Since July 2024, British policy towards Israel and the wider Middle East has increasingly substituted declaratory positioning for strategy. Ceasefires, recognition, sanctions, settlement pressure, humanitarian access and preservation of the two-state formula have progressively been elevated into objectives in themselves, without sufficient attention to the security and political conditions required to make any of them durable.
The result has been a marked erosion of British leverage with Israel, a weakening of the UK’s ability to shape post-war arrangements, and the accumulation of policies whose second-order effects may be making a viable two-state settlement less, rather than more, attainable. This is not principally an argument that the government has been too critical of Israel. Nor is it an argument against Palestinian self-determination, against scrutiny of Israeli conduct, or against the objective of two states. The criticism is more fundamental. The government has too often mistaken a preferred constitutional destination for a strategy capable of delivering it.
The Foreign Secretary’s statement to the House on 8 September 2026 described the two-state solution as the government’s ‘North Star’. The phrase is revealing. A North Star can indicate direction. It cannot provide a route through obstacles. It says nothing about who disarms Hamas; who prevents the rebuilding of its military infrastructure; who ensures that a future Palestinian state possesses a monopoly of legitimate force; who supplies an enforceable security guarantee capable of sustaining Israeli withdrawal; or how Saudi and wider Arab normalisation are restored. Until those questions are answered, reaffirming the destination does not amount to a strategy for reaching it.
The central strategic problem since 7 October has not simply been the absence of an Israeli-Palestinian political agreement. It has been the continuing capacity of armed rejectionist movements, above all Hamas, Hezbollah and the wider Iranian regional network, to veto accommodation through violence. The government itself recognises elements of this diagnosis. In today’s statement, Ed Miliband condemned Hamas, acknowledged the threat posed by Iran, announced sanctions against Hezbollah’s financing arm, reimposed major economic sanctions on Iran and reiterated that Hamas must decommission its weapons and dismantle its terrorist infrastructure.
Yet this recognition does not organise the policy. Against Israel and settlement activity, Britain now possesses an increasingly elaborate set of instruments: import prohibitions, sanctions on individuals and companies involved in construction, infrastructure, finance and real estate, restrictions on advertising, expanded human-rights sanctions and additional arms-export controls. Against Hamas and the broader rejectionist architecture, the government largely states outcomes which somebody else must somehow deliver. This is the central asymmetry of the present policy.
At the same time, Britain has progressively diminished the assets from which its influence historically derived. Access, political confidence, intelligence cooperation, defence ties, trade and the ability to be taken seriously in Jerusalem have increasingly been spent without demonstrable strategic return. Relations are widely judged to be at their lowest point in decades. Intelligence and defence cooperation are potentially exposed, and Israel has considered excluding British personnel from the US-led machinery coordinating Gaza’s post-war future.
The approach now being developed by the Burnham government and Miliband therefore requires especially searching scrutiny. Before 8 September it was possible to argue that the promised ‘comprehensive reset’ might involve a reconsideration of the assumptions underlying policy. The new approach, however, consists primarily of additional sanctions, wider settlement-related restrictions, tougher rhetoric and a more adversarial bilateral posture. It appears to be just an intensification of the approach pursued since 2024.
That would be concerning even if the existing policy had produced significant strategic gains. It is more concerning because the evidence of such gains is so limited.
The domestic context makes the question still more serious. Recent reporting has explicitly identified the government’s desire to recover voters from pro-Palestinian political competitors: the Greens and independents. It would be wrong to assert without evidence that British Middle East policy is simply an electoral operation. But it is increasingly legitimate to ask whether its timing, intensity and presentation are being shaped by domestic political competition.
Today’s statement sharpened that concern. Britain will not be ‘silent’, Miliband said; Britain will not be ‘powerless’ or a ‘bystander’; Britain will ‘call out’ injustice and ‘act’. These formulations have evident political force. What remains much less clear is how the measures announced change the behaviour of the actors whose choices will determine whether the government’s declared objectives are achieved.
