[First published by Middle East Eye]
Ed Miliband, Britain’s foreign secretary, this week announced plans for a banon trade and services with Israel’s illegal Jewish settlements, in a move the government has hyped as a “comprehensive reset” of relations with Israel.
The UK was joined by 11 other western states unveiling or proposing similar sanctions: Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.
They presumably hope it will look like they are amassing strength through numbers, upping the pressure on Israel to end the occupation and clear the way for Palestinian statehood.
More realistically, each is hoping it will prove harder for the Trump administration and Israel to single them out as a target in the inevitable backlash against these all-too-modest measures. In quick retaliation, Israel took the unprecedented step of shuttering the British consulate in East Jerusalem – that is, in territory it occupies in violation of international law.
But the idea that these sanctions will amount to a “reset” for UK-Israeli relations looks more like wishful thinking. Shortly before Miliband’s announcement, Bloomberg reported that British diplomats had been privately reassuring Washington that the trade ban on settlements was “largely symbolic”.
According to Alex Wickham, the news agency’s UK political editor, the government’s measures would “have no material impact on the UK’s wider relationship with Israel on trade or security”.
The UK’s trade with Israel’s Jewish settlements is a tiny fraction of its £6 billion ($8bn) overall trade with Israel. And after two decades of largely ineffectual “threats” from Europe to start labelling settlement goods, Israel long ago devised ways to conceal the provenance of such trade. It simply relabels items from the settlements as “made in Israel”.
This is why the Foreign Office has long argued a ban on trade with settlements would be impossible to implement. The “material impact”, as British diplomats are reportedly telling Washington, will be virtually non-existent.
Similarly, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s officials have been downplaying the significance to Labour MPs.
The night before Miliband’s speech, Newsnight reported that backbenchers had been told the government would carefully avoid any echo of the longstanding Palestinian demand for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against both Israel and the settlements.
A decade ago, Burnham described the BDS movement – backed by leading members of Palestinian civil society – as “spiteful”. During his speech, Miliband similarly went out of his way to emphasise his “wholehearted” opposition to BDS.
But there is something fundamentally, and transparently, dishonest about this approach.
The British public is being told that the UK needs to take “decisive action” in the form of sanctions against West Bank settlements, while Israel itself is to be left untouched. And the government justifies its half-hearted measures on the grounds that the settlements are the chief threat to a two-state solution.
But neither argument makes the slightest sense.
Of particular concern to the British government is a recent decision by Israel to advance a large settlement project called E1, on Palestinian land close to Jerusalem. It is seen as the final nail in the coffin for Palestinian statehood.
The truth, however, is that Israel has been expanding its illegal West Bank settlements for decades, using armed militias to drive Palestinians off their land. This is nothing new.
If the UK were really serious about punishing Israel for its lawbreaking, it would have “reset” relations over the even graver matter of Israel levelling Gaza and slaughtering and maiming tens of thousands of children over the past three years.
It is quite preposterous for Burnham’s government to engage in public handwringing over the damage being done to the chances of a two-state solution by Israel building 1,200 homes in the heart of a future Palestinian state. Britain, after all, has just spent three years helping Israel erase half of that potential state – the half comprising Gaza.
Israel’s wholesale destruction of the tiny enclave ought to be front and centre of any justification for a change of policy, were Burnham really intending to punish Israel and end British complicity. Instead, Israel’s genocide has been shunted into the background, while the spotlight is turned on longstanding settler violence.
This isn’t “decisive action”. This is more smoke and mirrors.
More worrying still, the UK may actually assist Israel by reinforcing a laughable distinction between “illegal” settlements, on the one hand, and a supposedly “law-biding” Israel, on the other.
The effect will be to suggest, quite falsely, that the settlements are somehow discrete from Israel itself. But it is Israel establishing the settlements on stolen Palestinian land. It is Israel servicing them with infrastructure, from roads and electricity to schools and public transport.
It is Israel encouraging Jews to move into the illegal settlements through housing and other subsidies. It is Israel sending soldiers to protect the settlements and crush any opposition from Palestinians.
And it is Israel arming settler militias to terrorise Palestinians off land desired by Israel for further colonisation.
It is the Israeli state – hiding behind its self-declared “Jewish” status – responsible for this decades-long process of ethnic cleansing, designed to eradicate any chance of a Palestinian state emerging.
Despite Miliband’s references to the “conduct of the Israeli government” – meaning the far-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – there is cross-party support in Israel for the expansion of the settlements and the thwarting of Palestinian statehood.
Yair Lapid, the Israeli opposition leader, seen as on the centre-left in Israel, lambasted the UK sanctions against the settlements, calling them “a boost for Hamas and terror organisations”.
