Separation Is Not Justice

A boycott cannot build coexistence. Ed Miliband’s speech deserved a serious answer; his policy deserves a firm rejection.

The British foreign secretary spoke movingly about the sanctuary Israel gave his grandmother after the Nazis murdered his grandfather and 60 other members of his family. He defended Israel’s right to exist as the homeland of the Jewish people, named Hamas’s October 7 massacre for what it was, affirmed Israel’s right to defend itself, announced new sanctions on Hezbollah’s financing arm and the reimposition of economic sanctions on Iran, and declared — rightly and without qualification — that blaming British Jews for the actions of Israel’s government is antisemitism. He described Jewish children going to school past security guards. He insisted Hamas cannot govern Gaza and must decommission its weapons. These are not incidental parts of his speech. They reflect a moral seriousness too often absent from European discussions of Israel.

But precisely because Miliband knows Israel’s history and says he wholeheartedly opposes the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, the measures he announced are especially troubling. He has taken legitimate concerns about violence, humanitarian suffering and Palestinian political rights and used them to justify a sweeping economic campaign against Jewish communities beyond the 1949 armistice line.

Violence must be confronted without hesitation

Miliband is right about one essential point: Palestinians should not have to fear violent attack by Jewish extremists.

He came with evidence, and it should be stated plainly rather than waved past. The United Nations records an average of six violent settler attacks against Palestinians per day this year, the highest figure ever recorded. Sixty-five Palestinian communities have been completely expelled since 2023, with more than four thousand people driven from their homes. In Al Mughayir, families have been squeezed off their land, olive trees uprooted, livestock stolen — and last week two teenagers were shot dead when settlers entered the village under police and military escort. Five children from that one school have been killed this year.

I do not dispute those numbers and I will not minimize them. Israelis who assault civilians, burn property, steal livestock, uproot trees or use intimidation to force families from their homes are not defending Zionism. They are betraying it. Israel should investigate these crimes, prosecute those responsible, and hold commanders and public officials accountable when they fail to protect Palestinian communities — or, worse, when soldiers and police stand between the attackers and consequence. Statements by Israeli ministers that encourage forced displacement deserve condemnation.  Friendship with Israel does not require silence when Israeli law or Jewish moral responsibility is violated.

Nor should supporters of Israel dismiss the suffering in Gaza. The scale of death, displacement and destruction demands sustained humanitarian action and credible investigation of alleged violations of the laws of war. Israel has both a strategic and moral interest in ensuring that food and medicine reach civilians while Hamas is disarmed and excluded from Gaza’s future.

Miliband is also right that October 7 does not excuse everything that follows it. No atrocity gives any country unlimited freedom of action. But the reverse is equally true: Palestinian suffering cannot erase October 7, the hostages, Hamas’s embedding of military operations among civilians, or the continuing threats from Iran and its proxies. Accountability must examine conduct and evidence, not assign collective innocence to one people and collective guilt to the other.

A grave charge requires more than a political declaration

The British government has now declared that ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is taking place in areas of the West Bank, perpetrated by settler terrorists, and that Israel’s government has too often turned a blind eye.

Note the words “in areas of.” Miliband was careful there, and he was right to be. The problem is that his remedy is not. The finding is geographic and specific; the economic instrument he announced is territorial and indiscriminate. That gap between the charge and the response is where his policy fails.

Ethnic cleansing is among the gravest charges in international law, and grave charges carry evidentiary burdens that scale with their scope. Six attacks a day is a damning statistic about perpetrators. It is not, on its own, a finding about policy. What would establish the larger claim? A documented pattern of coordinated expulsions; findings that state institutions directed or systematically shielded the perpetrators; prosecutorial failure so consistent it amounts to policy — established by investigators with access to evidence and to case files, not inferred from atmosphere. The Al Mughayir shootings, with police and military present, are exactly the kind of case such an investigation should begin with, and Israel’s failure to produce convictions in cases like it is a scandal Israelis should be shouting about.

But even taken at full weight, none of that establishes that some 770,000 Jewish residents are participants in a single campaign. Ehud Olmert and Ephraim Sneh are serious men and their warnings deserve to be heard; they are also warnings, not findings. And a warning about what a state is allowing does not license a policy aimed at everyone who lives on one side of a line. It does not justify treating a family in Ariel, a shopkeeper in Gush Etzion, a student in Ma’ale Adumim and an armed extremist at an illegal outpost as morally or legally interchangeable.

That distinction matters. Collective labels make accountability less precise, not more. When everyone is called a settler and every settlement is treated as an act of violence, the actual violent actors disappear into a political category while ordinary people become acceptable targets of economic punishment.

An advisory opinion is not a substitute for negotiation

To his credit, Miliband did not rest the legal question on the International Court of Justice alone. He gave reasons of his own: entrenchment of control, the intention to extend permanent sovereignty, an expansionist agenda advanced through settlement growth. Those are arguments, and they are arguable.

The honest counterpoint to my position is that the court’s 2024 advisory opinion did not invent obligations but described ones third states already carry — duties of non-recognition and non-assistance. I understand that reading. I do not think it survives contact with the framework Britain itself helped build, the only framework both parties have ever accepted.

United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 paired Israeli withdrawal from territories captured in 1967 with the right of every state in the region to live within secure and recognized boundaries — deliberately leaving the extent of withdrawal to negotiation. The Oslo agreements, signed by the Palestinian leadership itself, explicitly reserved borders, Jerusalem and settlements for permanent-status talks. When London treats the answer to those reserved questions as already known, and enforces its preferred answer through commercial punishment, it is not simply upholding international law. It is choosing one legal instrument over the ones the parties actually signed.

