Miliband’s Sanctions Put Britain’s Relationship with Israel at Risk
This week, Britain’s new Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband, decided to sanction Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. Miliband does not believe that the Jewish people have a right to live in Judea and, rather than sanctioning terrorist organisations such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the IRGC, believes the best way to achieve so-called ‘peace’ is to target a valued ally of the UK, Israel, and, more specifically, its citizens who wish to live where their ancestors did.
According to the new Labour government, this applies to all of Judea and Samaria, including the Cave of the Patriarchs, where the Jewish patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and matriarchs Sarah, Rebekah and Leah are buried. It includes even the eastern part of the united city of Jerusalem, Israel’s capital and home to the holy city’s most sacred sites.
Now it seems that if you visit the Kotel to pray, you will be cast as an ‘evil settler’ by Burnham and Miliband’s government.
Judea and Samaria have been home to Jewish presence for millennia, predating any other claim. It is only under Israeli control that Jews and other religious groups alike have been able to access the holy and historic sites there. For religious Jews, settling and controlling our Promised Land is a commandment.
They want to ensure that Judea and Samaria are judenrein because of their unattractive desire to create a terrorist state in the heartland and centre of Israel. They believe they can force Israel to do this by preventing Israeli products originating in Judea and Samaria from reaching the shelves of British supermarkets.
On the contrary, Israel is committed to its land and its people. Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar has clearly said that the Jewish people did not liberate their land after thousands of years of Assyrian, Babylonian, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Crusader, Ayyubid, Mamluk, Ottoman and British rule only to lose it in the face of unrelenting international pressure.
Legality of Judea and Samaria
No nation on earth has a better claim to its land than the Jewish people have to Judea and Samaria – whatever non-binding resolutions and opinions the United Nations and the International Court of Justice may issue.
It is striking that the Labour government – and the eleven other countries that joined its announcement: France, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Iceland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden – believe that peace in the region is best achieved not by expanding the Abraham Accords that President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu forged with the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and others, but by helping to create a Jew-free state run by the unstable, corrupt and terror-financing Palestinian Authority. It is shocking that so many around the world genuinely believe that peace means expelling Jews from an area in which they already live.
Unlike what you hear in the media, and possibly believe yourself, Israel has every right to control Judea and Samaria and establish Jewish communities there. The very premise that there is an ‘illegal occupation’, ‘illegal settlements’ or a ‘West Bank’ is wrong.
What most people call the ‘West Bank’, or worse, the ‘Occupied West Bank’, is not only a place to which Jewish people are indigenous and from which they originate but is also legally an integral part of the modern State of Israel.
In 1948, when the Jews liberated their homeland and regained sovereignty, Arab armies from across the Middle East attacked the fledgling State of Israel. In this war, notably, Jordan occupied Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem, while Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip. The UK even decided to recognise Jordanian control over Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. In 1967, when Israel was attacked again by these same countries, Israel liberated Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. Ever since, Israel has been branded an illegal occupier in its own land; accused of seizing territory despite having captured it not from a so-called ‘State of Palestine’, but from Jordan.
Judea and Samaria are the indigenous and biblical homeland of the Jewish people: where we originate from, where our ancestors walked and lived, and where so many of our holy sites are located. The territory is also absolutely vital to Israel’s security, allowing the army to maintain strategic depth in hostile areas.
Before Israel liberated Judea and Samaria, there were the 1949 Armistice Lines, which were never internationally recognised borders but temporary ceasefire lines. They were explicitly rejected as borders by Arab states at the time and were intended as military armistice demarcations, not political frontiers.
The government’s decision disregarded the Jewish people’s historic, religious and indisputable indigenous ties to these territories, Israel’s legitimate security needs, as well as repeated Palestinian Authority rejections of peace offers.
These rejections date back to before the 1948 Partition Plan, which would have created an independent Arab state alongside Israel. For example, the 1937 Peel Commission proposed giving approximately 75% of the Land of Israel to an Arab Palestinian state, as well as all of the territory of modern-day Jordan for another Arab state.
Labour also ignores the fact that no ‘Palestinian’ state had ever existed in these areas and that Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria were established voluntarily, rather than through forcible transfer as prohibited under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Importantly, Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention was drafted to prevent the kind of mass state-enforced deportations perpetrated by Nazi Germany, not voluntary settlement in disputed territories without the forcible displacement of a local population.
International legal instruments – the 1920 San Remo Conference, the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate for Palestine – explicitly recognised the Jewish people’s right to reconstitute their national home in these territories, rights that have never been legally superseded. The San Remo decisions were incorporated into Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations and formed the legal basis for the British Mandate, giving them binding force; they remain binding today under Article 80 of the UN Charter. It was Britain itself that first breached the Mandate, becoming an occupying power when it issued the White Papers restricting Jewish return during the Shoah – when Jews needed it most -barring Jewish settlement in Transjordan, and detaining Jewish refugees who entered “illegally” at Atlit.
Additionally, there was a consistent precedent that successor states to British Mandates typically inherited control over their entire mandate territory, known as uti possidetis juris. Countries such as India applied this principle when annexing Goa in 1961 following India’s independence in 1947.
Why do London and Paris not accuse India of illegal annexation of Goa? It is precisely the same logic.
Notably, before Israel regained these areas in a defensive war in 1967, there were no formal Palestinian sovereignty claims to them, and Israel did not ‘take’ them from anyone.
