Ali Abunimah Rights and Accountability, 8 September 2026
British foreign minister Ed Miliband on Tuesday announced plans to ban imports from Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
He called Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians from their West Bank lands “ethnic cleansing” and finally accepted the 2024 International Court of Justice ruling that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is illegal.
But while his statement in Parliament – and a shorter video on X – were ostensibly about supporting Palestinians, they reveal that Britain’s overriding priority remains protecting Israel as a racist Jewish state.
Miliband begins not with Palestinians but with Israel, his attachment to it and Jewish feelings.
He promises several hundred million dollars to fight “anti-Semitism” – a much-abused term Israel and its lobby have redefined to mean opposition to Israel’s crimes and its racist ideology Zionism. He recalls idyllic childhood visits to Tel Aviv and picking oranges on a kibbutz, but does not mention that the “sanctuary” Israel gave his grandmother and other relatives was only made possible by the Nakba – the deliberate expulsion, under British supervision, of Palestine’s indigenous population to make way for European settlers such as Miliband’s family.
While young Ed was picking oranges, Israel was bombing Palestinian refugees, murdering Palestinian writers and poets and imposing apartheid across historic Palestine.
Pro-Zionist, anti-Palestinian
He proclaims himself “unwavering” in support of a state that has spent almost eight decades expelling, occupying, besieging and killing Palestinians – and the last three years perpetrating genocide.
Israel’s supposed “right to exist as a homeland for the Jewish people” is sacred and beyond question.
Palestinians, meanwhile, appear mainly as objects of suffering whose future Britain and its allies are entitled to decide, including by admonishing the collaborationist Palestinian Authority to “accelerate reform” – whatever that means.
Miliband repeatedly condemns Hamas, demands that it disarm and bars it from any role in Gaza’s future. He makes no comparable demand that Israel dismantle the army that continues to destroy Gaza and carry out daily massacres there.
Nor does he deign to tell Israel which of its blood-soaked leaders can hold office.
Effectively justifying genocide, Miliband asserts that 7 October “makes plain the grave threats that Israel faces” and that it “has every right to defend itself.”
Echoing Trumpian neocon propaganda, he claims falsely that “Iran continues to threaten Israel and Jews across the world” – when it was Israel that bombed a synagogue in Tehran during the US-Israeli war of aggression, the second such unprovoked attack in less than a year.
Miliband also vows more British sanctions against Lebanese resistance organization Hizballah, which he mislabels as an Iranian “proxy,” as if Lebanese people have no right or interest to defend their land against Israeli massacres and occupation.
The UK foreign minister’s efforts to swaddle his mild sanctions in love for Israel were – as expected – to no avail. Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar swiftly announced retaliation, including the closure of Britain’s consulate in occupied East Jerusalem and travel bans on British officials.
Supporting genocide
Substantive discussion of Gaza is buried deep in the statement, after Miliband’s declarations of love for Israel and lengthy discussion of West Bank settlements.
Even then, he begins by repeating Israeli atrocity propaganda, claiming that on 7 October: “Men, women, children and babies killed, mutilated, and tortured by Hamas terrorists.”
In fact only one Israeli baby was killed in her home on 7 October, Milla Cohen, inadvertently shot through a closed door.
Miliband is also silent about the large number of Israelis killed by Israel’s own forces that day in a widescale application of the Hannibal Directive.
In Gaza, Miliband acknowledges mass killing, deliberate deprivation, forced displacement and wholesale destruction. He notes that more than 70,000 people have been killed, including at least 20,000 children.
Yet he refuses to call it genocide, despite repeated declarations by Israeli leaders that their goal is to destroy Gaza and expel its people.
Instead, Miliband claims Britain must await a final judgment from an international court. This is cowardly and depraved political evasion dressed up as respect for law. Under the Genocide Convention, governments must act once a serious risk is apparent – not after a court confirms the extermination has occurred. Britain does not await final judgments before naming alleged international crimes when the accused is an official enemy. Within weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared unequivocally that President Vladimir Putin and his army were “committing war crimes.”
Britain has sanctioned Russia, armed Ukraine, sent investigators and promised prosecutions while international inquiries were still beginning.
British police are investigating alleged war crimes in Ukraine while arresting thousands of British citizens for opposing genocide in Gaza.
Miliband himself called Russia’s intervention in Ukraine “illegal,” although no international court has ruled it so.
Nor does he promise to end British military support for Israel. He refers to suspended arms licenses and restrictions on exports that “materially contribute to the occupation” – a vague standard if ever there was one – but announces no comprehensive arms embargo, end to military cooperation or halt to British assistance enabling Israel’s crimes, including ongoing British military overflights of Gaza shrouded in official secrecy. Miliband offers no plan to identify, arrest and prosecute Israeli officials and soldiers responsible for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, or any pledge to arrest the already indicted war crimes fugitives Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, and former defense minister Yoav Gallant.
Israeli perpetrators are not threatened with the “full force” of British sanctions. Miliband reserves that language only for those involved in settlements.
Rescuing racist Israel
This, apparently, is the post-Keir Starmer reset – the “better” policy Prime Minister Andy Burnham promised after admitting Labour “didn’t get it right” on Gaza.
The reality was exposed before Miliband spoke. Bloomberg reported that British diplomats had privately assured Washington the measures were “largely symbolic” and would have no material impact on Britain’s wider trade or security relationship with Israel.
Burnham’s PR push is likely meant to placate angry Labour voters without disturbing the relationship sustaining Israeli apartheid and genocide and the regime of Jewish supremacy these crimes perpetuate.
The narrow focus on settlements reflects the real purpose – candidly stated by Miliband – of rescuing the so-called two-state solution.
This “solution” offers Palestinians disconnected enclaves under permanent Israeli military, economic and political domination – the equivalent of apartheid South Africa’s Bantustans. They would be expected to call these fragments a state, renounce their right to return and accept Israel’s permanent existence as a Jewish supremacist entity.
Consequently, Western governments treat settlements as a deviation from an otherwise legitimate Israel, rather than one expression of a brutal settler-colonial project founded on mass expulsion.
Their disagreement with Israel is only over how much Palestinians should be dispossessed.
Israel’s government and much of its Jewish population support total dispossession, including through mass expulsion and extermination, to take over all of historic Palestine.
By contrast, Britain and other Western governments believe that the Zionist theft of 78 percent of the land of the Palestinians in 1948 should be enough. Canada, France and several other European countries are joining Britain for the same reason.
Their joint official statement explicitly says the objective is to “protect” the two-state solution.
The Élysée’s statement gives the same justification.
This is coordinated action to rescue a segregation plan, not end Israel’s racism. That is why Miliband can recognize an imaginary “State of Palestine” and condemn settlements while maintaining his “unwavering” support for Israel and proclaiming: “I wholeheartedly oppose the boycott, divestment, sanctions or BDS campaign.”
Miliband says the British will no longer be “bystanders.” But that has never been the case. Britain will continue protecting Israeli apartheid, rejecting meaningful pressure and refusing to name the genocide it enables.
This is not solidarity with Palestinians. It is just the latest Western attempt to rescue the genocidal Jewish supremacist state that Britain created.
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