FILM SCREENING: Planet Israel – fundraising preview screener
followed by Q&A with Director Gillian Mosely
Thursday 23rd April at 6.30pm
Britain Palestine Project: Welcome to our new-look website
Events and podcasts
WEBINAR: Israel: What Went Wrong?
With Omer Bartov. Thurs 7th May 2026 at 3pm UK time
International Law in crisis?
This BPP podcast series with Lara Bird-Leakey examines whether International Law is in a fit state to bring justice and human rights to the Palestinian people.
Listen on Spotify
Choose from more than 150 BPP podcasts available on Spotify, featuring expert guests from a wide range of professional fields.
Listen on Substack
Many of our podcasts are also available as videos on Substack. Click to visit BPP Substack.
News and commentary
Countering Israel’s life by the sword
Sir Vincent Fean, BPP trustee and former chair, argues that Israel’s unlawful war of choice against Iran, and its continued destructive military occupation of and assaults on Gaza and the West Bank, mean Britain must take concrete action to protect the State of Palestine it recognised last autumn.
Britain must act: former diplomats warn on West Bank annexation
As global attention shifts elsewhere, Israel is accelerating its annexation of the West Bank. In this urgent intervention, senior former British diplomats argue that words are no longer enough – and call on the UK to take concrete action to uphold international law and protect the viability of a Palestinian state.
UK must act against E1 plan to cut West Bank in half
Construction tenders have been issued for the E1 Settlement. UK Government action is needed to stop the splitting of the West Bank.
2026 surge in West Bank settler violence
More West Bank Palestinians have been physically routed out of their homes and villages in the illegally occupied Territory during the first three months of 2026 than in the whole of 2025, reports the UN. The United Kingdom has many ways of acting against this terror, writes Brian Brivati, BPP executive director.
Since the earliest years of the Zionist Project, many of its founders and progenitors have coveted the fertile Lebanese south, up to 18 miles inside Lebanon, as far as the Litani River, as the northern border of any Israeli state. Once again, it seems, Israel and its supporters feel there is “no choice” but to seize by arms and occupy “Northern Galilee”, even if they have to destroy it first.
Inside a multi-village settler-soldier ‘pogrom’
An investigative reporter with +972 describes a devastating settler attack, undertaken in apparent co-ordination with the Israeli army.
What happens to Palestinians when Israel goes to war
Brian Brivati, BPP Executive Director, reports.
‘The only thing free is the cheese in the mousetrap’
Encounters in Palestine during a visit in January 2026, by Miranda Pinch.
US-Israel attacks on Iran are an illegal war of choice
United Nations Association – UK statement on the escalatory attacks on Iran, and what Britain and its allies can do.
Spooner Prize
Call for Submissions: Britain & Palestine Essay Competition
We are inviting submissions for the Spooner Prize – an annual essay competition supporting rigorous, evidence-led research on Britain’s role in Palestine. Open to postgraduate students, early-career researchers, and independent scholars.
Deadline: 31 July 2026
History
1915–17: Britain’s historic contradictions in Palestine
The recognition of Palestine as a state refocuses attention on Britain’s 20th-century legacy in the Holy Land. This 2016 lecture on events involving Henry McMahon, Mark Sykes and Arthur Balfour examines more than two years’ spread of British duplicity and contradictory policies whose consequences live on in the disaster of Palestine.
Tawfik al-Ghussein explains how from the earliest days of British rule, Palestinians were denied any real voice in their own governance, and until this day even such apparent progress as UK recognition of a Palestinian state is part of an ongoing trauma: a system that keeps the Palestinian people under oppression, control and attack.
How the first High Commissioner rigged Palestine for the Zionists
Herbert Samuel, Britain’s first – and Zionist – High Commissioner in Palestine, was able to deploy the contradictions and vagaries of the Balfour Declaration to the eternal advantage of the Zionists, right from the start.
Dirty Work: how an Israeli eye-witness account of the Nakba disappeared from view
The 1949 Israeli novella Khirbet Khizeh revealed the horrors and ethnic cleansing mechanisms of 1948: the wrecking of towns; the expulsion of Palestinians. Then, as Nathan Thrall reports in The New York Review of Books, in the late 1970s it suddenly became taboo for Israelis.
Videos
Britain in Palestine 1917–1948
We investigate the contradictory promises and actions which defined British Mandatory rule in Palestine and laid the groundwork for the Nakba (the catastrophe) and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. This is essential viewing for understanding Britain’s legacy in the region and the situation on the ground today.
Our second BPP film traces the calamitous history of the Palestinian people from the Zionists’ eviction of them from their homeland between 1947 and 1949, through the 1967 Israeli invasion and occupation of the remaining Palestinian lands in Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank in 1967, and to the betrayal of the Palestinian case and cause in the Camp David agreement of 1979 when Egypt made a separate peace with Israel, brokered by the United States.
Origins of the Israel-Palestine conflict
The Balfour Declaration was published on 2 November 1917. It stated the intent of the British government to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine. William Dalrymple (historian and BPP patron) and Anita Anand (historian) are joined by Tom Segev (Israeli historian and writer) to discuss the declaration and the ensuing British mandate for Palestine.
Campaigns and fundraising
Email your MP: ban UK trade with illegal Israeli settlements
Illegal settlements are a war crime. UK trade with them must stop. Use our template to urge your MP to support a full ban on UK trade, services and investment linked to illegal Israeli settlements – and to uphold international law.
Stop Trade with Settlements – Campaign Launch
The Britain Palestine Project is proud to support the launch of the international campaign to ban trade with Israel’s illegal settlements, backed by a new report: Trading with Illegal Settlements.
Palestine: UK must act against genocide and settlements following recognition
Recognition is a vital first step, but it must be given real meaning through action. Britain’s historic responsibilities, and its obligations as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, require more than symbolic gestures.
Britain owes Palestine – a lot
Our Chair’s response to 14 Palestinians who have filed a legal petition demanding the British Government account for systematic violations of international law during its occupation of Palestine (1917–48). The Britain Palestine Project urges the Government to meet its historic responsibilities.
Recognition Is the Beginning merch
Our new ‘Recognition Is the Beginning’ merch collection celebrates this moment while calling for meaningful change. Every item helps amplify the message that recognition must lead to real progress.
Reviews
Britain’s cruel crushing of the Arab Revolt
John Bond and Ian Wellens review Palestine 36, the moving and revealing feature film that shows how British forces used murderous methods to end the Palestinian Arab uprising of 1936–39. Those methods are still in use today, by Israel, in all the occupied Palestinian territory.
Palestine at war
A young English woman reporter tells the personal stories of Arabs, Jews and Britons during wartime under the British Mandate, and describes the terror that tore the country apart as Zionist forces prevailed. Yet, she maintained hope for compromise. Review by Tim Llewellyn.
A Historian in Gaza by Jean-Pierre Filiu
Jean-Pierre Filiu is a French historian and author of Gaza: A History. He had visited Gaza many times before 7 Oct 2023, yet he writes: “Nothing had prepared me for what I saw and experienced in Gaza between 19 Dec 2024 and 21 Jan 2025.” Review by Mike Scott-Baumann.
British complicity in Israel’s murderous campaign against Gaza
Tim Llewellyn reviews Peter Oborne’s Complicit: Britain’s role in the destruction of Gaza – a detailed, minutely notated and sourced polemic by an outraged Englishman. Not one aspect of the UK establishment escapes his wrath.