West Bank sanctions a big moment in UK's foreign policy

It was forthright, it was clear, it was unequivocal – ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is being carried out in the West Bank by Israel. The formal position of the UK government now is that the occupation of the West Bank is illegal, and must end.

It was a big moment in British foreign policy, and Ed Miliband’s statement to the House of Commons was charged with emotion and freighted with history.

“With permission, I would like to make a statement on Israel and Palestine. I do so as a proud British Jew, someone with the deepest gratitude to the state of Israel for giving a home to my grandmother after she lost her husband, my grandfather, and 60 other family members at the hands of the Nazis.

“I remember visiting her in the 1970s in Tel Aviv and seeing the life and sanctuary Israel had provided. Indeed, some of my most joyful childhood memories are of picking oranges as a kid on the kibbutz where my cousins lived.”

This was how the British Foreign Secretary began his speech laying out a major change in the tone and tenor of the UK’s relations with Israel. A speech his Israeli counterpart said “carries echoes of the antisemitic words” used by the former British military commander of mandatory Palestine in the interwar years.

It would have been difficult to accuse Mr Miliband of outright antisemitism.

The policy objectives set out are not just those of Britain – it was one of a dozen countries including Ireland to issue a joint statement on Tuesday. France and Canada were also signatories.

That means two of the five permanent members of the UN security council, and three member states of the G7 are formally declaring Israel’s occupation of the West Bank to be illegal, and introducing sanctions regimes as a result. That is a big deal.

A year ago France, Britain and Canada gave diplomatic recognition to the State of Palestine on the eve of the UN General Assembly in New York. The West Bank sanctions are likely to feature at this year’s General Assembly in ten days’ time.

Announcing the move in France, foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot posted on X: “France will end trade with Israeli settlements located in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, alongside eleven other countries that have made similar commitments.”

He added: “Why? Because ⁠the West Bank is on the brink of exploding: unchecked expansion of colonization in violation of international law, surge in violence perpetrated by extremist settlers against Palestinians, acts of terror denounced by the Israeli authorities themselves. – there is frenzied expansion of the settlements, a flare up of violence against Palestinians by extremist settlers, and acts ‌of terror which have been attacked by Israeli authorities themselves.”

La France va mettre fin au commerce avec les colonies israéliennes situées dans les Territoires palestiniens occupés, avec onze autres pays qui ont pris des engagements du même ordre.

Pourquoi ?

Parce que la Cisjordanie est au bord de l’explosion : expansion effrénée de la… pic.twitter.com/mJStC3HgOk

— Jean-Noël Barrot (@jnbarrot) September 8, 2026

Mr Barrot’s statement argues the expansion of settlements in the West Bank threatens Israel’s own security.

He continued: “The Israeli authorities must imperatively put an end to illegal colonization and the intolerable violence that accompanies it”.

“France cannot, through its trade, support a situation that threatens the security of Israeli’s and Palestinians alike, as well as peace and stability in the region. Europe must uphold the same imperative.”

That latter point was aimed at Berlin, which Paris and other capitals say has blocked the adoption of a common EU trade ban on the West Bank.

The point was made openly by Fianna Fáil MEP Barry Andrews on Tuesday night on his way to a Renew Europe party meeting with President Macron in the Elysee Palace.

He said: “Countries like Germany and Italy are now clearly isolated in ignoring international law in the Middle East. It is also bitter that [European commission] President von der Leyen has shown again an abject failure of leadership”.

In an interview with the Irish Times on Friday, the EU’s Foreign Policy chief Kaja Kallas said a trade ban on goods from the West Bank would be a “principled stance” for the EU to take.

She also suggested this could be done not as a foreign policy position – which requires unanimity among member states, but as a trade measure, which can be approved by a qualified majority of at least 15 of the 27 states representing 65% of the EU population.

The blocking minority would have to comprise four states representing a combined 35% of the EU population. Germany and Italy together form just under 32%, so would have to be backed by two other states bringing with them another 3-4% of the population.

Hungary and the Czech Republic have at various times vetoed EU responses to or sanctions on Israel, and would have the power to block a trade measure if they combined with Germany and Italy.

Mr Andrews and Ireland’s Labour Party argued the Government should follow the British example of banning services imports from the West Bank in the Irish Occupied Palestinian territory (Prohibition of Importation of Goods) Act 2026.

That Act, signed into law by the President at the end of July has as a stated aim compliance with the International Court of Justice’s advisory ruling on the occupation of the West Bank in 2024.

The British too said they were changing policy to comply with the court’s ruling, with Ed Miliband’s speech on Tuesday formally stating the British position.

