Britain's settlement trade ban is cosmetic. For it to work, it must sanction Israel

Britain's settlement trade ban is cosmetic. For it to work, it must sanction IsraelThe UK may end up assisting Tel Aviv by reinforcing a preposterous distinction between 'illegal' Jewish settlements and a supposedly 'law-abiding' IsraelJohnathan Cook Sept. 11 [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.Dishonest reasoningSimilarly, 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.No ‘law-abiding’ IsraelMore 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.An apartheid allyIndisputably, 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.LBC@LBC‘Anyone who tells me “God gave me this land and told me to do this violent act”, I can’t have a conversation with.’ @AndrewMarr9 'has no time for Hamas or Islamism', but says the idea of ‘allowing the Palestinians to be wiped out is intolerable'6:05 PM · Sep 8, 2026 · 1.5M Views466 Replies · 1.07K Reposts · 5.31K LikesThe 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.Elephant in the roomThe 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.<