The UK government‘s UK West Bank settlement sanctions, announced by foreign secretary Ed Miliband on Tuesday, have drawn immediate criticism from the Conservative opposition, Israel and the United States, with shadow foreign secretary Tom Tugendhat calling the measures ‘performative politics’ that lack widespread support.
Miliband announced that the government would impose sanctions on companies and individuals who finance or help create settlements in Palestinian land. The territory was formally recognised as a country by the Labour government last year. The measures could take as long as nine months to come into force.
Tugendhat: ‘Light and dangerous’
Tugendhat, recently promoted by Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch to the opposition frontbench, described the sanctions as simultaneously too weak and too risky. Speaking after a parliamentary debate on Tuesday, he said the announcement did not have widespread support and that the Foreign Office was ‘acting without prudence’.
‘Sadly this government has reduced complexity to a soundbite,’ Tugendhat said. ‘The Foreign Office knows these sanctions won’t work and is acting without prudence, introducing sanctions that are both light and dangerous.’
His argument on both counts: the measures are ‘light’ because settlers themselves are not yet targeted, and ‘dangerous’ because he argued they could drive sectarianism and antisemitism in the UK and abroad. Tugendhat also raised the question of timing, noting that the Israeli general election is ‘in just seven weeks’ and suggesting the announcement could aid extremist campaigns there.
He was careful to add that the Conservatives do not reject the government’s aim of supporting recognition deals between Israel and its neighbours, nor the basis of a two-state solution.
Israel closes British consulate, US refuses to follow
The diplomatic fallout was swift. Israel closed the British Consulate in Jerusalem and removed British representatives from a support centre for Gaza. It also banned 12 parliamentarians from entering the country, including Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott.
US secretary of state Marco Rubio said Washington would not follow with its own sanctions. ‘We think it has implications as well on our ability to make progress with regards to Gaza, on the 20-point plan and the Board of Peace that we’re very committed to,’ Rubio said.
Miliband, for his part, has shown no sign of retreating. He described settlements in the West Bank as ‘unlawful’ and said they amounted to ‘ethnic cleansing’, accusing the Israeli government of turning a ‘blind eye’ to their expansion across the occupied territory.
A pressure point inside Labour
The sanctions have also exposed divisions within the government’s own parliamentary party. According to Anadolu Agency, more than 140 Labour lawmakers, roughly a third of the parliamentary party, have signed a letter calling on the government to go further and ban trade with Israeli settlements outright. The measures announced by Miliband fall short of that demand, which helps explain why the opposition’s ‘performative’ charge has found some resonance even within Labour’s own ranks.
One complicating factor in the broader debate is the scale of the economic relationship at stake. Israel is the UK’s 43rd-largest trading partner, with bilateral trade amounting to about £6 billion: roughly £3.5 billion in UK exports and £2.5 billion in imports, according to UK government figures cited by The Conversation. The UK West Bank settlement sanctions are targeted narrowly at settlement-related activity rather than broader bilateral trade, but critics warn that the line between the two may prove difficult to police in practice.
The measures have also faced a specific technical concern: the risk that, as currently designed, they could be applied to both Israeli and Palestinian businesses and individuals operating in the West Bank, an outcome the government will need to address before the sanctions come into force.
With implementation potentially nine months away and a diplomatic row already running across three continents, the pressure on Miliband to either tighten or retreat from the measures is likely to intensify well before they take legal effect.
