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I listened with increasing outrage and disbelief as a series of Israeli figures, including the country’s Foreign Minister, Gideon Saar, accused the British Government of imposing trade restrictions on illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank for purely domestic political reasons. They alleged that the British Government’s action is nothing more than virtue signalling, in order to appease the Labour Party’s left wing in the run-up to the party’s annual conference, to fend off an electoral challenge from the Green Party, and to win the support of pro-Palestinian voters, in the upcoming by-election in Keir Starmer’s old seat of Holborn and St Pancras.
The charge is ludicrous on its surface, given that the UK was taking action in concert with eleven other countries, who presumably weren’t at all motivated by concern for UK electoral politics. It’s also deeply insulting, since it implies that the British Government has become so shallow that it is willing to take a decision of serious strategic importance for purely trivial domestic reasons.
But, most of all, it is nakedly hypocritical, because for decades the UK, far from bending the knee to its most progressive and pro-Palestinian voters, has actually repeatedly gone out of its way to appease pro-Israeli groups, and tacitly turned a blind eye to Israeli actions which would have earned far more robust Government censure, had they been committed by almost any other country.
I know of what I speak. In the late-1990s, I was the head of the Middle East Peace Process section in the UK Foreign Office, charged with overseeing efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including through trying to establish a two state solution. The big challenge of the time was to secure successful implementation of the Wye River Memorandum, an agreement brokered by President Bill Clinton in October 1998, requiring steady Israeli withdrawal from areas of the West Bank in return for stepped up security cooperation by the Palestinians to clamp down on terrorism.
The deal quickly began to unravel, as both sides accused the other of failing to deliver on their commitments. It eventually collapsed altogether when right-wing opposition in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, including elements of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s own coalition, forced the dissolution of the Government.
Though both parties bore some responsibility for the agreement’s failure, it was always a lopsided arrangement, because it imposed the most stringent requirements on the Palestinians, and failed to address many of their fundamental concerns, such as the right of return, or control of land and water in the West Bank. Many suspect Prime Minister Netanyahu never had any intention of allowing the agreement to succeed – a suspicion borne out by his boast years later that he had single-handedly destroyed the Oslo Accords, and his many actions since then to expand settlements in the West Bank.
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Yet, whenever we in the Foreign Office tried to get Downing Street to sign off on statements urging Israel to comply with its commitments, or criticising its breaches of the Agreement, we were repeatedly rebuffed by the team around the-then Prime Minister Tony Blair. We were always being told that it would not be “helpful”, or was “not the right time”; or that “private engagement would be more productive.” No such restrictions were imposed on our suggestions for public statements concerning alleged Palestinian shortcomings.
In the mid-2000s, I was head of the Foreign Office’s Human Rights and Democracy Department, charged with overseeing UK policy on human rights abuses worldwide. Again, there was the same reluctance by British political leaders to publicly criticise Israel, even in the face of persistent and systematic instances of abuse against Palestinians in the West Bank.
The most blatant discrimination occurred when drafting the UK’s annual human rights report. Ministers repeatedly refused to allow officials to include a dedicated section in the report on Israel, even though its poor record on human rights undoubtedly warranted individual attention. Instead, we were told to address any concerns about Israeli behaviour in a more anodyne chapter addressing alleged abuses “by both sides” in the Occupied Territories.
This pattern of lopsided UK political support for Israel continued right through to its invasion and destruction of Gaza following the horrendous October 7 attacks by Hamas, when, even as Ministers rightly rushed to condemn Hamas’s atrocities, they took far longer to acknowledge, let alone criticize, Israel’s disproportionate response.
Successive British Governments have indeed bent over backwards to avoid taking resolute action against Israeli violations of international law in the West Bank and Gaza, including by continuing to supply weapons and intelligence to Israeli forces long after the scale of their abuses in Gaza were apparent, long resisting calls to recognise Palestinian statehood, and long resisting imposing concrete sanctions on Israeli officials complicit in the abuse.
Even last year, when the UK finally did impose sanctions on far-right Israeli Ministers Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich for “repeated incitements of violence against Palestinian communities”, the fiction was maintained that somehow the wider Israeli Government itself was not complicit, even though Ben Gvir and Smotrich were part of the ruling Israeli coalition.
In his statement announcing the new measures, the UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband, himself Jewish, went out of his way to reaffirm UK support for Israel, its right to exist and its right to self-defence, to condemn anti-semitism, and to reiterate the UK’s horror and utter condemnation of the October 7 attacks. He listed in detail the horrific circumstances of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, the growing number of new settlements which risk permanently ending the prospect of a two state solution, the increasing settler violence against Palestinian communities, and the plight of Palestinians in Gaza.
He quoted prominent Israelis, such as former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and former senior IDF officer Ephraim Sneh, themselves describing what is happening in the West Bank as “ethnic cleansing.” He also stated his firm opposition to a full trade boycott with Israel proper, along the lines of that advocated by the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign, and announced new sanctions against Hezbollah and Iran.
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None of this was enough to assuage Israel’s supporters, who despite Miliband’s immensely careful words, hysterically accused the current Government of being anti-semitic and anti-Israel; of behaving like old-time colonialists, meddling in matters outside their jurisdiction; of interfering in Israel’s politics by taking action so close to Israel’s upcoming elections in late October; and of peddling outright lies about the reality of the situation in the West Bank.
These shrill denunciations reveal a far more fundamental truth. The critics are all focusing their attention on the UK’s motives, because they know they cannot dismiss the substance of the UK’s allegations. Israel’s abuses are too well documented and backed by too much concrete evidence to be brushed aside.
It is certainly open to debate whether the UK’s new policy will have any impact. But, it is at least a step towards making the UK less complicit in the historic mistreatment and injustice towards Palestinians. Far from being blatantly biased, anti-Israeli, or anti-semitic, this is a long overdue course correction, fully merited by the facts on the ground.