One month after the Gaza ceasefire, and the prospect of a just and lasting resolution feels as distant as ever. In Gaza, Israel continues to dictate the terms of an increasingly fragile peace – obstructing humanitarian access, committing near-daily ceasefire violations, and showing little sign of any genuine commitment to withdrawal or reconstruction.
But it is in the West Bank that Israel’s true intentions are most clearly revealed. While global attention has remained fixed on Gaza, Netanyahu’s government has quietly pressed ahead with the steady consolidation of its grip on the occupied territory.
This year has already seen record levels of settler violence, carried out with the active support of the Israeli government and army. The weeks following the ceasefire have been no exception. In the past month alone, Israeli forces and settlers have carried out more than 2,300 attacks across the occupied West Bank, terrorising inhabitants and forcibly displacing Palestinians from their homes through demolitions, arbitrary arrests, physical assaults and the uprooting of over 1,000 olive trees.
Mere weeks after the ceasefire was announced, the Knesset advanced a bill to annex the West Bank, a move that would constitute a clear breach of international law. And just this week, the government issued tenders for 356 new settlement housing units in the territory. This follows its revival of the controversial E1 settlement plan, a project that would cut the West Bank in two – a clear attempt to bury any remaining hopes for a two-state solution.
These are not the actions of a government interested in peace, but of one intent on erasing, piece by piece, the separate identity of the Palestinian people and their culture and the very state that the UK and other western nations have finally recognised.
It is futile to hope that Israel will change course on its own. Even Yair Lapid, the leader of Israel’s so-called ‘liberal’ opposition party, voted in favour of the recent annexation bill (though this is hardly surprising, given his party’s own record of deepening the settlement project while in power).
In the absence of meaningful pressure from within the Israeli political system, it falls to the international community to dismantle the exceptional treatment that Israel has long enjoyed and make clear that its persistent violations of international law will no longer be met with impunity. Sanctions against individuals are insufficient; real leverage can only come through measures that undermine the economic viability of the occupation.
As with the fight against apartheid in South Africa, there is huge support for, and good logic to, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. But given the entanglement of Israel’s settlements within its economy and politics, the Liberal Democrat policy of a ban on settlement trade is the logical starting point.
Any ban must include all forms of trade, not only in goods but also in services and investments. This would send a clear signal to firms such as JC Bamford Excavators (JCB), whose machinery has been used to demolish Palestinian homes, and Barclays, which has supplied billions in loans and services to companies linked to settlement expansion, that Britain will not tolerate profit derived from illegal activity.
Such a move would target the illegal settlement enterprise directly. It would not be a boycott of Israel itself, but a precise measure targeting an occupation that has been ruled unlawful under international law.
The UK has both a legal and a moral obligation to act. The ICJ’s July 2024 advisory opinion reaffirmed that states must not recognise or assist the illegal occupation in any form, including through trade. Several European countries, Slovenia and Ireland among them, have already moved to ban settlement trade. In the UK, the legislation to do so exists in the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018. All the pieces are in place; the only thing missing is the political will.
Recognition without action is meaningless. The UK cannot claim to support Palestinian statehood while standing idly by as its businesses profit from the settlements eroding it.
And while we are not the party in power, we must not underestimate our ability to help push the government into taking this crucial next step. We campaigned long and hard in the build-up to the recognition announcement, using every lever available to us – from letters to ministers and private members’ bills, to countless media appearances and parliamentary interventions. We must channel that same focus and energy again.
A ban on settlement trade has been party policy since 2021, and now is the moment to act on that commitment. Just as the government must match its words with deeds, we too have a responsibility to keep ramping up the pressure to ensure that recognition is not merely symbolic, but a catalyst for real and lasting change.
* Maggs Mackechnie is on the Committee of Liberal Democrat Friends of Palestine. She is currently Vice Chair and soon to be Chair of my local party, Canterbury and Coastal Lib Dems
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11 Comments
It is interesting to see that moves are afoot in Europe to ban trade with illegal settlements https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/10/netherlands-ban-imports-israeli-settlements-palestine-sanctions?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other Hopefully the weak and complicit government of Keir Starmer will show some moral courage and follow suit.
Thanks for this timely message. Can we be hopeful about actively opposing the annexation of the West Bank given that even the Trump administration have said they do not support it?
It is timely in another sense too. I have not heard or seen anything about the Knesset’s bill to take over the West Bank on BBC news. So is the BBC failing to inform us, given that this is an absoultely crucial element in finding a lasting peace between Israel and Palestine ?
My family in the West Bank includes doctors, teachers, accountants and more.
Much of our family’s olive trees have been destroyed. Much of the land that my grandad owned to which I have title deeds has been taken by force.
Settlers are illegal, they are violent and they are motivated by an ideology that god has made the request that they should carry out acts of terror against the Palestinians.
