Britain’s Israeli Policy Is a Miscalculation

Britain’s foreign secretary has presented sanctions against Israel as a route to Middle East stability. The argument rests on an assumption that history, geography and the record of failed peace initiatives do little to support.

The House of Commons has hosted speeches that altered the course of British foreign policy. Edward Miliband’s statement on September 8 was unlikely to join that list for reasons he would have preferred.

As Britain’s foreign secretary announced a tougher policy toward Israel, he presented it not simply as a matter of diplomacy but as an expression of personal identity. “I do so as a proud British Jew,” he said, before invoking his grandmother, whose husband and dozens of relatives were murdered by the Nazis, and expressing gratitude to Israel for providing her with a home.

That history deserves respect. It does not, however, settle the question of what policy Britain should pursue toward Israel.

Miliband’s argument was that sanctions and pressure could help compel Israel toward a two-state settlement. The difficulty is that the proposed destination is clearer than the security arrangements required to get there—and the history of the conflict offers scant reason to believe that territorial concessions alone produce peace.

The geography of Israeli insecurity

Miliband spent time on a kibbutz in Israel. That experience ought to make the country’s security concerns more comprehensible, not less.

When he visited Kibbutz Nahshonim, south of Rosh Ha’ayin, Israel was a young state confronting infiltration across the armistice lines. During the 1950s, Jordanian infiltrators crossed into Israel, stealing livestock and crops and killing civilians.

There was no Israeli presence in the West Bank to blame for those attacks. There was no post-1967 occupation. The borders were those established after the 1948 war.

That history complicates the convenient idea that Israel’s security problem began with the territorial changes of 1967.

Israel’s vulnerability has long been geographical as well as military. The narrow waist of the country leaves little room for strategic retreat. Abba Eban famously described the pre-1967 boundaries as carrying something resembling an “Auschwitz memory”—a reference to the fear that an enemy able to penetrate the country’s narrow center could threaten its survival.

The point was not that every territorial compromise is impossible. It was that any settlement requiring Israel to surrender strategic depth must explain how the resulting security problem would be solved.

Miliband’s statement did not adequately do so.

The two-state assumption

The most consequential assertion in his speech was also among the least substantiated: “if there is one lesson of recent decades, it is that we will never have stability in the Middle East without a two-state solution.”

That is a striking claim given what the past decades actually contain.

The Oslo process produced the Palestinian Authority and significant Israeli territorial withdrawals. Israel subsequently disengaged from Gaza in 2005, removing its settlements and military presence.

What followed was not a stable Palestinian state living peacefully alongside Israel. Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007, built an extensive military infrastructure and ultimately launched the October 7, 2023, assault that killed Israeli civilians and triggered the war that followed.

The experience does not prove that Palestinian statehood is impossible. Nor does it establish that a two-state settlement cannot eventually succeed. It does, however, demonstrate that statehood without a credible answer to questions of security, armed groups and political extremism can produce something very different from the peace its advocates envisage.

That problem remains unresolved.

Where does Hamas go?

The central weakness in Britain’s approach is therefore practical.

Who disarms Hamas?

Who prevents it from reconstructing its military capabilities?

Who ensures that a future Palestinian government controls the territory under its authority rather than competing armed factions?

Who guarantees that Israeli forces can withdraw without creating another security vacuum?

And what happens if those guarantees fail?

These are not technical details to be addressed after a political settlement. They are among the conditions that determine whether such a settlement is viable in the first place.

Lord Jon Mendelsohn made a similar argument in The Spectator, criticizing Miliband’s policy for failing to confront the violence that has repeatedly prevented a durable peace. A diplomatic framework that establishes a Palestinian state but cannot establish who controls its weapons or territory would solve a political problem on paper while leaving the underlying security problem intact.

That would be a precarious bargain for Israel—and potentially for Britain as well.

Sanctions and the politics of pressure

Britain’s willingness to sanction Israel also raises a broader question: what precisely is the strategy?

Pressure can sometimes alter the behavior of an ally. But sanctions are useful only when the target has both the capacity and the incentive to change course in the desired direction.

Israel is unlikely to surrender fundamental security interests because Britain imposes economic or diplomatic penalties. Indeed, such measures may strengthen the political forces that regard international pressure as evidence that Israel cannot rely on Western governments to protect its interests.

Some Israeli critics of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government have already warned that British sanctions could strengthen the prime minister politically. Simon Schama, the historian, argued that they could help Netanyahu’s electoral prospects.

The political effect could extend beyond Netanyahu himself. A British government seen in Israel as hostile to the country’s security may reinforce support for the broader right-wing bloc, particularly among voters who believe that international pressure threatens Israel’s territorial and national interests.

That would be an ironic outcome for a policy supposedly designed to advance peace.

Britain has problems of its own

There is another uncomfortable question for London.

Britain itself has struggled to confront antisemitic violence and the ideological currents that can encourage it. If a government finds it difficult to deal decisively with threats against British Jews, it should be cautious about assuming that sanctions can resolve a conflict thousands of miles away, involving generations of competing national claims and armed organizations.

Britain can influence the Middle East. It cannot dictate its political settlement.

Nor can it wish away the ideological component of the conflict. Any serious peace initiative must confront not only Israeli policies but also Palestinian rejectionism, jihadist movements and hostility toward Jewish national self-determination.

A settlement that asks Israel to recognize Palestinian national rights while treating Jewish national rights as an obstacle is unlikely to command lasting legitimacy among Israelis.

The question of Jewish national rights

Miliband’s invocation of his Jewish identity makes the contradiction sharper.

He has described himself as proud of his Jewish heritage and supportive of Israel while simultaneously advocating the creation of a Palestinian state. There is no inherent contradiction in supporting Palestinian statehood while supporting Israel’s existence. The contradiction arises when Palestinian national aspirations are treated as legitimate while Jewish national claims are regarded as historically or morally suspect.

The international framework established after the First World War did not envision the land solely as a future Arab national state. The League of Nations Mandate for Palestine explicitly recognized the “historical connection of the Jewish people” with the territory and called for the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people.

That history does not resolve the modern territorial dispute. Nor does it confer an unlimited right to every policy pursued by an Israeli government.

But it does establish something that contemporary British diplomacy too often treats as negotiable: Jewish national identity and attachment to the land are not recent inventions that can simply be removed from the equation.

A policy that needs more than good intentions

Britain’s desire to promote a Palestinian state is understandable. Its belief that a durable peace requires Palestinian self-government is hardly unusual.

The problem lies in confusing the desired endpoint with a workable route to it.

A two-state settlement cannot be made durable by sanctions alone. It requires Palestinian political institutions capable of restraining armed groups, security arrangements that Israelis can trust, recognition of Jewish national rights and an answer to the ideological forces that have repeatedly rejected coexistence.

Gaza should be the immediate test.

If the international community cannot establish security and political order there, it is difficult to see why the same formula should simply be expanded across a future Palestinian state.

Britain has every right to criticize Israel. It has a long history in the region and retains diplomatic influence that can be put to constructive use. But influence is squandered when moral certainty substitutes for strategy.

Miliband’s policy risks doing precisely that. It offers pressure without a convincing mechanism for peace, statehood without an adequate security architecture and diplomacy that appears to underestimate the reasons Israel remains wary of the promises made by foreign governments.

For Britain, that is more than an argument about Israel. It is a test of whether its foreign policy is being guided by hard-headed judgment—or by the comforting belief that declaring an outcome makes it attainable.