From 1948 to 1967, Judea and Samaria were occupied and annexed by Jordan, a move recognised only by the UK and Pakistan. Jewish residents, particularly those of eastern Jerusalem, were expelled, while dozens of synagogues and ancient cemeteries were desecrated or destroyed – a fact rarely acknowledged in modern discussions about the city’s legal status.
At the time, local Arab leadership offered little resistance and, in some cases, actively supported Hashemite rule. At the 1950 Jericho Conference, prominent local Arab figures formally called for the unification of the territory with Jordan under King Abdullah.
Throughout this period, no independent Palestinian government or sovereign institutions were established in either Judea and Samaria or Gaza, with Palestinian national aspirations largely absorbed under Jordanian and Egyptian control. It was only after Israel took control of these territories in a defensive war that modern Palestinian nationalism began to assert distinct claims to statehood in these areas.
The UK and these countries also overlook the defensive realities: Israel took control of these territories in a defensive war against Arab aggression in 1967.
While European capitals remain fixated on Israel, or worse, try to tie Israel’s hands after the 7 October massacre by trying to get Israel to repeat the same mistake it made in Gaza in 2005 in Judea and Samaria, they ignore the strategic realities of the territory. Judea and Samaria are mountainous areas overlooking Israel’s main cities, are approximately 15 times larger than the Gaza Strip, and were also the principal source of much of the terrorism during the Second Intifada.
European capitals conspicuously avoid implementing sanctions on other long-running territorial disputes, including Morocco’s control over Western Sahara and Turkey’s occupation of Northern Cyprus. Parliament refuses even to speak about these disputed territories, let alone create the storm it did this week against Israel.
Severe atrocities are happening all around the world, yet not even half the attention given to Israel is given to any other country.
Bad for Britain, Too
Aside from the legality of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, Miliband’s decision to sanction them is not in Britain’s interest, and may prove counterproductive.
Israel shares vital intelligence with the UK, supplies as much as a quarter of its pharmaceuticals according to US Ambassador Mike Huckabee (other estimates put the figure at around one in seven), and provides a large proportion of its defence and military equipment. London has put this relationship at risk.
There is also a serious question over the legal and commercial basis for Britain’s new restrictions. Britain already has a Trade and Partnership Agreement with Israel, under which the two countries enjoy preferential access to one another’s markets. Indeed, the existing agreement already contains a controversial distinction whereby goods produced in Israeli settlements do not receive preferential tariff treatment. That does not mean that every new settlement-related measure automatically breaches the agreement, but moving from a tariff distinction to broader trade restrictions raises important questions under both the treaty and World Trade Organisation rules. WTO law does contain exceptions for certain measures, but these are not a blank cheque for governments to impose discriminatory trade restrictions. If ministers are confident that their new policy is lawful, they should explain the legal basis for it and how it is compatible with Britain’s existing commitments to Israel.
Several US states – Florida chief among them, but as many as 38 in total – have laws penalising boycotts of Israel. Elements of UK–US trade, and British firms operating in America, may suffer as a result.
Israel’s response has already been damaging to British interests in the region: London has lost its consulate in Jerusalem, had its representatives expelled from the Gaza coordination centre in Kiryat Gat, seen its forces stripped of their role training Palestinian Authority security forces, and had a dozen MPs and activists banned from Israel. National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir has even called on Israel to recognise the Falkland Islands as Argentine territory – a symbolic gesture, but one that would sting in London.
Miliband decided to ignore warnings from Jewish leaders, including the Chief Rabbi, that this measure was wrong, counterproductive and potentially dangerous for British Jews.
It is hardly surprising that such a move could embolden antisemites. Despite what Miliband says about being a ‘proud Jew’, singling out Israel on the world stage as committing ‘terror’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ risks giving encouragement to terrorists and their supporters on the streets of Britain.
It is clearly domestic politics influencing Miliband and Burnham. The new Labour government appears determined to win back the anti-Israel and antisemitic vote, much of which has now gone to self-declared pro-Gaza MPs and the Green Party.
For the most virulent anti-Israel haters, however, this move is not even close to sufficient. They want a trade ban on Israel altogether.
The move may also harm the very people it claims to protect. Tens of thousands of Arabs in Judea and Samaria are employed by Israeli companies and entities, many in construction, agriculture and manufacturing tied directly to the communities Miliband has targeted. The sanctions do not discriminate between Jewish and Arab livelihoods: a trade ban that chokes off Israeli businesses in the territory chokes off Arab wages alongside them. Even President Herzog, no ally of the settlement movement, has warned that the measures will “directly harm” local Arab workers. It is a strange kind of humanitarianism, which could impoverish the people it claims to be defending.
Some Israelis, including President Herzog and Foreign Minister Sa’ar, have also suggested that this amounts to interference in Israel’s democratic elections this October.
President Herzog and Foreign Minister Sa’ar have both suggested the move amounts to interference in Israel’s general election this October. That would hardly be surprising: when the world piles pressure on Israel, its electorate tends to shift rightward. While I would welcome Netanyahu remaining prime minister after October, I doubt that is an outcome Burnham’s government would like to see.
The UK government is, painfully, no longer an ally of Israel. The warning signs were there even under Starmer, not least when Britain recognised a “Palestinian state.” Miliband and Burnham have put a vital strategic relationship at risk over fabricated claims and myths about international law, all to shore up their vote.
The British people deserve better from their government. Israel deserves better allies. And the truth about its claims to Judea and Samaria deserves to be heard.