If they were muslim, Western politicians would call them terrorists.
We can’t know exactly when it happened, but at some stage the Israeli government realised the retaliation for October 7 was the opportunity they needed to complete the annexation of Palestine. The ceasefire ostensibly ‘demanded’ by Trump was just a blip, because by then Hamas was defeated, and the foreign governments which could have intervened during the more active phases of the genocidal attack on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank had already demonstrated their supine acceptance of Netanyahu’s will – not least Keir Starmer, the prime minister whose country has the greatest obligation to the Palestinians.
Instead, Starmer’s focus is on briefing against those of his colleagues who might be about to challenge his leadership. He has never shown the slightest interest in the plight of the Palestinians, or any awareness of his own, or others’, failure to uphold international law, something which belongs to a past life of his, before he got interested in politics.
Maggs is right to call for imposition of the 2021 Liberal Democrat policy demanding economic isolation of the Israeli invaders in the West Bank, and there are many in other parties who would support it. However, it will need a huge push from our MPs to make this a central focus in parliament. If they meet that challenge they will be reflecting the will of the British people, and will establish the Lib Dems at the moral heart of the current parliament.
Further evidence of the Israeli intent has been the massive increase in the destruction of buildings in Gaza – after the ceasefire began – as reported by the BBC today https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0mxylxw48yo.
Netanyahu, not for the first time, is demonstrating contempt for the wishes and intentions of the international community. But why wouldn’t he? International so-called “leaders”, like Starmer – the least popular UK PM since approval records began – have given him no reason to respect them.
I’m writing to my (Labour) MP today, calling for her to reject him as leader and demand action by the British government against the genocidal, rogue state of Israel, until it replaces its right-wing leaders, and comes back into the fold of law-abiding countries.
A practical and very simple step the party could advocate as a starting point is that all Israeli exports to the UK without exception must contain as part of the customs declaration a signed statement by the exporter that they emanate entirely from territory on the Israeli side of the 1949 Green Lane.
Very depressed to read in today’s FT that a bill has passed its first reading in the Knesset imposing capital punishment on Palestinian terrorists who murder Israeli Jews but not applying to Israeli Jews who murder Palestinians.
Maggs’ call for action comes against a background of inept responses from successive British governments over the genocidal attack on Gaza, but in Gaza Israel could claim the thinnest of possible excuses for the civilian death-toll (“we were always targeting at least one Hamas member”), and the further justification in the view of some Israelis (“the October 7 attack was beyond the pale, and we have to kill them because they all want to kill us”).
In the West Bank there is no alleged “existential threat” to Israel from Palestinians, and the Palestinians are simply guilty of owning land Israelis want to own.
Regardless of what Trump says he wants or doesn’t want, we cannot allow the annexation of the West Bank to happen. It’s already devastating for the people whose crops have been destroyed and land stolen, but if we don’t stop it, our own credibility as a nation claiming to respect the rule of law will also have been destroyed. When we took control of Palestine after the First World War we solemnly promised to protect the rights of its people. A hundred years may have passed since we made that commitment, but the need for us to honour it is stronger today than it has ever been.
No one has any right to doubt that the theft of land from Palestinians in the West Bank is an act of 18th or 19th century colonialism carried out in the 21st century. It is utterly wrong, and has no place in the modern world. Only the the complete failure of contemporary western democracy has allowed it to happen, or start to happen. If the current crop of Westminster MPs allow this to proceed they will earn in a ignominious place in the history of this century.
I notice that the BBC this morning (Woman’s Hour on Radio 4) still uses different language for Israel, reporting that twenty living “hostages” have been released by Hamas since the ceasefire, whereas more than 1,700 “detainees” from Gaza who had been “held without charge or trial” were released by Israel”. So according to the BBC, Israel doesn’t do what is normally known as ‘the exchange of hostages’, they simply unlawfully imprison Palestinian people for a while, and then let them go – coincidentally at the same time as a ceasefire deal is agreed.
The BBC has been accused of favouring Hamas in their Arabic division, and some people think that also happens in the English language service. The evidence suggests otherwise.
Thank you for this timely piece, Maggs. Completely agree and with the several supportive comments already here. However I have a sense that we are here talking to ours sympathetic selves, and wonder if anyone else is listening. Perhaps we should ask, and talk about what can actually be done to move the Party towards supporting this policy, not least to challenge the creeping idea that Gaza (and Palestine more holistically) are being sorted now with Trump’s ‘peace plan’.
While a ban on settlement trade is a step in the right direction it is not sufficient. The global community must increase the pressure on the Israeli government to treat the Palestineans with dignity until they change their behaviour. There are parallels with the apartheid movement in South Africa. When a behaviour is unacceptable the global movement must act until that behaviour changes.