Hasan*, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, has spent all but one of his 24 years of life in the United Kingdom. He does not speak Hebrew or Arabic fluently, and depends on British medical care. In 2019, Hasan was informed that he was to be deported to Israel, separating him from his family in the U.K., so he filed an asylum claim. In 2022, that claim was denied, forcing him to appeal. In the years since then — and in recent months, as Israel’s post-October 7 incursion into Gaza has brought Palestinians’ human rights into the international spotlight — Hasan has waited. His appeal hearing was scheduled for March 12 of this year.
If Hasan were to be returned to Israel, his lawyers wrote that he’d face “likely persecution” because he is Palestinian, because he is Muslim, and because of “his anti-Zionist, anti-apartheid and pro-Palestinian political opinion.” But in a surprising reversal March 11, Hasan was told that he’d be allowed to stay — without having to go to court. His lawyers say this is a precedent-setting recognition by the British state of the Israeli government’s persecution of Palestinians.
“This is a victory not just for me but for all Palestinians living under the apartheid Israeli regime,” Hasan wrote in a statement. “Without even having to step into court, the U.K. government has now accepted that the Palestinian struggle for freedom should not just be limited to Gaza and the West Bank but to all parts of historic Palestine under Israeli rule.”
The impact of Hasan’s case, legal experts say, could reverberate beyond the U.K., impacting Palestinian refugees claiming asylum in places like the United States, too.
Hasan’s barrister, Franck Magennis, called the decision “completely unprecedented,” and said that it amounted to an acknowledgment that even Palestinians with Israeli citizenship are likely to experience violence and harm at the hands of the Israeli state. “It amounts to admission by the British state that there’s a real risk that Israel persecutes at least some of its own Palestinian citizens, whether because they’re anti-Zionist or simply because they’re Palestinian.”
This may be the first case in which a Palestinian citizen of Israel has successfully won asylum in the U.K. on the argument that an apartheid system of racial domination systematically oppresses Palestinian citizens. On a page set up to crowdfund his legal support, Hasan stated that he particularly wanted to underscore apartheid in his case. “My previous solicitors dropped my case because they were nervous that I wanted to put the spotlight on Israeli apartheid as part of my asylum case,” he wrote. His new lawyers built his case around the 1951 Refugee........