Britain finally acts against Israel’s illegal settlements – because people forced it to

This isn’t enough. But it’s something to build on

As British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband announced new sanctions targeting Israel’s illegal settlements, I thought back to exactly a year ago.

Back then, I was in the West Bank – Palestinian land that is illegally occupied by Israel.

I had travelled on a delegation organised by the Christian Palestinian charity Sabeel-Kairos, and if I’m honest, I was surprised Israel let me in after keeping me for interrogation at the Jordanian border.

A couple of days later, they sent me an email revoking my visa, which answered that one.

In the village of Beit Ijza, I met Sa’adat Gharib and his family. By the time I visited, their home had been completely boxed in by the neighbouring Israeli settlement. Sa’adat told us the surrounding land had belonged to his family. Around the house stood a 26-foot-high metal fence. They lived under the constant gaze of settlers and surveillance cameras.

To get in or out, the family had to pass through an electronic gate controlled by Israeli forces.

Sa’adat told us that the family had been arrested, intimidated and physically attacked. That included attacks on the children. Sometimes, he said, settlers would deliberately walk around the fence naked when his kids were outside.

I went to Hebron and walked down what was once its main commercial street. Much of it has been shuttered, and Palestinians are barred from walking on sections of the street – while Israeli settlers can move freely.

This is apartheid.

One evening, a young Palestinian man I’d met in London took us to a hipster bar in Ramallah. He lived on the outskirts of Jerusalem, where we were staying. But while I could walk freely around Jerusalem, he had only entered the city once in his entire life – as a small child. He couldn’t remember it.

Here is a land where some 770,000 illegal Israeli settlers now live. Palestinian life is being gradually asphyxiated. Palestinians live under military occupation and are routinely detained and incarcerated under a military legal system, including children. Jewish Israeli settlers living alongside them are subject to Israeli civil law.

They endure the routine humiliations of the longest belligerent occupation of our time. Travelling around the West Bank is made nightmarish by Israeli checkpoints. Land is routinely seized. Palestinians are being violently driven from their homes.

In the northern West Bank, Israeli forces have emptied the Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams refugee camps of their residents. More than 33,000 Palestinians were displaced, according to the UN, while huge areas of the camps were demolished or damaged and residents were prevented from returning.

With the support of the Israeli state, settlers are waging a campaign of terror.

Since 7 October 2023, more than 1,100 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces or settlers in the West Bank, including more than 240 children.

This is what I thought about when Miliband announced the sanctions.

At first, I was extremely cynical. I remember talking to Palestinians in the West Bank about the UK’s recognition of a Palestinian state last year. They were entirely dismissive.

They said it was for domestic political consumption, and made no difference to them. If it had been done three decades earlier, they said, then maybe it would amount to something. But the Israeli state was destroying any possibility of a Palestinian state – and the West was doing nothing meaningful about it.

The “two-state solution” has just been a crutch for politicians. When they receive any scrutiny about Israel’s crimes – which is rare – they simply point to their meaningless abstract support for a “two-state solution”.

Britain’s sanctions are certainly not even close to being enough. Israel is a state committing genocide in Gaza. UN investigators have also found it responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity. That’s without even mentioning the heinous crimes committed in Lebanon, the illegal occupation of Syrian land, or the disastrous attacks Israel and the US have launched against Iran.

It is a reasonable question to ask why Britain is still conducting any trade with illegal settlements. The direct economic impact of the import ban will be negligible: it will represent only a tiny fraction of the roughly £6 billion in annual trade between Britain and Israel.

But even so, this is a victory won because of those who have ceaselessly campaigned – and because voters, including those who switched to the Green Party, punished Labour at the ballot box.

Those electoral shocks helped bring down Keir Starmer and usher Andy Burnham into Downing Street. Burnham now faces pressure to shore up Labour’s left flank – and that includes taking action on Israel. Recent polling shows support for banning trade with illegal Israeli settlements massively outstripping opposition.

This isn’t enough – but it represents concessions that can be built on.

It doesn’t just mean a ban on imports from illegal settlements. It opens the way to sanctions against companies and individuals whose money or services help settlements expand. That potentially puts Israeli banks and financial companies in scope.

Britain has now officially declared that Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian land is unlawful, in line with the 2024 ruling of the International Court of Justice. That is – alas! – a new development, and provides a legal basis to push for more action.

Arms export restrictions have been tightened – although the existing carve-out for components supplied through the global F-35 programme remains.

The government is using very careful language, declaring that “there is increasing evidence that war crimes appear to have been committed”. Miliband, the prime minister and the rest of the government obviously know that war crimes have been committed on an industrial scale. A definitive finding, however, would impose certain legal obligations on the government.

But Miliband explicitly backed legal processes to determine responsibility for war crimes, and said Britain supports the International Court of Justice reaching its judgment in South Africa’s genocide case.

The Global Human Rights sanctions regime is being expanded, allowing sanctions to be imposed not just on those involved in illegal settlements, but potentially on those responsible for violations of international humanitarian law in Gaza.

Miliband also declared that “settler terrorists” are committing ethnic cleansing in parts of the West Bank, and said members of the Israeli government had supported the forced displacement of Palestinians.

All of this can lay the foundations for us to build more pressure – and ensure more far-reaching action.

There were certainly other problems. Miliband denounced the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which consciously draws on the successful boycott movement against South African apartheid.

He denounced anyone who questions Israel’s right to exist as “a homeland for the Jewish people” – as though it is somehow outrageous to support a single state (which de facto exists!) with equal rights for all between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea.

That won’t age well.

But you can see from the resulting hysteria that Israel and its cheerleaders are rattled.

Outrageously, that has centred on arguing that taking even these limited measures against a foreign state’s illegal conduct endangers Jewish Brits.

This shameless conflation of Jewish people with Israel’s crimes is dangerously irresponsible.

So no, this isn’t enough.

But it does represent welcome movement – and these concessions were only won because people organised, from the streets to the polling booth.

That includes people like you.