This week, the UK government announced sanctions on Israeli ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, alongside Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Norway. citing their incitement of violence and abuses of Palestinian human rights. This marks a significant shift – from targeting individual settlers to sanctioning sitting ministers – and is a move the Liberal Democrats have long called for in parliament.
But if this action is to be more than symbolic, it must mark a broader change in UK policy. Sanctions should not stop at ministers who incite violence; they must extend to all those who are orchestrating and directing these policies, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former and current Defence Ministers Yoav Gallant and Israel Katz. The UK must also finally ban trade with illegal settlements, recognising that economic engagement with settlement infrastructure entrenches Israel’s unlawful occupation of the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt).
Why the sanctions must go further
To understand what more can be done, we first need to examine the basis for the new sanctions. The Foreign Office has stressed that it is sanctioning Ben-Gvir and Smotrich in their “personal capacity” due to their “repeated incitement of violence against Palestinian communities.” The emphasis here is telling. By focusing on rhetoric over action, the UK avoids holding Israel’s leadership accountable for the official decisions driving violence on the ground. As Israeli newspaper Haaretz has observed, this approach “enables the West to have it both ways – to impose sanctions on Israeli ministers but to claim that they are only personal and do not involve their role as decision-makers.”
According to Middle East Minister Hamish Falconer, the sanctions were partly motivated by Ben-Gvir and Smotrich’s vocal support for the aid blockades and mass displacement of Palestinians in Gaza. But if voicing support for such policies warrants sanctions, then surely all those orchestrating them should also face consequences. This means sanctioning any minister complicit in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and what the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has identified as a plausible genocide. At the very least, this should include Israel’s entire war cabinet – especially Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is already the subject of an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The same applies in the West Bank. Framed as a response to the incitement of settler violence, the new UK measures fail to adequately address Israeli government policies that entrench and deepen the illegal occupation. Just two weeks ago, Israeli Defence Minister Katz approved 22 new illegal settlements in the West Bank – the largest such expansion in decades. These actions are not peripheral; de facto annexation has long been intrinsic to Israeli government policy. Yet by focusing on vulgar rhetoric, the UK and its allies avoid confronting the structural nature of the settlement project. Sanctions must reflect the reality that Israeli policy is not merely encouraging dispossession but also executing it.
Banning trade with illegal settlements
Holding individual ministers accountable is only part of the solution. Settlement expansion is a decades-long project that spans successive Israeli governments, including our so-called ‘liberal’ sister party, Yesh Atid.
In this context, targeted sanctions on individuals, while important, are insufficient. The UK must adopt measures that undermine the economic viability of the occupation, beginning with a comprehensive ban on trade with illegal settlements. Such a move would put sustained pressure on the Israeli government to halt settlement expansion. It would also bring the UK sanctions regime in line with longstanding Foreign Office policy that settlements in the oPt are illegal.
The ICJ’s July 2024 advisory opinion reaffirmed that states are legally obliged not to recognise or assist illegal occupation, including through trade in goods or services. Over 800 lawyers recently echoed this, writing to Keir Starmer to urge immediate sanctions on Israel in line with international law.
Banning trade with settlements is not only a legal necessity – it is a test of whether the UK is willing to move from statements of concern to concrete action. Anything less risks reinforcing the very structures that the recent UK measures claim to oppose.
Of course, if the UK is serious about complying with international law, these sanctions must be accompanied by a full arms embargo and immediate UK recognition of the Palestinian state. Only through a comprehensive overhaul of its existing policy can the government finally end its complicity in Israel’s atrocities and help secure meaningful progress towards peace, justice and accountability.
* John Kelly is the Secretary of Liberal Democrat Friends of Palestine and an active member in Warwickshire.
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4 Comments
John Kelly’s hope, that the Labour Government will do more than sanction individuals, is surely right, and to be welcomed. Unfortunately I do not thing Keir Starmer is likely to fulfil his hopes any time soon. As DPP, Starmer blocked the arrest of ex-Prime Minister Tzipi Livni when she visited London in 2011, although she was ‘wanted’ for grave violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention (Art. 147). The Tory government had empowered the DPP to use his discretion, a discretion not permitted by Convention Art. 146, as Starmer must have known perfectly well. The obligation to arrest is absolute, not discretionary. It did not stop him arranging the arrest of a Rwandan politician. Nor is a government, signatory to the Convention, empowered to choose when and when not to honour a law it promised to respect as drafted.
Starmer also declines the findings of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Israeli NGO, B’tselem, and others, including harvard law School, that Israel is an apartheid state, something to which the International Court of Justice alludes in its July 2024 Advisory Opinion. Which brings one to the UN General Assembly vote of 18 September 2024 to adopt the Advisory Opinion. The UK declined to do so, just as it declines to acknowledge that a genocide is taking place, because then it would by under so much greater pressure to desist from sending war materiel to Israel.
John Kelly makes a pretty unanswerable point about the absurdity of the UK government’s position – you can’t sanction someone for vocal support of Israeli government policy without taking the same stance against the Israeli government itself – but this government and its predecessor are adept at repeatedly not answering unanswerable questions about Israel and Palestine, usually by answering a different question.
I agree with John that timidly edging towards the “concrete” measures David Lammy mentioned in Parliament a few weeks ago (but didn’t want name them, in case someone expected him to actually do any of them) does no good, and I have said elsewhere that only a dramatic move like a full trade embargo on Israel is likely to shock Israelis into doing exactly what Netanyahu advises Iranians to do, which is to remove from power those who advocate, and revel in, war and hatred between neighbours, and install a government which wants peace with Palestine.
Thank you John Kelly – a time to be on the right side of history.
On April 16th, 2014, I wrote in my 11th book: ‘We have just returned from a 9½-hour excursion to Nazareth and Galilee, which consisted of a vitriolic anti-Arab diatribe. Jannie and I have no hope for any two-state solution and believe Israel will never accept anything less than the whole of the area within what they show on their map as the International Boundary. There are just a dozen areas, some minute, where there is Palestinian responsibility for civil affairs, internal security and public order. I would love to write at length about this country, but I am absolutely devastated by the day.
Within a few years Smotrich was writing that all non-Jews should be expelled from the ‘River to the Sea’.
Sanctions are easy to propose and difficult to implement. Please consider producing a detailed analysis of Smotrich’s sayings and then publish it to show what Netanyahu has in his cabinet