Israeli elites back UK sanctions on West Bank settlements as 'inevitable' response

When Britain's foreign secretary announced new sanctions against Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank on a Tuesday in early September, the response from inside Israel's establishment was not what the government in Jerusalem had braced for. Former prime ministers, retired military commanders, leading scientists, and career diplomats—the kind of figures who typically defend their country against outside pressure—instead called the move necessary and inevitable. They said it was a response to failures by their own government and security apparatus, not an attack on Israel itself.

The sanctions had caught Israeli officials off guard. Senior government figures used the phrase "an intelligence-diplomatic failure" to describe the moment. What they had expected to weather as a minor rebuke from a distant ally turned into something far larger: France and Canada announced their own trade restrictions on settlement goods within hours, and ten other European countries signaled support for similar measures. Notably, the Trump administration, which had been briefed in advance, offered no criticism. For a country accustomed to American backing and European ambivalence, the coordinated pressure felt unprecedented.

The joint statement backing the sanctions came from an unusual coalition. David Harel, president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, signed alongside Ehud Olmert, a former prime minister; Dan Halutz, the retired commander of the Israeli military; Yuli Tamir and Roni Bar-On, both former ministers; and Yoram Ben Zeev, a former ambassador to Germany. They framed the sanctions not as an assault on Israel's legitimacy but as a necessary tool against what they called Jewish terrorism and the occupation's expansion. "This decision is precisely what the state of Israel should have received in order to remove the disgrace of Jewish terrorism from the face of the country," they wrote.

Harel, a British-born scientist, spoke directly to the Guardian about why he supported the measures. He drew a careful distinction: he opposed broad boycotts of Israel as a state, which he saw as potentially antisemitic, but he supported targeted action against specific Israeli policies and actions in the West Bank. The occupation, he argued, was not only harming Palestinians but threatening Israel's own future. "Getting out of there, or at least for the present, stopping these things from happening and starting to really talk about a two-state solution is not only good for the Palestinians," he said. "It's not that we're doing these poor people a favour. We're doing a favour to ourselves, no less, maybe even more."

Other prominent Israelis echoed this reasoning. Nadav Tamir, a former diplomat, described the sanctions as serving Israel's long-term interests by preventing annexation and ethnic cleansing. Avraham Burg, a former speaker of the Knesset, thanked the British foreign secretary for what he called courageous moral leadership. Fourteen Israeli human rights organizations, including B'Tselem and Breaking the Silence, welcomed the sanctions as an important first step toward meeting international legal obligations.

The political context in Israel made this elite fracture more significant. Polling showed that nearly three-quarters of Jewish Israelis favored partial or total annexation of the West Bank. All leading candidates in the upcoming October election rejected a Palestinian state. Yet a vocal minority within Israel's security, political, and cultural establishment had grown increasingly alarmed. They had threatened legal action against their government over the summer, accusing it of supporting Jewish terrorism and promoting an ideology of ethnic cleansing.

The practical impact of the sanctions remained uncertain. The direct trade value of goods from occupied territories to Britain was only $45 million out of $4.4 billion in total Israeli-British trade. But the potential reach was far wider: if sanctions extended to any company financing or facilitating settlement expansion, Israel's major banks and insurance companies would face a choice between their business interests in Britain and their operations in occupied Palestinian territory. That pressure could slow or halt construction projects that have accelerated in recent years.

Israeli government officials rejected the sanctions as interference in domestic affairs. Gideon Sa'ar, the foreign minister, attacked the British decision as blatant meddling before the October election. Some opposition politicians suggested Netanyahu might use the sanctions to his political advantage, framing them as evidence of international hostility. But Dahlia Scheindlin, one of Israel's leading political analysts, said the sanctions were unlikely to shift electoral calculations. Since October 2023, she observed, Israelis had become more inward-looking, and international criticism was more likely to be interpreted through existing political divisions than to change them. Netanyahu supporters would see antisemitism; opposition voters would see confirmation that the world was turning against Israel because of government policy. Either way, the electoral map would probably remain unchanged.

What had shifted was the international landscape. For years, Israel had relied on diplomatic ambiguity and expressions of concern from allies who took no concrete action. Now, for the first time in many years, a close ally was using economic leverage to force change. The British foreign secretary's intervention had opened a door that Israeli elites—at least some of them—had been waiting for someone else to open.