In the Commons this week, the foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, appeared to have accepted the principle of a trade ban between the UK and Israeli settlements, which Britain says are illegal under international law. This is long overdue. The test now is whether his promised “comprehensive reset” deserves the name. Stopping settlement-produced goods at the border is not enough. Britain should prohibit its companies from sustaining settlement activity – by financing, constructing, insuring, advertising – in territory whose occupation it regards as unlawful. The ban must have teeth.
The UK can no longer ignore the violence and pressure exerted on Palestinians in the West Bank by Israel’s government, military and settlers. There have been more than 1,400 settler attacks so far this year, according to the UN, against a record 1,800 registered in 2025. An election campaign has only made matters worse. Last month, Israel issued tenders for 1,234 homes in the 3,401-unit E1 development east of Jerusalem. The country’s ministers gave the green light for the controversial settlement – long condemned for effectively bisecting the West Bank – expressly to “erase” the idea of a Palestinian state, the creation of which the UK officially supports.
Israeli ministers have reacted with fury, threatening retaliation if Britain imposes sanctions over settlement expansion. This is disappointing, but hardly surprising. Benjamin Netanyahu has accused countries imposing sanctions of “moral bankruptcy”. Yet Britain would be following several comparable European states that increasingly regard such bans as a consequence of international law. Spain has banned settlement imports; Norway is legislating against trade and services linked to settlements; nine EU governments have demanded action from Brussels.
Since 1967, Israel has built about 160 settlements housing 700,000 Jewish people among 3.3 million Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. There are now calls to suspend the EU’s trade agreement with Israel. Britain has such a deal and, under Sir Keir Starmer, Labour wanted to “distinguish and protect trade with people and businesses across the state of Israel”. This gave critics reason to warn that targeting settlements could end up as a “de facto” boycott of Israel. But that gets the argument backwards: Israel cannot make the settlements part of its economy and then argue that other nations must treat them as part of the country.
Mr Miliband has political room to manoeuvre. Polling suggests that even Reform UK and Conservative voters are more likely to support than oppose a settlement trade ban. In parliament there was agreement stretching from the Greens to Labour to Tory MPs that something has to be done.
Settlement expansion accelerated after Mr Netanyahu’s far-right coalition took power in 2022 and then again after Hamas’s murderous attack sparked the Gaza war in 2023. The legal case is clear: other nations are acting and the political space is opening up – all while creeping annexation becomes a reality. Israel is extending civilian control over occupied territory as settlements expand. Gaza, where more than 70,000 Palestinians have been killed, has understandably commanded the world’s attention. No one disputes that Israel exists in a violent and unstable neighbourhood, though its actions aggravate, rather than alleviate, that instability. But the West Bank and Jerusalem cannot be ignored. Security cannot justify an ideological land grab.
