Last week, on 8 September, the Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband announced a significant change in British foreign policy. In a speech which he framed as a “comprehensive reset” of the UK’s policy towards Israel, Miliband called the occupation of the West Bank illegal and accused settlers of “ethnic cleansing.” As a result, he announced an import ban on goods made in West Bank settlements, sanctions on organisations and individuals who finance or build settlements, and a refusal to grant arms export licences connected to the occupation. Britain was joined in these measures by eleven other countries, including France and Canada. This announcement went much further than any UK government has ever gone.
The West Bank takes its name from its position west of the Jordan River. When the British Mandate of the territory ended in 1948, the West Bank was designated as part of an Arab state to be called Palestine. However, the territory was occupied and annexed by Jordan in 1950. In 1967, Israel took a number of territories from neighbouring states. These included the Gaza Strip, Sinai, and the Golan Heights. The West Bank was taken from Jordan, and Israel has occupied it ever since. Since then, Israeli settlements have grown in number in the West Bank. This is despite the fact that the UN has continuously said that the settlements are illegal. In July 2024, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel’s continuing presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including the West Bank, was unlawful under international law.
In the 1990s, the Oslo Accords split the West Bank into three administrative areas: Area A under full Palestinian Authority control, Area B under joint Israeli-Palestinian administration, and Area C — roughly 60% of the territory – under full Israeli civil and military control, which is where most settlement growth has happened since.
Ed Miliband’s statement was significant for a number of reasons:
It formally reclassified the position of the UK Government. For years, UK governments have said that whilst settlements were unlawful, they fell short of saying the same about the occupation. They maintained that it was a temporary state of affairs pending a two-state solution. The UK government’s framing has now unequivocally changed, and it now sees the UK government move in line with the ICJ’s 2024 opinion.
It moved the UK government from statement to enforcement. Whilst the UK government has criticised settlements before, it had never taken such direct enforcement action. Since 2015, goods from the West Bank have had to be separately labelled, but the UK government has now gone further by announcing meaningful sanctions.
It was part of a coordinated action. Announcing the measure alongside eleven other states turned it into a bloc statement, rather than an isolated British position. Diplomatically, therefore, it’s harder for Israel, or the United States, Israel’s biggest ally, to frame this as a UK overreaction, and it instead marks a broader shift in how Western governments are positioning themselves.
Miliband’s statement was unsurprisingly had a range of reactions. Israel’s reaction was immediate. It closed its consulate in Jerusalem and barred twelve British MPs from entering the country. The stance from the Opposition was largely critical. Kemi Badenoch dismissed it as “performative politics, designed to appease Labour activists and Tom Tugendhadt, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, warned that it will increase division in the UK. The Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, was similarly concerned about the impact on UK citizens. He said that the measures amounted to symbolic gesture politics rather than genuine peace-making and they would “succeed only in bolstering the very extremism” that the government is meant to be tackling.
The announcement also raises a question about how UK foreign policy decisions are made. In the UK, conducting foreign affairs, including the recognition of situations abroad, falls under the Crown’s prerogative powers. This means that whilst Miliband announced it in Parliament, there was no vote, and Parliament did not need to authorise the change. Courts have traditionally found this category of prerogative act non-justiciable, meaning it is not subject to judicial review and cannot be challenged in the courts. The sanctions themselves are generally statutory, mainly through secondary legislation enabled by laws like the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018 and the Export Control Act 2002.