“The British government accepts that Palestinian areas of the West Bank are being subjected to ethnic cleansing by terrorist settlers.”
With these words, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband brought about “the biggest reset in Britain’s relationship with Israel in decades”, said Ailbhe Rea, political editor of The New Statesman.
His decision to introduce a ban on imports from illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank is not without “political risk” but it marks a determination to “bring values and policies into British foreign policy” that many at home and abroad say has been lacking for years.
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“Ethnic cleansing” and “forced displacement” are often seen as acts of genocide, a word Miliband was careful not to use, said The Independent’s international affairs editor Sam Kiely. In this context, sanctions against settlers appear “disproportionately low and leave the State of Israel out of the loop”, but “the consequences of the new British legislation will be felt much more widely”.
Israel responded strongly and quickly, announcing four “countermeasures” against Britain, including closing the British consulate in Jerusalem and denying entry into Israel to 12 “elected British representatives and other British citizens involved in anti-Semitic and anti-Israel activities.” Among them is former Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Mike Huckabee, the US Ambassador to Israel, also responded to X: “The British lost. Jewish hatred of their government knows no bounds and knows no facts.”
With this announcement, the UK “risks moving from a country capable of connecting Israel, the Gulf, Washington and Europe to one whose positions are increasingly predictable but whose participation is increasingly less necessary”, said Labor Party colleague John Mendelson in The Spectator. This could result in “a significant loss of influence in pursuing policies that have not yet demonstrated that they have made peace, Palestinian statehood, regional security, the security of British Jews or Britain’s national interests more achievable.”
Miliband will hope that his Jewish heritage (his mother survived the Holocaust and fled to Israel) and “staunch support for Israel’s right to exist will reassure Americans” and he will “highlight the difference” between targeted sanctions in the West Bank and a blanket boycott of all Israeli goods, which Miliband himself opposes, Rea said.
What’s next?
Beyond the widely publicized but underappreciated impact that West Bank sanctions will have on Palestinians living there, “there are other potential costs to be paid for this convoluted gesture,” The Times View reports. Not least in Israel’s crucial general elections next month, where “a siege mentality could rear its head, bringing even more hardliners to power.” If this happens, the current good mood caused by the joint sanctions of Britain, France and Canada could prove “extremely counterproductive.”
However, Miliband is showing no signs of backing down and intends to use the UN General Assembly later this month to shine “the clearest and sharpest light on what is happening and what needs to change” in Gaza, he told the House of Commons.
Those who have long argued that the UK has no influence on the world stage are “missing sight of what’s going on”, former Foreign Office special adviser Ben Judah said on X. By bringing together the CANZUK countries (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK) with EU members and their partners in these “problematic coalitions of Western countries not led by the US”, the UK has “found a role, an influential one, partly because America has abandoned its own”.
“This move against the Israeli settlement project, aimed at trying to protect the possibility of a two-state solution from the extremist Israeli government, is a continuation of this geopolitics.”