“For a long time, the British Government have rightly said that settlements are illegal, but we have remained silent on the question of the legality of the occupation as a whole, which in 2024 the International Court of Justice concluded was unlawful,” he said.

He added: “Today, I announce that the official view of the British government is that the occupation is unlawful, because of Israel’s entrenchment of its control, its intention to extend permanent sovereignty and its expansionist agenda via illegal settlements.”

The timing of the co-ordinated move was agreed the previous Thursday, when President Emmanuel Macron met Prime Minster Andy Burnham in Downing Street for two hours, after which there was no press statement.

Internally, the change of direction flows from the change of leadership, from Kier Starmer to Andy Burnham in July. That gave political impetus to the faction in the Labour Party that favoured a stronger diplomatic signal to Israel about the settlements and their role in undermining the viability of a two-state solution.

The timing was also dictated (and the French and Canadian’s were very emphatic about this) by the publication of a tender for the construction of some 1,200 homes in a part of the West Bank designated E1 that critics say will effectively cut the West bank along a north-south line.

It is this construction project that the European governments say is a line that if crossed will collapse the viability of a potential two-state solution. The construction tender closes days before the next Israeli general election.

But according to reporting by the Times Newspaper in London on Thursday, the idea of placing economic sanctions on Israeli settler activity in the West Bank has been under examination for a couple of years, and was advised against by officials.

According to The Times, foreign office officials asked their embassy colleagues in Tel Aviv about sanctioning products from the West Bank. The Embassy staff advised it was not possible, but minsters decided to go ahead anyway.

The initial advice was sought before Andy Burnham became prime minister. The newspaper said foreign office officials had told “successive governments”, including Conservative ones, that it was not possible to separate the Israeli, Palestinian and settler economies to enforce a trade ban.

The paper quoted an unnamed official source saying: “This announcement has been made to feed into the fever of Labour Party Conference before kicking it into the long grass. They have no idea how this is going to work. It’s purely symbolic”.

But the change of leadership appears to have tilted the political playing field towards those in Labour (both inside and outside Parliament) favouring stronger words and actions against Israel’s policy – including Ed Miliband.

Below was the core of his speech on Tuesday.

“What we seek today is to salvage the only course for peace and security for Israelis and Palestinians: the two-state solution. Let me start with the situation in the West Bank. At the time of the Oslo peace accords in 1993, around 270,000 settlers lived in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Today it is some 770,000. More settlements have been approved under the four years of this Israeli government than in the previous 20 years.

“Let us spell out what that has meant for Palestinian communities: houses bulldozed; roads and public infrastructure destroyed; families displaced from their homes, community by community, family by family, person by person. Sixty-five Palestinian communities have been completely expelled since 2023—a total of over 4,000 Palestinians have been evicted from their homes due to settler violence and state actions.

“In August, we saw the crossing of a long-standing red line: the issuing of E1 tenders for over 1,200 homes. I visited a community in the area covered by E1 in 2014. The Bedouin communities I met in Khan al-Ahmar had lived on that land for generations. E1 proposals would evict them and place settlements directly between East Jerusalem and the west bank, cutting through the heart of Palestine. Let us be absolutely clear what this means: the creation of a set of facts on the ground to make the two-state solution unviable.

“On top of official state policy, settler terrorism is rampant. The UN reports an average of six violent settler attacks against Palestinians per day this year – the highest on record. Let us take one example: in al-Mughayyir, 20 miles north of Jerusalem, settlers have encircled the village and mounted a campaign of intimidation, largely under the protection of the Israeli military.

“Families in the village are increasingly cut off from accessing their land, squeezed into ever smaller areas, and have olive trees uprooted and livestock stolen. In the same community, just last week, two teenagers were shot when settlers entered the village under police and military escort. Both died before reaching hospital. Five teenagers from their school have now been killed this year.

“Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli Prime Minister, has described what is happening as ‘a violent and criminal effort…to ethnically cleanse territories in the West Bank.’”

“The former Minister of Health and retired brigadier general from the Israel Defence Forces, Ephraim Sneh, has said: ‘This is ethnic cleansing, to put it simply.’”

“Ethnic cleansing is defined by the UN as ‘a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.’

“The British government agree that there is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in areas of the West Bank, perpetrated by settler terrorists. All too often, the Israeli government have turned a blind eye to that – and, worse, members of that government have made statements and taken actions to support the forced displacement of Palestinians.

“I recognise the gravity of saying this, but the truth is that it is the least the people who face such suffering deserve, and it should be the prelude to justice,” Mr Miliband said.

There was instant push back from Israel, but curiously very little from the United States (as of Friday night).