The West Bank is not merely an abstraction called “occupied Palestinian territory.” It is also Judea and Samaria, the landscape in which much of Jewish history took place. Hebron, Shiloh and Bethlehem are not recent inventions of an Israeli cabinet. Acknowledging that connection does not determine sovereignty, authorize the taking of private Palestinian property or erase Palestinian attachment to the same land. It does mean that Jewish residence there cannot honestly be described as foreign intrusion in every instance — and that the disposition of these communities is exactly the kind of question negotiation exists to answer.

Coexistence must run in both directions

Miliband repeatedly invokes coexistence. I share that aspiration. I believe Palestinians deserve political rights, dignity, security and a future in which they govern their own lives. But coexistence must mean more than drawing a line and sorting human beings by ethnicity.

Let me separate two questions that are too often collapsed into one.

The first is how these communities came to be. Most were established under military occupation, as a matter of state policy, on land whose status both parties agreed to leave for later. That is a real grievance, and it is the serious core of the case against settlements. It is answered by ending unauthorized construction, dismantling outposts on private Palestinian land, and negotiating borders — not by boycotting the people already living there.

The second question is what happens to those people once sovereignty is settled, and it is the one almost no one wants to ask. More than two million Arab citizens live in Israel. They vote, hold public office, attend universities, practice their faiths and work throughout Israeli society, even as serious inequalities remain. The situations are not symmetric today: Arab Israelis are citizens of the state they live in, while Palestinians in the West Bank are not. But the comparison that matters is not the present — it is the future both sides claim to want. In that future, a Palestinian state would face the same test Israel faces now: whether it can protect a minority that remains within its borders. Why is it treated as self-evident that it must never face that test at all — that a Jewish family willing to live under Palestinian sovereignty, obey Palestinian law and hold no privileged status has less right to remain than an Arab family living under Israeli sovereignty?

Some Jewish communities will almost certainly become part of Israel through negotiated land swaps. Some isolated communities may be evacuated as part of an agreed settlement. Others might remain under Palestinian jurisdiction if both sides can build institutions capable of protecting minorities. These are difficult questions. They are precisely the questions diplomacy exists to resolve.

This is a boycott even if Britain refuses the name

Miliband says he wholeheartedly opposes BDS, and he built in real limits: the regime targets settlements and settlement expansion rather than Israel, trade with green-line Israel continues, and religious exemptions are promised. He also did some of what I would ask — designating individual extremist settlers who incited or supported violence, and pressing the Palestinian Authority to accelerate reform.

Those limits matter, and I say so plainly. They do not cure the central problem.

A blanket import ban on goods from an entire territory, penalties for firms providing construction, infrastructure, financing or real estate services there, a prohibition on advertising, and a licensing lock on exports that materially contribute to the occupation together add up to a regime defined by geography rather than conduct. To the ordinary people whose products, jobs, homes and communities are targeted because of where they live, it will feel very much like a boycott — and doing something precise alongside something indiscriminate does not make the indiscriminate part precise.

The contradiction is not cured by saying Britain’s argument is with Israel’s government rather than Israel’s people. Governments do not harvest dates, manufacture equipment, pay mortgages or lose jobs. People do. A policy aimed at an entire geographic population inevitably reaches far beyond violent offenders or political decision-makers.

It may also strengthen the very Israeli voices Miliband hopes to weaken. Israelis who already believe Europe applies standards to Israel it would never apply to others will see confirmation, not an invitation to compromise. Palestinians may conclude that international pressure can deliver what direct negotiation has not — reducing incentives for political reform, security cooperation and mutual recognition.

What a genuine pro-peace policy would do

Britain does not have to choose between indifference and collective sanctions. It can act with far greater precision: expand and sustain sanctions on individuals credibly implicated in violence rather than announcing them in batches and letting them lapse; press Israel to dismantle unauthorized outposts built on private Palestinian land, to prosecute those who attack civilians, and to discipline the officers who escort them; abandon E1; demand that the Palestinian Authority confront terrorism, incitement and corruption; insist that Hamas disarm; support humanitarian access in Gaza with safeguards against diversion; press Israel to release the withheld revenues crippling essential services in the West Bank; and encourage regional partners to provide security guarantees, reconstruction funding and political incentives for compromise.

The honest objection is that versions of this approach have been tried for two decades and peace has not come. That is true — and it is an argument about enforcement, not about principle. Individual sanctions have been sporadic, quietly lifted, rarely coordinated among allies. Pressure on the Palestinian Authority to reform has been episodic; pressure on Israel over illegal outposts has seldom carried consequences. The precision toolkit has not failed. It has barely been used. The remedy for weak enforcement is serious enforcement — not abandoning the distinction between the guilty and the innocent, which is the one line a country devoted to the rule of law should never cross.

Britain should also use its influence to bring Israelis and Palestinians back to direct talks over borders, security, Jerusalem, refugees and the future of communities on both sides of any agreed line. That process will be agonizing. But no declaration from Westminster can replace it.

Separation is not justice

Miliband ended by invoking the rule of law, freedom and self-determination — values his Jewish refugee family found in Britain. Those values should guide British policy. Applied consistently, they require protection for Palestinians facing violence, security for Israelis facing terror, self-determination for both peoples and civil rights for minorities in both states. His speech contained the beginnings of that balance. His policy abandoned it.

Israel’s friends should tell the truth when Israelis commit crimes, and the truth this week is ugly: children shot, villages emptied, perpetrators unpunished. Saying so is not a concession to critics. It is the price of being taken seriously when we say the rest.

And the rest is this. Peace will not come from boycotting one population or erasing one people’s claims. It will come when Israelis and Palestinians are asked to do the harder thing: protect one another’s humanity while negotiating how to share the land both call home.

A peace plan that requires one state to protect a large Arab minority while demanding the other be emptied of Jews is not equality. It is separation presented as justice — and no boycott can build coexistence on that foundation.