As Britain’s government announces a West Bank trade ban, some media outlets have categorically expressed opposition or published commentaries arguing against a boycott. We’ve selected just a few pieces of recommended reading here.
The Telegraph explains how this boycott move could hurt Britain:
The two-state solution is not imperiled simply because of a failure to stop violent Israeli settlers. It is imperiled because of repeated Palestinian attacks on Israel, and the refusal of the Palestinian elites to accept its fundamental right to exist.
Much as when Labour recognised Palestinian statehood last year, shamefully handing Hamas a diplomatic prize in return for precisely nothing, sanctions will not further the cause of peace.
Instead, they risk making Britain less safe. Israel is one of our greatest allies. Our military partnership and intelligence sharing have seen countless plots foiled and lives saved on British streets. Mr Miliband’s actions potentially threaten this. Israel has already pledged to close the British consulate in Jerusalem and further measures could follow. The Americans are unlikely to look favourably on Labour’s actions, yet further undermining our interests. And castigating Israel will do nothing to reduce the unacceptable threats faced by Britain’s Jews.
The Wall Street Journal also articulates well the hypocrisy and ill-advisedness of the UK’s move:
Europe has a talent for dressing up domestic political pandering as righteousness on the world stage. The latest is a British ban on imports of Israeli goods from the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, plus sanctions on anyone facilitating new construction. France and Canada plan similar measures. “We will not acquiesce in the destruction of the two-state solution,” said U.K. Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband.
That’s curious. If settlements were the issue, Israel’s removal of every settlement from Gaza in 2005 should have helped. Instead Gazans voted in Hamas. The Palestinians have been destroying the two-state solution by showing Israel that any territory it relinquishes will be used to launch wars and pogroms.
Israel offered the Palestinians a state in the West Bank and Gaza in 2000-01. They turned it down and launched a terrorist intifada, then rejected it again in 2008. What Palestinians keep saying, but the likes of Mr. Miliband refuse to hear, is that they won’t live in peace alongside a Jewish state even in Tel Aviv, which they consider as much a settlement as any hilltop outpost.
Yet the British Labour Party, Canada’s Liberals and France’s lame-duck Macron government have only carrots for the Palestinian side. While banning imports from Jews in the West Bank, they subsidize the Palestinian Authority, a dictatorship that still awards “pay-for-slay” salaries to terrorists who murder Jews.
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Most remarkable, Mr. Miliband accused Israeli extremists of ethnic cleansing before himself declaring all Jews illegal in Judea, Samaria and even the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City. Labour claims it’s the law because Jordan expelled the Jews from those parts in 1948, for 19 years of a 4,000-year history. None apply international law this way in any other case.
The Times of London points out how the British government’s actions are both counterproductive and performative, with the potential to harm Britain’s Jewish community:
Israel goes to the polls next month. If Britain favours a more moderate Israeli administration, and it can safely be assumed that No 10 and the Foreign Office would like nothing more than a return to the days of Peres and Rabin, it would do well not to feed the fire of ultra-nationalism. That is why the government’s decision to sanction products and services from illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank could be hugely counterproductive.
The announcement of the sanctions in the House of Commons by Ed Miliband, the foreign secretary, was a warm bath for Labour. No less than Andy Burnham, the prime minister, turned up to luxuriate in the virtue of it all. Billed as a reset in Anglo-Israeli relations — and not of the positive kind — the measures failed to match the rhetoric. But the rhetoric was damaging enough.
This was performative politics, intended in large part to appease Labour’s restive soft left and staunch the flow of Muslim votes to the Greens in the coming Holborn & St Pancras by-election caused by Sir Keir Starmer’s retirement. To do so, Mr Miliband turned up the volume, accusing the Netanyahu administration of turning a blind eye to ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, to the killing of children and the theft of homes and land.
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There are other potential prices to pay for this muddled gesture. In next month’s Israeli general election that siege mentality could rear its head, propelling more hardliners into power. Closer to home is the peace of mind of Britain’s Jews. The sanctions will be seen by those who clothe their antisemitism in sympathy for Palestine, who like nothing more than to conflate being Jewish with supporting Israeli policy, as a licence to stir up hatred. British Jews have had plenty of cause for dismay over the last four years. Labour’s empty theatrics threaten to create another one.
Writing in the National Review, Mark Goldfeder argues that the UK’s West Bank trade ban will inevitably become a blanket de facto boycott of Israel in its entirety and outlines how the UK’s actions fall foul of U.S. anti-boycott laws:
The ban will not stop a single home in E1, the tract between Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim where Israel published tenders last month for some 1,200 homes. Britain’s entire trade with the areas in question was about £38 million last year, against £6 billion with Israel. What it will do is frighten British banks, insurers, and advertisers into dropping anything with a Jerusalem address rather than risk guessing wrong about the customs rules, which is what Labour Friends of Israel meant when it warned of “a de facto boycott” of Israel. The Chief Rabbi named the other victims: tens of thousands of Palestinian workers employed by the very businesses Britain is targeting.
The services ban is also where Britain runs into American law. Congress wrote the anti-boycott laws in the 1970s to stop the Arab League from conscripting American companies into its boycott of Israel. Section 999 of the Internal Revenue Code requires Treasury to list countries that require cooperation with an international boycott and strips tax benefits from any taxpayer who cooperates. Its only exceptions are for complying with a foreign ban on importing goods from the boycotted country or exporting goods to it. Refusing to finance, insure, advertise, or provide services is not excused, and those are exactly the refusals Miliband is demanding. The Commerce Department’s regulations reach any foreign subsidiary “controlled in fact” by an American parent, so a London bank owned in New York that refuses to finance a building in a Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem because British law tells it to is, under the regulations, an American person breaking American law. And in 2016, Congress defined boycotts of Israel to include measures aimed at anyone doing business “in any territory controlled by Israel.”
Washington already has the tools. When Turkey announced a trade embargo on Israel in May 2024, Commerce issued an anti-boycott advisory telling American companies in Turkey what they could not do and what they had to report. Treasury published its boycott list on August 10; it names eight countries, all Arab League members. The State Department said of Ireland’s settlement bill in July that the United States “firmly opposes this effort and rejects any efforts to economically isolate, or discriminate against, Israel.” London should get the same statement, then the same advisory, and, if the services ban becomes law, a place on the Treasury list.
The states will also not wait. Many have anti-boycott statutes that apply to anyone limiting commercial relations with businesses in Israeli-controlled territories — the exact conduct Miliband is mandating — and those laws bar such companies from state contracts, require state pension funds to divest from them, or both. Florida’s alone knocked Airbnb off the state’s approved list in 2019 until it reversed its settlement policy, and British companies are the top foreign investor in Florida, with more than 88,000 jobs there. British lawyers will answer that federal law preempts state rules on compliance with foreign boycotts, and it does. It does not preempt state laws against discrimination, which is how most of these statutes are written. The rest run in the same direction as federal policy, and the Supreme Court strikes down state laws that obstruct Washington’s foreign policy, not state laws that carry it out. A British bank that announces it has stopped serving Jerusalem to satisfy London will be answering to Austin and Tallahassee before Treasury has finished its paperwork.
Will more media step up and call out the UK government?
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
