Failing to act in the West Bank or in the West, Israel brought UK’s sanctions upon itself
Times of Israel · LC · trust 57/100
Israel’s relationship with Europe reached an unhappy watershed on Tuesday as British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband announced an unprecedented set of sanctions targeting West Bank settlements.
He was joined by France and Canada, and a group of other Western countries signed on to a statement that they would support European Union measures against Israel.
The true scope of the sanctions remains to be seen, as do the precise means of implementing them.
Regardless, the decision underscores how ineffective Israel’s government has been in maintaining support among erstwhile Western partners, who are increasingly unhappy with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
Instead of working to isolate obsessively anti-Israel countries in Europe like Spain and Ireland, Jerusalem is making it easy for those critics to pull powerful states to their side.
“We would have wanted the pro-Israel countries to draw other countries toward them,” said Rémi Daniel, research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.
“In the end, it’s the anti-Israel countries that are setting the tone.”
There’s plenty to criticize in the sanctions decision.
Domestic political concerns, which Miliband dressed up as grand, universal — even Jewish — principles, had some impact on the move, especially its timing.
“Labour voters are leaving them for the Greens,” said Maya Sion-Tzidkiyahu, director of the Israel-Europe Relations Program at Mitvim, “and they recognized some of it was because of the Israeli-Palestinian issue — that the government really hasn’t taken sufficiently tough or hard measures, and hasn’t been progressive enough for what the progressive public believes.”
Announcing sanctions on Israel was a sure way of making headlines and appeasing liberal voters that Labour needs to keep in its camp.
Moreover, Miliband’s presentation in the House of Commons left ample room for criticism. He opened his remarks by claiming the moral authority of “a proud British Jew,” seeking to defuse charges of antisemitism.
But he dismissed concerns from Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis that the sanctions announcement will make Jews at Rosh Hashanah services this weekend less safe — a year after a deadly High Holidays attack at a Manchester synagogue. “I don’t go to synagogue,” he said Wednesday in response.
He also mourned the “over 70,000 people that have been killed” in Gaza since 2023, a figure that includes tens of thousands of Hamas terrorists.
Instead of targeting violent settlers in the West Bank, a move that would line up with the sentiments of the vast majority of Israelis, Miliband chose to lump together a whole raft of alleged Israeli violations — the Jewish presence over the Green Line, ostensible blocking of medical aid in Gaza, and the possibility that Israel had carried out a genocide in the Strip.
Still, Israel has only itself to blame for giving European countries a reason to levy the sanctions — even if domestic considerations played a role in their ultimate implementation.
“There are things this government does that cross a red line, and that intersects with internal politics, with the Israeli-Palestinian issue becoming a polarizing factor in politics,” said Sion-Tzidkiyahu.
Israel’s government has failed to rein in settler violence in the West Bank, leading even US Ambassador Mike Huckabee, a lifelong Christian Zionist, to visit a Palestinian town, denounce “settler terrorists,” and call for “severe consequences.”
In August, Israel issued a tender for the construction of over 1,000 housing units in the E1 area east of Jerusalem. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich lauded the E1 expansion plan last year, saying it “practically erases the two-state delusion” by splitting up the territory that would be slated for a future Palestinian state.
With the famously languid European summer over, countries were champing at the bit to make Israel pay for its policies over the previous few months.
“They wanted to act as quickly as possible to formulate a position after the recent steps, especially around E1,” said Daniel.
Israel could have headed off this predictable result. Dealing with attacks in West Bank more effectively is an obvious place to start, as is keeping settlement plans quiet.
It also could have made itself a key part of Europe’s major security challenge, the Russia threat. Instead of ramping up support for Ukraine, a country that speaks loudly about the common Iranian threat facing both nations, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to balance between Kyiv and Moscow, a government that is helping Iran develop new missiles.
The E1 announcement was the last straw, Daniel argued. “Of course settler violence and the government’s response to that violence trouble the Europeans, but the [E1] decision is one of policy, and therefore in the eyes of the Europeans it demanded a political response.”
The sanctions won’t be implemented till next year, and if Netanyahu is defeated in October, the new government will have room to blunt some of the measures by showing a willingness to chart a new course.
The scope of the sanctions could expand or narrow based on the actions of the next government, a British official said on Wednesday, without suggesting that the measures could be abandoned altogether.
“The government has flexibility in how it implements these measures,” the official said.
“The specific details of how this ban will be implemented will be clarified at a later date,” said a French official.
That still won’t change the trend in Europe and elsewhere that is pushing positions that used to be the preserve of the extremists into the mainstream. A joint statement from the UK, France and Canada went out of its way to “welcome the important action already taken by Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway and Belgium.”
Equally worrying, the US doesn’t seem eager to push back against the UK or anyone else for targeting Israel. US President Donald Trump did not seek to head off…
Read the original at Times of Israel →
Open in TruthVane →