British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband yesterday delivered an important and far-ranging speech that updated the United Kingdom’s policy regarding Israel and Palestine. Partners for Progressive Israel vehemently rejects irresponsible descriptions of that speech as antisemitic by members of the Israeli government and its supporters in the Diaspora.
Miliband’s address, it should first be noted, featured a recommitment to a two-state solution and to Israel’s place as a homeland for the Jewish people; an explicit condemnation of Hamas’s terrorist actions and a call for its disarmament; a full-throated rejection of growing antisemitism; and express opposition to boycotts, divestment, or sanctions that focus on Israel within its internationally-recognized pre-1967 borders.
These elements did not make headlines, but they are the vital context in which Miliband also announced that the UK would be declaring a ban on imports from Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territory, and taking action against those in the UK who are financing or facilitating settlement expansion, such as through construction, infrastructure, or the holding of real estate “expos”.
The need for the UK’s new policy, Miliband accurately stressed, arose because Israel’s government was clearly involved – by its own admission – in efforts to destroy any possibility of implementing the two-state solution, including via its new “Doomsday” E-1 settlement project, and the violent ongoing campaign to ethnically cleanse West Bank Palestinians.
The British Foreign Secretary, who is himself Jewish, also made clear that the UK supports the 2024 International Court of Justice ruling that the Occupation as a whole is unlawful, since Israel has exploited what was designed as a provisional reality in 1967 in order to entrench and expand its control, particularly via the establishment and growth of illegal settlements.
MK Gilad Kariv of the HaDemocratim party, the merger of Labor and Meretz, put it well when he wrote that “the bottom line is that the policy of annexation, the rejection of any diplomatic initiative, the tailwind [given to] extremist settler terror, the dispossession of Palestinian communities in [the West Bank’s] Area C, and the ongoing attempt to strangle the Palestinian Authority are turning the State of Israel into a pariah.”
And Zehava Galon, former chair of the Meretz party, reminded us that to be pro-Israel, one needs to also be anti-settlement: “Israel’s security and peace depend on ending the occupation. The British step, therefore, which distinguishes Occupied Territory, Settlements, and West Bank Settler terror from legitimate and sovereign Israel is important. The Settlement movement is corrupting and rotting Israel from within, and is putting it in existential danger. If we care about the security, democracy, and future of Israel, we mustn’t defend those working to destroy the possibility of promoting a two-state solution.”
We commend the British Foreign Secretary for reminding the world of the important distinction – one which Israel’s government is making every effort to eliminate – between Israel’s sovereign territory and the area Israel controls via an undemocratic and oppressive 59-year military occupation.
Leave A Comment