Britain Sanctions the Settlements and Israel Retaliates Against Britain

London carefully separated the settlements from Israel. The Netanyahu government’s response erased that distinction.

By Elijah J. Magnier –

Britain imposed measures targeting illegal Israeli settlements while insisting that it was not sanctioning Israel. The Netanyahu government responded as though all of Israel had been attacked. It ordered the closure of the British consulate in East Jerusalem, excluded Britain from the US-led Gaza coordination mission, ended British training of Palestinian Authority forces and prohibited selected British officials and nationals from entering Israel.

The retaliation was disproportionate to the immediate economic effect of the British measures, which remain largely symbolic and will take months to be fully implemented. But Israel’s response conveyed a clear political message: the government rejects London’s distinction between Israel and the settlement enterprise. Measures against settlers and settlements are treated as measures against the government that has adopted their objectives as its own.

This confrontation carries particular historical weight. After Argentina and British East Africa—the so-called Uganda proposal—had been considered as possible locations for a Jewish homeland, Britain transformed the Zionist ambition in Palestine into formal great-power policy through the Balfour Declaration of 1917. In doing so, Britain promised to facilitate a national home for one people on territory that it neither owned nor possessed sovereign authority to give, without consulting the Arab (Muslim, Christian and Jew) living there. The declaration committed Britain to supporting “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”, while reducing the Palestinians to the territory’s “existing non-Jewish communities”. Under the subsequent British Mandate, Jewish immigration increased and the political and institutional foundations from which Israel eventually emerged developed under British rule.