrain violence, but to authorise it. The result was a system in which abuse could be committed and then insulated from accountability, strikingly similar to what we see play out today.
Darkest day
One of the clearest and darkest examples is al-Bassa in September 1938, where there are strong grounds to conclude that the British army carried out a massacre of around 50 Christian and Muslim Palestinians in reprisal for a roadside bomb. It is among the most egregious episodes uncovered from the period.