Britain Has Sanctioned the Settlements. But Is It Enough?

Britain’s sanctions on Israeli settlements are welcome. But stopping settlement expansion will not, by itself, resolve the political reality created by decades of occupation, dispossession and unequal power.

It felt pretty impossible for me to put out a piece this week that did not acknowledge the UK’s latest foreign policy decision – one that seems to have surprised almost everyone, including Israel.

Britain has announced sanctions targeting illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, including a ban on settlement goods, new powers to target companies and individuals supporting or profiting from settlement expansion, a ban on advertising settlement property, and sanctions against extremist settlers.

For once, I don't want to spend the first paragraph explaining why the Government has got it wrong. It hasn't.

These measures are welcome. They are more significant than the endless expressions of “deep concern” that have characterised so much of the West’s response to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Britain is finally moving beyond condemning settlement expansion and towards imposing consequences on those who profit from it.

That matters. It is also extraordinarily late. For decades, Britain and its allies have treated Israel’s settlement programme as an unfortunate obstacle to peace rather than as part of the political project reshaping the territory itself. Since the Oslo process began in 1993, the number of Israeli settlers living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem has increased from around 260,000 to more than 700,000.

The latest example is E1: a proposed settlement development between Ma’ale Adumim and East Jerusalem which would effectively divide the West Bank and sever it from East Jerusalem, the capital Palestinians seek for a future state. Ed Miliband has described the settlement programme as something that threatens the viability of a two-state solution. I think that gets the problem backwards.

The question is no longer simply whether the settlement programme is threatening the two-state solution. It is whether the two-state solution was ever capable of resolving the political reality that has been created.

There is a temptation to imagine the conflict as a problem of geography: Israel on one side, Palestine on the other, with settlements inconveniently scattered between them. If only we could stop the expansion, draw a border and put the pieces back together, the problem would be solved. But people are not pieces on a map.

The two-state solution requires the partition of a land in which two populations have been made deeply interconnected, while one has accumulated vastly greater political, military and territorial power than the other. It asks us to believe that the answer to decades of dispossession, occupation and violence is to draw a line through the consequences and call what remains a state.

This is why Edward Said became increasingly sceptical of partition towards the end of his life.

Said had initially supported a two-state settlement. But after the Oslo Accords, he became one of its most forceful critics. He argued that Oslo had not produced meaningful Palestinian sovereignty, but a fragmented Palestinian authority operating within a political structure that remained fundamentally controlled by Israel.

His objection was not simply that the map was inconvenient. It was that partition risked turning inequality into a permanent political settlement. Said ultimately advocated for a secular, democratic and binational state in which Israelis and Palestinians would possess equal citizenship and political rights. Whether that is politically achievable is another question entirely. It may not be. It certainly cannot be conjured into existence simply by declaring it preferable.

But Said’s criticism remains useful because it forces us to ask a question that Western diplomacy has often avoided: what exactly are we trying to preserve when we talk about a two-state solution?

There is another problem with treating two states as the obvious answer. The settlement project is not simply a collection of houses which can be removed and forgotten. It is part of a much longer history of dispossession, occupation and the unequal distribution of political power. Stopping settlement expansion is therefore necessary. But it does not reset the clock.

“Partition is not inherently a solution to conflict. Sometimes it simply gives the conflict a border.”

Partition is not inherently a solution to conflict. Sometimes it simply gives the conflict a border. The partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 is an obvious example. The division was intended to resolve competing national claims by creating two states, but the process produced enormous displacement and violence, while unresolved territorial questions — most obviously Kashmir — became sources of conflict that have endured for generations.

The point is not that India and Palestine are the same. They obviously are not. History rarely offers such convenient comparisons. It is that we should be careful about treating partition itself as the solution. A border can separate territory. It cannot, on its own, resolve competing claims to that territory, erase historical grievances or create political equality.

Nor would removing settlements, important though that would be, undo everything that came before them. Britain cannot pretend that the problem began when Israeli settlers started moving into the West Bank. Nor can it pretend that removing enough settlements would return the region to some previous moment when a neat two-state compromise was simply waiting to be implemented.

Britain’s own role in this history makes its current position particularly uncomfortable.

The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was not a Palestinian political settlement. It was an imperial government commitment concerning a territory it controlled, promising a national home for the Jewish people while stating that the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish population would not be prejudiced. The contradictions were there from the beginning.

More than a century later, Britain is now attempting, in a limited way, to confront one of the consequences of that history. It deserves credit for doing so. But the language matters.

The UK has been very clear that its sanctions target settlements, not Israel. That distinction is understandable. It is also revealing. Because Israel’s settlement project has never existed in a political vacuum. Settlers do not simply appear on Palestinian land independently of the state that controls the territory, provides infrastructure and security, and contains politicians who openly advocate annexation. Israel’s current political leadership includes ministers who are themselves settlers and who have explicitly opposed Palestinian statehood. Even beyond the current government, support for a Palestinian state is hardly a comfortable political consensus within Israel.

This creates a strange contradiction at the heart of Western policy. Britain says it wants to protect the two-state solution. It is imposing sanctions because the settlement project is making that solution harder to achieve. But the political and territorial reality that has emerged over decades increasingly raises the possibility that the problem is bigger than the settlements themselves.

Perhaps the more difficult task for Western governments is not figuring out how to rescue the two-state solution. It is finding the courage to admit that the framework itself may no longer be adequate. That does not mean abandoning Palestinian statehood. It does not mean denying Israel’s existence or security. And it certainly does not mean pretending that the political, legal and human consequences of the past century can be wished away.

Nor does recognising the limitations of the two-state model require us to have a fully formed alternative ready to go. We do not have to know exactly what a just political settlement would look like to recognise that the existing one has failed to deliver justice. What we should not do is confuse uncertainty about the alternative with evidence that the current framework is working.

The UK’s sanctions are therefore both welcome and inadequate. They matter because they represent a shift from condemnation to action. After decades of treating settlement expansion as something to be negotiated away at some hypothetical point in the future, Britain is finally using its own economic and diplomatic power to say that there are consequences to building permanently on occupied land.

And that is worth defending. But if the lesson we take from this is simply that we need to work harder to preserve the two-state solution, we may miss the bigger one. The settlement project did not merely threaten a Palestinian state. It helped create a political reality in which the question of what Palestinian sovereignty would actually mean has become much harder to answer. Stopping that project is necessary.

It is not, by itself, a peace plan.

And after everything that has happened, perhaps the most honest thing Britain and the rest of the West could do is stop asking how to preserve the solution they have spent decades insisting is inevitable, and start asking what a just political future for Palestinians and Israelis would actually look like.

Because a solution is only a solution if the people living under it can call it one.