Within minutes of the debate wrapping up in Westminster, Gideon Sa’ar, Israel’s Foreign Minster, made a televised announcement of the closure of the British Consulate in East Jerusalem – the de facto British Embassy to the Palestinian Authority.

Israel will also deport a number of British civil servants and military staff from the Gaza co-ordination centre, and ban almost a dozen British MPs, including former Labour leader Jermy Corbyn, from entering Israel.

Mr Sa’ar said: “The accusations made today by the Foreign Secretary of the Labour government in the British Parliament were outrageous lies.They chose to do this, on the eve of the holiest days in the Jewish calendar, for domestic political reasons, ahead of the Labour Party Conference taking place this month. The British move is morally distorted and constitutes blatant interference in the affairs of a sovereign state and in its electoral process.”

“A boycott of goods from Judea and Samaria is a despicable practice that harms hard-working, law-abiding citizens”, including he said thousands of Palestinians who work in Israeli owned businesses.

He also disputed the claims of the British, French and Canadian governments about the E1 settlement construction.

“Contrary to the false claims of the Labour government, no new decisions have been made regarding development in E1. The decision was taken more than a year ago, and the tender process has been under way for many months,” he said.

He added: “The claims regarding the severing of potential Palestinian territorial contiguity are also baseless. The decision of the Government of Israel, taken more than a year ago, stipulated that two roads would be built: the first, Road 80, which will serve as a major transportation route from the Bethlehem area to the Ramallah area; the second, known as the ‘Fabric of Life’ Road, between a-Za’im and al-Ezariya.”

Mr Sa’ar said the Israeli public overwhelmingly supports the settler communities in the West Bank and overwhelmingly opposes the establishment of “a Palestinian terror state”.He said attempts to force Israel to accept a two-state solution will fail.

He said: “After everything we have seen, after the Israeli concessions in the Oslo Accords and the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, the Second Intifada and 7 October, the Israeli public utterly rejects the establishment of a jihadist terror state in the heart of our land.

“I say to the Labour government and to every government in the world that thinks it can force Israel to act against our national and security interests: You have no chance of succeeding.

“We did not return to our land after 2,000 years only to lose it under pressure from jihadists, Islamists, antisemites, far-leftists and wokes. Not only will you fail to harm us. You will harm yourselves and your own influence.”

Mr Sa’ar said the trade sanctions were the latest in a series of measures the British government has taken since 2024, listing them as follows: “Recognition of a virtual ‘Palestinian state’ in September 2025; the resumption of funding for UNRWA, even though its employees were actively involved in the 7 October massacre; the suspension of licences for defence exports to Israel, and today we learned of the intention to expand these restrictions; sanctions on Israeli ministers; sanctions on Israeli individuals and entities; the suspension of negotiations on a free trade agreement; restrictions on Israel’s official participation in the international defence and security equipment exhibition in Britain; the freezing of military dialogue and security cooperation; preventing IDF officers from participating in training at the Royal College of Defence Studies; and the promotion of repeated, biased and one-sided attacks against Israel in the international arena.”

He said these measures, along with what he called “biased and one-sided anti-Israel rhetoric” have contributed significantly to “the unprecedented rise in antisemitic attacks, including violent attacks against British Jews”.

He finished with this warning to Britain and the 11 other countries that signed Tuesday’s joint statement.

“Britain initiated and led the current move. But we will also take countermeasures, at our discretion, against other countries that act or will act against Israel. The message to every government that harms us is clear: whoever acts against Israel, Israel will act against them, and they will lose their influence and relevance in the region. Measures against Israel will not go unanswered.”

Mr Sa’ar also said it was “absurd” for Britain to attack Israel because of the “Balfour Declaration” by one of Mr Milibands predecessor as Foreign Secretary in 1917,that set in motion the great power – and later United Nations – decisions that led to the founding of the State of Israel in what was back then a province of the Ottoman Empire in the midst of World War One.

The declaration – addressed to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland – reads: “His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

Mr Sa’ar said that declaration “formally recognised the historic right of the Jewish people to re-establish their national home in the Land of Israel, including in Judea and Samaria (the Israeli term for the West Bank).

The declaration was imprecise in its wording, offering civil and religious – but not political – protection for non-Jewish communities in Ottoman Palestine (about 90% of the population at the time).

This was recognised by the British government in 2017, on the Declaration’s centenary, when Conservative Party Foreign Office Minister Joyce Anelay told the House of Lords: “We recognise that the declaration should have called for the protection of political rights of non-Jewish communities in Palestine, particularly their right to self-determination. This is why we support a two-state solution.”

In that sense, Tuesday’s speech by Ed Miliband is the latest effort to correct a course of conflict that was set in motion in Westminster in 1917.