If Britain wants to stop the criminal settlements, it has to wield its stick not just against these visible symptoms of the occupation, but against the root cause: the Israeli state.
Indisputably, there were welcome aspects to Miliband’s address to the House of Commons – not least, the government’s decision to finally accept a 2024 ruling from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that Israel’s occupation of the state of Palestine is itself unlawful, not just the settlements.
Miliband’s use of the term “ethnic cleansing” in reference to the West Bank – though not, it appears, to Gaza – sets a precedent that is already liberating some prominent journalists to speak up against the occupation, if very belatedly.
The government’s inclusion in its measures of financial services that fund settlement expansion provides a potential tool for sanctioning foreign companies and Israeli banks that operate in Britain, should the UK choose to use it.
There was a forthrightness too in Miliband’s description of the settlers currently carrying out pogroms in Palestinian communities across the occupied West Bank as “terrorists”. Such language sounds bold only because all previous British governments have shied away from naming a longstanding reality.
But Miliband downplayed the fact that all Israeli governments have backed these settler terrorists. It was a convenient fiction for Miliband to suggest instead that the violence was largely a result of Netanyahu’s far-right government turning a “blind eye” to this criminality.
Other aspects of Miliband’s speech were even more troubling. He declaredthat he was “unwavering in my support for the state of Israel”.
But the ICJ, the world’s highest court, also concluded in 2024 that Israel had imposed a system of apartheid rule over the Palestinian people for more than half a century. How can Britain claim to be taking the moral high ground, and carrying out a “reset” in relations, when it expresses “unwavering support” for an Israeli state engaged in apartheid?
Miliband also stated: “Our argument is not with the people of Israel, with whom the UK has unshakeable bonds. Our argument is with the conduct of its government.”
But how, if we continue to have “unshakeable bonds” with the people of Israel, do we pressure that society – one steeped in the Jewish supremacist ideology of Zionism – to stop electing governments, year after year, decade after decade, that seek the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their historic homeland?
Poll after poll shows Israel’s Jewish population overwhelmingly against the creation of a Palestinian state – the explicit goal of Britain’s new sanctions policy – and in favour of the expulsion of Palestinians from all parts of their homeland. In the midst of the Gaza genocide, almost half of Israelis expressed support for killing the enclave’s entire population, including its children.
How would apartheid in South Africa have been brought to an end if Britain and other western states had preferred to maintain “unshakeable bonds” with the white population, rather than impose boycotts and sanctions on the whole society?
Miliband’s aim is to treat Israel as discrete from its settler militias and the more fanatical members of the current government – figures such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
But it is a distinction without a meaningful difference. It falsely regards the crude, open and relatively small-scale violence of settler terrorists as categorically more important than the controlled, covert, incremental and far larger-scale violence wielded against Palestinians by every government in Israel’s history.
Culpability rests not with a few rogue elements in the settlements, but with the entirety of a society that has chosen apartheid, ethnic cleansing and finally genocide, as its “solutions” to silence the claim of the native Palestinian people to sovereignty over part of their historic homeland.
The elephant marauding through the room, the one we are supposed to ignore, is the UK’s three years of complicity in Gaza’s destruction.
The Labour Party has burned its credibility on the single most important moral foreign policy issue of our time by allowing Britain to actively collude in Israeli atrocities. The new prime minister understands this problem only too well.
Shortly before he took over from Keir Starmer, Burnham issued a public apology via social media in an attempt to distance himself from his predecessor.
In a three-minute monologue to camera, he offered vague contrition for Labour “getting it wrong” on Gaza, without specifying how. He feebly noted that war crimes “appear to have been committed”, and lamented the “humanitarian” suffering of Palestinians in the enclave.
Burnham also committed the UK to upholding the vision of a two-state solution, with a Palestinian state alongside a self-declared Jewish state. But Starmer stole Burnham’s potential thunder by recognising Palestinian statehood nearly a year ago – though predictably, the declaration had negligible effect.
That recognition – hailed as momentous too – has turned out to be utterly inconsequential. So much so that, as John Whitbeck, a long-time legal adviser to Palestinian negotiators, pointed out in an email, Miliband repeatedly made reference to settler violence in the “occupied territories” rather than – as official UK policy should dictate – the “occupied state of Palestine”.
With a Labour Party conference looming, Burnham has needed his own rabbit to pull out of the hat and demonstrate his seriousness. He found it in trade sanctions on settlements in the occupied West Bank. They appear to punish Israel, while having minimal practical impact.
The noisy backlash from Israel, the Trump administration and Israel’s plentiful apologists at home, Burnham assesses, will win back leftwing voters hounded out of Labour by Starmer and into the arms of Zack Polanski’s Green Party. Those voters are needed if Burnham and Labour are to stand any chance of winning the next general election.
