Key Takeaways
- Britain’s boycott singles out Jewish businesses while leaving Palestinian businesses untouched.
- The policy risks costing Palestinians well-paid jobs and economic security.
- It rewards rejectionism while doing nothing to bring Israelis and Palestinians closer to peace.
Yesterday, the British government – along with Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden – announced that it will ban trade with Israeli communities in the West Bank, the territory also known as Judea and Samaria. Ed Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, told Parliament that Britain does not want its companies “financing, constructing, or advertising new settlements,” and that the government is examining “our wider economic relationship with the occupied territories.” The ban is expected to cover goods and services, and to be backed by sanctions on British institutions and individuals judged to be involved in settlement activity. Downing Street, asked whether the policy might endanger British Jews, said it “completely rejects that assertion” and remains “committed to protecting Jewish communities in the UK.” But despite their protestations, we should be clear about what is happening. Britain has decided to boycott Jews. Not all businesses in a disputed territory. Just Jewish people and Jewish ones in one particular place. Everything else is packaging.
Who Pays the Price?
Ministers will tell us this measure targets “settlements,” as though a settlement were an abstraction rather than a place where real people go to work each morning. Before October 7th, roughly 140,000 Palestinians worked in Israel and in Israeli-run industrial zones in Judea and Samaria. Those jobs pay considerably more than anything available under the Palestinian Authority: the Israeli minimum wage, which applies to them, is more than four times the average West Bank salary. They come with Israeli labor protections. They are, for tens of thousands of Palestinian families, the difference between surviving or not.
We have seen this play out before. In 2014, after a campaign by the boycott movement, SodaStream moved its factory out of Ma’ale Adumim to the Negev. The activists celebrated. Around 500 Palestinian workers lost their jobs. The Jewish company survived. The Palestinian employees did not keep their livelihoods. That is what a boycott of this kind achieves in practice: it takes a Jewish employer and a Palestinian employee and punishes them both.
Consider the scale. Britain’s entire trade with the Palestinian territories is around £38 million a year, against roughly £6 billion with Israel, and only a fraction of that touches Israeli communities across the Green Line. So a policy sold as solidarity with Palestinians will hurt Palestinians more than it hurts anyone else. Tragically, that will not stop anyone in London, or in capital cities across Europe, from congratulating themselves.
Only Jews
We must also consider the specifics of this boycott. The West Bank is disputed territory. Its final status has been the subject of negotiation for over three decades, since Oslo, and it remains unresolved.
Britain has not banned trade with the whole of this disputed territory. It has not said: until both parties settle their claims, no British company will do business with anyone there. It has drawn a line around the Jewish residents alone and declared their economic life illegitimate. A Palestinian factory in Area A may sell to Britain. A Jewish factory ten minutes down the road may not. The distinction is not geography. It is who owns the business. Imagine that formula applied to any other people. Imagine a government announcing a trade ban on businesses in northern Cyprus, but only the Greek-owned ones.
There is a word for that: racism. When a policy singles out one ethnic group in a contested land, and leaves everyone else untouched, it is discrimination based on ethnicity (something which is prohibited under British law).
There is an even more disturbing implication to Miliband’s language. He told Jewish News that Britain now regards the “occupation” as “unlawful,” and that this unlawfulness requires the government to reconsider its economic relationship with the territory. But the territory Britain defines in this way includes East Jerusalem. It includes the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, where Jews have lived, prayed and built communal life for centuries. In other words, the British Foreign Secretary is defending a policy built on the premise that Jewish presence there is part of something unlawful. That is Erasive Jew-hate in its purest form: Jewish history and Jewish indigeneity are erased, and an external power appoints itself arbiter of where Jews may legitimately live in their own ancestral capital. A British government has no business telling Jews that Jewish life in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem is unlawful. This is not the 1930s.
Miliband also went further than a trade ban. He told the Commons that “the British government agrees that there is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in areas of the West Bank,” and that the Israeli government has “turned a blind eye.” Like ‘apartheid’ or ‘genocide,’ ethnic cleansing is not a term to be thrown around. It describes the deliberate removal of a population from a territory. The Arab population of the West Bank has grown many times over since 1967. There are more Palestinians living there today than at any point in history. Whatever crimes individual settlers have committed, and those are serious, a population that continues to grow is not being ethnically cleansed. The Foreign Secretary knows the weight of the phrase. He used it anyway.
There is also a history of actual ethnic cleansing in this region that the government seems to have forgotten. Jews lived in Hebron for centuries until the massacre of 1929. Jews lived in Gush Etzion until 1948. Jews lived in the Old City of Jerusalem until the Jordanian army drove them out that same year, dynamited the synagogues and made the entire territory Jew-free for nineteen years. This only serves to complicate the status of the West Bank even further, and it should not be ignored.
