By Tom Fowdy
Yesterday the United Kingdom announced a ban on trade with illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
The ban, delivered to the House of Commons by Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband, who is of Jewish heritage, accused Tel Aviv of supporting "ethnic cleansing" in the Palestinian region. While doing so, he placed careful rhetorical emphasis on separating the actions of Benjamin Netanyahu's government from ordinary Israelis, and thus Jewish people as a whole, denying that it constituted a boycott of the country.
Despite the carefully ringfenced application of sanctions, the British government was quickly accused of inflaming antisemitism through its actions by a whole host of organisations and individuals, who argued it would normalise attacks on Jewish people. Despite this, a number of other European and Anglosphere countries followed suit in implementing the same sanctions, the United States, Israel's primary backer, being absent.
As I have written about before, outside of America, Israel owing to the actions of its government, is facing growing diplomatic and public opinion-based isolation, an event which is unprecedented in modern days given Tel Aviv has enjoyed decades of impunity and institutional protection for its actions. While opposition to Israel has always been, grassroots so to speak, squared against elite-level support for it, change is now starting to seep through at the policy level outside of America.
There is one critical reason this is happening: Not because Israel doesn't "have a right to defend itself" against attacks such as October 7th, but rather because Benjamin Netanyahu used the political magnitude of this conflict to seek to irreversibly change the status quo pertaining to Palestine and use the window of a national security crisis to advance what can be objectively described as an attempt to force a "one-state solution" in the form of settlement building and expansion, backed by extremist hardliners in his cabinet such as Ben-Gvir.
For Western democracies, excluding the United States, who have long spoke of a "two-state solution" even if in name only, Netanyahu's intentional crossing of the Rubicon, combined with the overwhelming public opinion backlash against everything his government is doing, has essentially turned the two-state solution into not just a fancy rhetorical outcome, but an increasingly serious red line. While Western governments have long supported Israel, ultimately there comes a time whereby its actions, and allowing those actions total impunity, start to transform into political liabilities for the said countries.
And this brings us to the situation in Britain. The fact that the United Kingdom could announce such measures, also a traditional and staunch backer of Tel-Aviv from the beginning, is very telling. The governing Labour Party, who only a few years ago aggressively purged its own left faction on accusations of "Antisemitism", has now ultimately concluded that unconditional support for Israel is an electoral liability. If the party continues to suppress criticism of the Israel government, even as it carefully navigates clear-cut antisemitism, it will pay the price electorally amongst Islamic communities and young people.
Keir Starmer undoubtedly paid a price for this even as he took the unprecedented step of recognising the State of Palestine; Andy Burnham on the other hand is more politically shrewd. The pattern nonetheless is unmistakable across the greater West, Israel's actions whereby they can be objectively argued to violate international law, are not defensible, and it casts a shadow if they claim to advocate for human rights in other areas.
As a result, the two-state solution is becoming not just a hope flung on top of decades' worth of an increasingly uneven status quo, but a necessity. While Western governments will be careful at this stage, as is the UK, not to announce boycotts or campaigns against Israel as a whole, I believe that the diplomatic trajectory ignited here is irreversible save serious concessions are made, which itself will be politically untenable for Israeli leaders to do so.
This is because when a given state attaches itself to a project or cause which it has become inseparable to its perceived sovereignty or national identity, to concede it for the goal of alleviating international pressure becomes tantamount to a betrayal and thus domestic political survival takes precedent over international acceptance, which incentivises resistance. This is the same reason Ukraine will not formally cede its territories to Russia for the sake of peace, why Iran will not capitulate to one-sided American terms to stop being bombed, why North Korea will not surrender its nuclear weapons program and so on.
Netanyahu thus subsequently knows very well that if he, or any future Israeli Prime Minister, concedes the West Bank and recognises Palestine, they go down as a traitor to the Zionist cause, both at home and in the eyes of those supporting it abroad. Why? Because the occupied West Bank is deemed integral to their ideology and national identity. As a result, we are entering what will be a lengthened diplomatic standoff whereby the noose and isolation Tel Aviv faces may gradually increase over time.
The two-state solution is a red-line now and what we are seeing here may only be symbolic for now, but we all know this issue will not go away. Tel Aviv will bank on American support for the time being, but who's to say that won't last forever if the Democrats are eventually pulled in the same direction as centre-left administrations in Europe have been?
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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