On Tuesday, the foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, made a statement to the House of Commons in which he announced an ‘import ban on goods from illegal settlements in the occupied territories’ and a ‘new comprehensive sanctions regime’ against ‘those who finance or facilitate illegal settlements’. In retaliation, Israel said it would close the British consulate in Jerusalem, expel British representatives from the International Gaza Support Centre, shut down the British Support Team in Ramallah and ban a dozen British MPs from entering Israel.
France, Denmark, Spain, Finland, Ireland, Iceland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Sweden and Canada have also announced sanctions. Ha’aretz expressed concern at the possible effect on both Israeli and Palestinian banks, and quoted Avraham Novogrotchi, the president of the Manufacturers Association of Israel, saying that ‘the main victim could end up being the Palestinian worker.’
This newfound concern for Palestinians employed by Israeli companies is long overdue. In 2024, nine global trade unions filed a complaint to the International Labour Organisation:
The complaint highlights the obligations of Israeli authorities to redress and remedy a range of abuses, including unpaid wages and withheld benefits for more than 200,000 Palestinian workers employed in Israel. These abuses have led to millions of dollars of lost income, causing severe financial insecurity, economic distress, deprivation of basic services and widespread hardship for the affected workers and their families, who have no access to judicial remedies.
Novogrotchi could also turn his attention to such long-term issues, documented by the labour rights organisation Kav LaOved (Workers’ Hotline), as the mismanagement of pension funds for Palestinian workers employed in Israel and the violation of their right to medical care.
In his statement to the Commons, Miliband condemned ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, referred to Israeli settlers as terrorists, declared the occupation unlawful, pointed out that since the peace accords of the 1990s the number of settlements in the West Bank has tripled, criticised a recent expo in London that advertised property in such settlements, and reiterated that twenty thousand children have been killed in Gaza since October 2023.
Miliband prefaced these criticisms with a declaration of his ‘unwavering … support for the state of Israel’ and for obvious reasons, though he shouldn’t have had to, he reminded his audience that he was speaking ‘as a proud British Jew’. The Radio 4 presenter (and Times columnist) Justin Webb told Miliband on the Today programme the next morning that he had ‘made much of the fact that you yourself have Jewish heritage’ and asked ‘whether you’re intending to go to a synagogue this weekend’.
I asked my friend Atef Alshaer how his family were in Gaza and what he thought of Miliband’s speech:
The situation remains dire and almost impossible for people there. They struggle to provide even the daily necessities and are living in terrible conditions. They feel particularly stuck because there is no real prospect of returning to their city, Rafah, which has been destroyed. There is a kind of resignation that their situation cannot change unless there is some dramatic event that could upend things in their favour. I suppose their faith sustains them, but life itself is incredibly hard. They are also afraid to move between cities or go anywhere, as Israel continues to bomb different places and people are killed and injured in the process. Transport within Gaza is extremely difficult and expensive, often involving donkeys and horses, which can make even short journeys long, exhausting and arduous.
But he expressed some optimism regarding the foreign secretary’s statement and the measures announced by the UK and eleven other countries:
It is a good thing that the government has moved on Palestine and spoken about what Israel is doing in terms of crimes. But the speech and the stance still do not acknowledge the full scale of Israeli crimes or the necessity of accountability. There is still a tendency to frame Israel as a normal country that simply happens to be led by a bad government, rather than recognising the reality of a historically criminal and rogue state, constantly involved in myriad and serious breaches of international law … Overall, though, it is a step in the right direction, as they say in diplomatic language. The tone has changed, and there is some sense of positivity after the gaping silence over Israeli crimes during the last three years.
Earlier this month I went to hear Omar Barghouti, one of the founders of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement – which Miliband said he ‘wholeheartedly’ opposes – in conversation with Aimee Shalan, the incoming director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. They spoke of grass roots mobilisation, the role of trade unions and the divestment from Israel by pension funds and local councils around the world over the past two decades. Barghouti stressed the need for international law and for Palestinians to maintain the moral high ground. In later interviews with Palestine Deep Dive he emphasised how much has been done to resist a system of oppression that is ‘absolutely depraved’.
My friend Jawad Ali tells me that his family in the West Bank ‘lives continuously on high alert, always watching the settler highway to see if settlers are gathering to attack’. He welcomes the sanctions but says that the UK and other governments must also take ‘practical and immediate action to end the suffering in Gaza and the Israeli settlers’ terror in the West Bank’.
Shifts in policy can come in various guises. ‘In the beginning,’ as Haris Gazdar, a senior researcher at the Collective for Social Science Research in Karachi, said to me, ‘they may not look very different from the start of another hoax, another trick, illusion of change.’ After years of ministers creeping around or deliberately undermining international law, institutions and rules-based accountability in diplomatic and trade relations, Miliband’s announcement of a change in the British government’s position, though it is only a beginning, is to be celebrated.
