On 8 September British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband announced a ban on imports of goods produced in illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank, sanctions on companies providing services to illegal settlements and new restrictions on arms exports to Israel. The sanctions, launched in cooperation with 11 countries including France and Canada, were framed as a response to the horrific, ongoing Zionist violence against Palestinians in the West Bank which amounted, Miliband said, to ethnic cleansing. This apparently strong language from a Labour government that has spent two years offering uncritical support for the Zionist genocide reflects the pressure it is under, with support for Palestine undimmed amongst the population, despite the state’s efforts to stamp it out. It is also a desperate effort by British imperialism to keep alive the illusion that peaceful coexistence could be possible between imperialism’s Zionist monster and a compliant and fragmented Palestinian entity. On the day of Miliband’s announcement, Prime Minister Andy Burnham hammered home the point, stressing that the measures were ‘aimed not at the Israeli people, but in support of the two-state solution’. On the horrors of Gaza, the Labour government remained silent.
West Bank: facing down the barrel of a gun
2026 has been the most violent year for Palestinians in the West Bank since UN records began over two decades ago. Over 1,400 settler attacks have been reported since January, with over 80 Palestinians killed and 1,000 injured. Across the occupied West Bank, settlers and Israeli military forces have intensified assaults, home demolitions and land seizures, particularly in ‘Area C’, which remains under full Israeli control. Thousands of acres of farmland have been razed, destroying the livelihoods of rural Palestinians in an attempt to drive them out.
Palestinians in the Jordan Valley and South Hebron Hills have been at the frontline of settler terrorism. In Masafer Yatta, a cluster of villages in the southern West Bank, the majority of Palestinian homes have been destroyed by settlers. In Qusra, south of Nablus, settlers have besieged Palestinian homes, cutting off electricity and water, forcing Palestinian families to barricade themselves inside. In the village of Umm al-Kheir, a British activist was illegally detained by settlers before being deported by Israel for protecting Palestinian children.
The scale of the violence – and the international outrage provoked – has forced the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government to offer up some token condemnation of what it is careful to frame as the actions of isolated ‘thugs’. In reality, Israel is committed to the ethnic cleansing and total annexation of the West Bank. In August, Defence Minister Israel Katz announced that law-enforcement powers would be transferred from the army to the police; a further step from occupation towards annexation. New settlements have been set up near Bethlehem and Jenin. On 28 August the Israeli army carried out an air strike on Jenin, the epicentre of resistance in the West Bank, killing three liberation fighters. 1,200 new tenders for Jewish housing have been issued in Area C, which makes up 60% of the West Bank. Nonetheless, Palestinian resistance in the West Bank continues – with nearly 300 attacks on settlers and Israeli military forces, alongside individual acts of self-defence, in August alone.
British sanctions: too little, too late
Earlier this year on 9 June, Britain joined Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand and Norway in imposing small, targeted sanctions on a handful of individuals and organisations linked to recent settler attacks, most notably settler extremist ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. The measures included asset freezes, travel bans and restrictions on entities which finance or facilitate settler violence. The more recent sanctions announced by Miliband are wider-ranging and will have a more considerable impact on the economy of illegal settlements. But this is still much too little, much too late. They do not alter the basis of the relationship between Britain and Israel. Nothing less than comprehensive sanctions, the severing of all ties, can halt the Israeli state in its tracks.
Britain’s farcical recognition of the state of Palestine in 2025 made evident its intentions to save the two-state solution. Britain’s ‘support for Pales-tine’ is limited to the most respectable, most bourgeois sections of Palestinian society. These are represented by the comprador Palestinian Authority which works with Israeli forces to attack the resistance.
What concerns the British government is not Israeli settler violence per se, but the fear that it could spark a further uprising, threatening the existence of the Zionist state and prompt a resurgence of solidarity with Palestine on the streets of Britain. Like the Palestinian Authority, what it fears is the revolutionary potential of the Palestinian working class. Those in Britain who seek a solution that maintains imperialist interests in West Asia have found apt representatives in the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which has effectively demobilised any street movement in support of Palestinian liberation. In the first days of the genocide, it sought to silence demands for sanctions on the Israeli regime in favour of a call for a ceasefire – in practice a demand that the liberation forces lay down arms. Today we see in Gaza what a ‘ceasefire’ actually means. Now the PSC is calling for sanctions when there is no movement left to give it meaning; it has stripped back its protests to a bare minimum – the national march on 10 October will be the first such mobilisation in over three months. In reality, they have left the Palestinian people to fight alone.
From the very beginning, the RCG has demanded total sanctions against the Israeli state and solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. It is up to us to help build the kind of anti-imperialist, uncompromising movement that challenges the Labour government’s utter complicity with Zionism and exposes the sell-out of the struggle for Palestinian self-determination represented by the demand for a ‘two-state solution’.
Victory to the Palestinian resistance!
End British support for Zionism!
Ameera Mahmoud and Sarah Guebre-Egziabher
