The walk up to Downing Street in September was a long time coming for Munib al-Masri, the Palestinian tycoon and former confidante of PLO leader Yasser Arafat, now in his 90s.
Masri was shot by British troops while on a protest march as a boy, in 1943. The leg injury has continued to plague him over the decades, like those countless Palestinians who have been injured, killed or displaced since the creation of Israel 77 years ago.
As a boy he lived through the Nakba in 1948, in which 750,000 Palestinians were made homeless by Zionist militias. Many arrived as refugees in his native Nablus in the occupied West Bank.
“I saw them, it was really terrible, they were hungry, afraid, bare footed, they had walked hundreds of miles to come to Nablus for refuge,” he tells Middle East Eye.
Six decades later, his grandson, also named Munib, was shot by Israeli forces in 2011 while on a peaceful protest from the Lebanese side of the Israeli border, leaving him paralysed.
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In September, Masri and his grandson delivered a petition to Number 10 Downing Street alongside British-Israeli historian Avi Shlaim and international law expert Dr Victor Kattan.
They demanded an apology for the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and reparations for the consequences of that short letter that promised to deliver Palestine as a homeland to the Jewish people, above the heads of the indigenous Palestinians.
‘Britain transformed the legal, political and demographic character of the territory [Historic Palestine] without authority to do so’
– Legal petition brought by Munib al-Masri and experts
“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,” the 400-page petition, written with the aid of academic and legal experts, including Ben Emmerson KC, said.
Now in his 90s, Masri is Palestine’s richest businessman, with a sprawling business empire across the Middle East and North Africa that he launched in the 1950s in the oil and gas sector.
He lives in his palacio-style villa in Nablus, surrounded by olive orchards.
Masri served as minister of public works in Jordan’s government in the wake of Black September, when King Hussein’s army fought Yassir Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1970, and two decades later as a minister in Arafat’s first Palestinian Authority administration, following the Oslo Accords in 1994.
In 2021 he filed a successful lawsuit in Nablus, occupied Palestine, against the British government for actions during the British Mandate period (1917-1948) and for the Balfour declaration of 1917, issued by the UK Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour.
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Out of this came the legal petition delivered to Downing Street in September.
Speaking to Middle East Eye over the phone from Nablus, Masri said he hoped to meet British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to discuss the petition in the wake of British recognition of Palestine in September, two weeks after he delivered the Balfour petition.
In a telling irony, on the day Masri delivered the petition to Downing Street, Starmer was controversially hosting Israeli President Isaac Herzog for an official meeting.
The Israeli president said early on in the genocidal Gaza war that “there are no innocents in Gaza”, and has been pictured signing missiles that would be fired on the besieged territory.
At least 79,000 Palestinians have been killed or are missing since October 2023. More than 4,000 people have been killed in Lebanon.
Push for UK apology and reparations
Masri told MEE that the next steps are in the hands of the British government, led by Starmer.
“We cannot do anything about it until we hear from them, the British government.
“We hope after a couple of months we will hear if they are going to settle it out of court, or they are going to take it to court, but we are determined to take our right.
“Balfour was a very, very ugly letter, a deceipt, it was unjust and it was not legal.”
He hopes Starmer’s Labour government will act on the petition as it has recognised the State of Palestine.
“We want to thank [Starmer] for recognising the Palestinian state, because the moment you recognise the Palestinian state, the Balfour declaration is null and void.
“I hope that if we have an audience with the new prime minister, that they [the UK government] realise that it’s about time they say sorry and make it right.”
The genocide in Gaza has opened the world’s eyes to the reality of Israel’s violent occupation and efforts to erase Palestinians, Masri says.
“Because of the Gaza war, the whole world realised that they had been completely fooled by the Israeli propaganda of a peace-loving and democratic state.
“But the whole cause of this came from something called the Balfour Declaration and that’s why England should really do everything they can to say ‘I’m sorry’ for the big mistake they did to Palestinians and the world, and to pay reparations for so many people who have suffered for this, like they did in India, like they did in Kenya.”
Masri studied in Texas in the 1950s and went on to build a fortune in the oil and gas industry, and as vice chairman of Arab Bank.
Over the decades he has met many of the key players in the Middle East, from Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to US Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
He also hosted Lord Jacob Rothschild, whose family were instrumental in gaining UK imperial support for the Zionist project to build a colony in Palestine more than a century ago.
Helping Trump buy a New York icon
Masri met current US President Donald Trump in the 1980s, when he was vice president of the Arab Bank and Trump was a New York City real estate tycoon.
The bank formed part of a global consortium that lent Trump the money to buy the Plaza Hotel for $390m.
Four decades on, there is a hope that Trump – a man who recognises the value of money above everything – will repay this in delivering a Middle East settlement that ends Israel’s wars and recognises Palestinian rights.