Related Reading: The UK’s “Settlement” Sanctions Single Out Israeli Jews
This Will Not Bring Peace
Nobody in government can seriously believe this ban will produce two states. It will not move a single Palestinian leader towards the negotiating table, because it only serves to reward their devastating attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. It does not impose pressure on the Palestinians to come to the table.. To understand that they need to sit down with the Israelis and compromise. It is, just as the recognition of the State of Palestine by the UK and many others was last September, entirely performative. It changed nothing. Not for Israel, nor the Palestinians themselves. Hamas did not release the hostages any faster, nor did it start freeing Gazans from its clutches. The Palestinian Authority did not hold an election. The gesture was for a domestic audience, and winning votes from the Muslim community, and so is this one. If the government believed its own rhetoric about two states, it would be spending its energy on the things that actually stand in the way: Hamas, and the absence of any Palestinian leader with a mandate to sign anything. Instead it has chosen the one measure that achieves nothing and lands entirely on Jews.
Related Reading: Why the New Anti-Settlement Sanctions Will Not Bring Peace
Looking for a Reason
We are told the trigger was the E1 tender. In August, Israel published a tender for 1,234 housing units on land east of Jerusalem that has been in Israeli planning documents since 1994, under Yitzhak Rabin, and that both the Clinton parameters of 2000 and the 2020 American plan envisaged remaining under Israeli sovereignty. It is a zoning decision on state land in Area C, where Oslo gave Israel full civil and security control by agreement with the Palestinians themselves. It is not new. It has been debated, frozen, revived and frozen again for more than thirty years. The E1 tender did not cause this policy. It gave the government a reason to announce a policy it had already been travelling towards. In June, Yvette Cooper had already strengthened the guidance to “strongly advise against” any economic activity in Israeli communities across the Green Line, extending it for the first time to services and tourism. The direction was set. E1 was the trigger.
The proof is in the company Britain kept. Within hours of Miliband’s statement, eleven other governments announced they would do the same: Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. The French foreign minister described it as a joint British-French initiative. Twelve countries do not align their trade law in a matter of days. This was negotiated for weeks, probably months, through the same channels and among many of the same governments that choreographed the recognition of a Palestinian state a year ago. The names on that list are familiar because it is nearly the same list. A planning tender published on the 19th of August did not produce a twelve-nation sanctions regime by the 8th of September. The regime was already drafted. E1 was the press line.
And the man at the top of the British government? Andy Burnham’s first significant intervention on foreign policy, before he had even entered Downing Street, was a video apologizing for Labour’s stance on Gaza. “My party didn’t get it right and I am sorry about that,” he said. Not an apology to the Jewish community for the tone of the marches his party’s activists joined. Not an apology for the weeks in which Labour struggled to say plainly that Hamas had carried out the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Shoah. An apology to the activists and communities who thought Labour had not condemned Israel quickly enough. That was the opening statement. The trade ban is the follow-through.
The Impact on Diasporic Jews
In a few weeks it will be a year since Yom Kippur 2025, when a terrorist drove into worshippers at Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester and murdered two Jewish men on the holiest day of the Jewish year. Andy Burnham should understand the consequences of this better than most. As mayor of Manchester, he stood outside a synagogue after Jews in his city had been murdered. Yet his government has now legitimized precisely the kind of politics that has helped create it.
Boycotting Jews is now an official policy in twelve Western countries. Not every Jew, they will say; only those Jews, over there. But that distinction is never the reality. It was not true when Jewish-owned businesses in London were targeted over Gaza. It was not true when Jewish students were told they could not join societies unless they disavowed Israel. It is not true now. What the government has done is to create a category, “tainted Jewish commerce”, and then hand it to people who have never in their lives been able to tell the difference between a Jew in Ariel and a Jew in Hendon.
The British Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council warned the government of precisely this before the announcement. The JLC said it was “deeply concerned” by the reports. They were ignored. Ultimately, this is what Jew-hate has always done. It borrows the language a society holds sacred and turns it against the Jews. Once it was the Church. Now it is international law and human rights. The costume changes. The accusation does not. And a policy that boycotts only the Jews of a disputed territory, that will impoverish the Palestinians it claims to help, that will not bring peace one day closer, and that arrives a fortnight before the anniversary of the murder of Jews at prayer in the Prime Minister’s own city, is not diplomacy. It is a boycott of Jews. Call it what it is.
Related Reading: “As a British Jew:” Ed Miliband and the Koshering of Jew-hate
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