But at the same time, the lack of real teeth from his government’s settlement sanctions are designed to forestall meaningful retaliation from Washington. That may explain Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s unexpectedly tepid response in the immediate wake of Miliband’s speech.
Burnham knows he needs to be seen doing something. And there are signs that the British public may be swayed by all the furore over his settlement sanctions into assuming significant action has been taken.
An opinion poll published this week shows nearly half of Britons favour a trade ban on settlement goods, with only 18 percent opposed. But sadly, Miliband’s speech gave every impression of preferring to change the rhetoric – and optics – rather than the substance of British foreign policy towards Israel.
Miliband noted “the most unimaginable trauma and suffering” of Palestinians in Gaza, as if they had endured an act of God rather than a campaign of genocide by Israel. He acknowledged a “deep sense of shame” over the international community’s failure to act sooner, while ignoring the active part Britain played – and is still playing – in the Gaza genocide.
The UK may soon bar British shops from selling “Israeli” wine from vines cultivated on stolen Palestinian land. But Britain continues to provide the trade and services needed by Israel to further erase the tiny enclave of Gaza, where some two million surviving Palestinians are now confined to less than a third of its ruins.
The UK continues to sell arms to Israel, including components for its F-35 warplanes and killer drones. Britain continues to transfer US and German arms via a Royal Air Force base on Cyprus, and to carry out surveillance flights over Gaza and provide Israel with intelligence.
The UK continues to stay silent as Washington wages war on the International Criminal Court for seeking to hold Israel accountable for the crimes of an occupation the Burnham government says it wants to end.
Britain is similarly quiet on the continuing abuses by the US of the United Nations’ expert on the occupied territories, Francesca Albanese.
At home, the government continues to outlaw as a terrorist organisation Palestine Action, and it arrests and jails those who protest too loudly against British collusion in genocide.
By contrast, the same government refuses to investigate the actions of British citizens – at least 2,000 of them – who reportedly participated or assisted in the Gaza genocide. They continue to freely move in and out of the UK.
Israel’s lobby groups in Britain, shamefully all too ready to excuse Israel’s crimes and incite against Palestinians, continue to attract British politicians, including Labour government ministers, as members.
Were Burnham really serious about changing Britain’s relations with Israel, all of this would have to be addressed, not swept under the carpet. His “decisive action” on settlement trade is, in truth, cover for the government’s continuing “decisive inaction” on Israel’s genocidal crimes and British collusion in them.
But one final, horrifying subtext to Miliband’s speech should not go unremarked.
In desperately trying to keep alive the West’s two-state solution, Burnham’s government is not just ignoring reality: the fact that there is no partner in Israel – electable or otherwise – to implement such a vision.
Burnham and Miliband are also insisting, in the entirely improbable event that a Palestinian state can be extracted from Israel, that the Palestinian people should be required to make peace with an unrepentant, heavily militarised, racist state that has recently committed genocide in Gaza.
None of the 11 states that joined the UK this week in sanctioning the settlements can apparently imagine Palestinians ever living in anything more than a small, demilitarised, economically dependent pseudo-state, with no real choice over its leaders, or control over its borders and economy.
Similarly, there is no suggestion that a neighbouring, territorially reduced Israeli state would need to be reformed ideologically, or made to engage in any kind of truth and reconciliation process, or face sanctions until it sees the error of its ways.
The Jewish supremacist ideology of Zionism, the dehumanising logic of the Israeli settler-colonial mindset, and the religious fundamentalism of large swaths of the Israeli population - all critical to the rationalisation of the Gaza genocide - would remain unchallenged.
On this view, it seems, long-established impulses towards apartheid and genocide would simply evaporate, even as the West continues to indulge Israel’s every whim.
This isn’t a recipe for peace, even of the flawed kind. It is a demand that the Palestinian lamb continue to dwell with the Israeli wolf.
The truth that Burnham’s government refuses to face, as with every government before it, is that peace won’t magically arrive with Palestinian statehood. A Palestinian state – or, more likely, a single state embracing Palestinians and Israeli Jews – can emerge only when Israel has been dismantled as a heavily armed settler-colonial state, as happened with apartheid South Africa.
Israeli society will need to be re-educated through a painful truth and reconciliation process, as also happened in apartheid South Africa. Israelis will have to be made to confront the facts about a century of atrocities committed against the native Palestinian people.
Britain is not contemplating doing any of this – because the threads from unravelling the crimes of Israel and the Zionist movement would lead straight to the door of 10 Downing Street and other western powers.
Israel isn’t some Frankenstein’s monster. It is doing exactly what it was set up to do: serve as a western colonial implant – a militarised fortress state – projecting power into the oil-rich Middle East.
Israel wants to be nothing less – and, rhetoric aside, the British establishment is not about to do anything practical to cut it down to size.
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