“I have written two letters to President Trump who I met when I was in the [Arab] bank in New York, where we had made a loan for him to buy the most famous hotel in New York.
“We were part of the consortium that delivered to him $400 million and I visited him in Trump Tower. He was very kind and very nice, so I reminded him of this.”
He says that Trump is doing “okay”.
“I hope that America will go back to support the two-state solution. Because it is the only way – they cannot kill us all, and we don’t want to kill them, we want to live together.”
In 1993, when Palestinian Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat returned to Palestine from exile as part of the Oslo Accords, Masri accompanied him.
“We went to Gaza, we went everywhere. They called me the black box of Yasser Arafat, because I was very close to him.”
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Arafat appointed Masri as a minister without portfolio in the first Palestinian Authority administration in 1994.
“I believe I was the only person who held a ministerial post in both Jordan and Palestine. I was proud of it.”
Masri ran his business empire from the UK in the late 70s and 80s, but has lived in occupied Palestine since 1993, founding a number of businesses, including Palestine Telecom (Paltel).
His palatial home, Beit al-Falastine, which is on the site of an excavated fifth-century Byzantine monastery, stands above the crowded Balata refugee camp in the valley below.
Masri insists that had he not built it, it would now be an illegal Israeli settlement.
The site was occupied by Israeli troops during the Second Intifada, who “left it like a big latrine,” he previously told The Guardian.
Broken promises
Masri has experience of the way US political leaders often promise something in person and then renege on it.
This was the case with Biden. It should perhaps dent his optimism, which remains undimmed.
“I met Mr Biden when he was vice president, and very briefly when he was president, and he agreed with me on the two state solution.
“But then he changed his mind; he started not saying anything, because of the Zionist pressure on him.”
‘Jews and Arabs could live together like they lived many centuries ago. Palestine could be the first federated state’
– Munib al-Masri
Masri, perhaps in line with his allies in the Mahmoud Abbas administration, clutches at the hope that Trump will deliver on the vague words of point 19 in his plan, which says there is a possibility of a future Palestinian state.
“Even Mr Trump agrees on it and now I think he will eventually [deliver on it]. His number 19 point shows there is a possibility of a Palestinian state.”
Masri has also attempted over recent years to end the division between Abbas’s Fatah, in the occupied West Bank, and Hamas, which has governed Gaza since 2007 and still has control of the strip despite a two-year onslaught that has destroyed most of it.
Many critics see Abbas as the main obstacle to unity on the Palestinian side. MEE put this to Masri, who says: “Ending division is the most important issue. President Abbas has to accept this, and I wrote him a letter on this.”
His view of the now widely discredited two-state solution – made less likely each day as Israel expands illegal settlements across the occupied West Bank – is that it is a stepping stone to a federated one state of all citizens in Israel-Palestine, which he calls a “workable utopia”.
“We support a two state solution, which emerged from the United Nations, and hopefully the Israelis will accept it, but there is no room for the Zionist belief or doctrine in the future.”
He hopes that “Jews and Arabs could live together like they lived many centuries ago. Palestine could be the first federated state, hopefully in a federation with all the Arab states.”
Meeting Netanyahu
In the 1990s, while working for the PA under Arafat, Masri met Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin, who had signed the Oslo Accords with Arafat, but who was then assassinated in 1995.
“I met Rabin and I met Netanyahu, in accordance with what Arafat wanted me to do,” Masri says.
He recalls his meeting with Netanyahu in 1996, at the beginning of the International Criminal Court-indicted war criminal’s first premiership.
“The first time he was prime minister I went to see him with my daughter; it lasted three hours, and after the meeting he told his aides, ‘I like Munib. Make sure he and I meet once every month.’ I was very happy.
‘An apology is not just words, it is the recognition of truth and the start of healing’
– Munib al-Masri
“I said there is no way other than living together, and he agreed. But then, he deceived me, he did not stand with his word. I stood with my word.”
There were no further meetings with Netanyahu.
For Masri, the Gaza genocide has been horrific, but has delivered a change in the view of millions of Americans and Europeans over Palestine that he could not have imagined.
“You see what is happening in Gaza… I cannot sleep at night when I see what is happening there.
“If we [Palestinians] spent 15 or 20 billion dollars on changing people’s minds in America we would never have succeeded, but God gave us this privilege – finally, Israel made it clear what they want. They want us out, they want to kill us.”
He brings the current genocide back to Balfour and Britain. He is grateful for the Palestine protests that have swept the UK and US since 2023.
“I want to thank the British public who have been demonstrating against what Israel is doing and what their government is doing.
“This document [Balfour] made seven million Palestinians homeless. And you see the result of this in what is happening in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem.
“An apology is not just words, it is the recognition of truth and the start of healing.”