This distinction is particularly important given the climate facing British Jews. The responsibility for anti-Semitism rests with anti-Semites, and no government should dilute legitimate criticism of Israel because extremists may seek to misuse it. But government rhetoric and political positioning do not operate in a vacuum. Britain has experienced exceptionally high levels of anti-Semitism since 7 October.
The Foreign Secretary himself now explicitly acknowledges the seriousness of the current environment. His statement describes Jews living in fear, attacks on Jewish institutions, Hatzola ambulances being targeted and Jewish children attending schools protected by security guards. He also states, correctly and emphatically, that holding Jewish people responsible for the actions of the Israeli government is anti-Semitism.
Miliband himself is Jewish, but the validity of British foreign policy cannot derive from the ethnicity or biography of the minister announcing it. Jewish identity should neither authenticate government policy nor be used, however inadvertently, to imply that Jews who reach different conclusions about Israel are morally less legitimate. The government’s obligation is to make the strategic case.
A government which recognises that Israel-related political discourse repeatedly migrates into hostility towards British Jews cannot plausibly treat the wider atmosphere surrounding its own increasingly adversarial Israel policy as somebody else’s responsibility.
There is an additional problem in the Foreign Secretary’s assertion that ‘we will never have stability in the Middle East without a two-state solution’. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains profoundly important. But it is not the sole organising cause of Middle Eastern instability. Iran’s regional ambitions, political Islam, sectarian conflict, state collapse, the wars in Syria and Yemen, maritime insecurity and great-power competition possess dynamics of their own.
Indeed, the Abraham Accords reflected an important evolution in regional thinking: leading Arab states were no longer willing to subordinate the entire architecture of Middle Eastern cooperation to the Palestinian question. They concluded that regional integration could advance while the Palestinian conflict remained unresolved and might ultimately create additional leverage with which to address it.
British policy has incorrectly treated 7 October as the beginning of another Israeli-Palestinian crisis. It is better to understand it as an assault upon a wider regional trajectory.
Before the attack, the Middle East was not moving inexorably towards deeper conflict. The Abraham Accords had established that Arab-Israeli relations could develop even in the absence of a final Palestinian settlement. Israel and Lebanon had reached a maritime agreement despite formally remaining enemies. Most importantly, Washington was actively pursuing Saudi-Israeli normalisation.
Such an agreement would not have resolved the Palestinian conflict automatically, but it could have changed the environment. Saudi Arabia could have offered Israel acceptance, economic integration and a major shift in the regional balance while creating leverage to extract significant political and economic gains for Palestinians. That prospect posed an obvious challenge to Hamas and to the wider Iranian rejectionist system. During the Oslo period, Hamas violence weakened the Israeli political constituency willing to take risks for peace. October 7 reproduced that dynamic on a greater scale.
Britain policy should have sought to ensure that the attack failed in its wider political purpose. That would have meant ensuring that Hamas did not emerge able to claim that mass violence had transformed the diplomatic agenda in its favour; restoring and protecting regional integration; reducing Iran’s capacity to use armed proxies to veto accommodation; and strengthening Palestinians who were not rejectionists. We have instead risked doing the opposite.
A durable settlement must also address Israel’s legitimate security requirements. The experience of Gaza after 2005, Hezbollah’s rearmament after Resolution 1701 and the attacks of 7 October have profoundly weakened Israeli confidence in international guarantees. Britain cannot reasonably demand territorial withdrawal or reduced reliance on unilateral military action without helping to establish credible alternatives: verified demilitarisation, effective prevention of rearmament, credible Palestinian security institutions. These are the conditions necessary to make Palestinian statehood viable and secure for both peoples.
The government has chosen to launch today’s sanctions immediately before an Israeli election. The obvious risk is that the British intervention will be absorbed into that campaign and used by precisely those political forces whose influence Britain says it wishes to diminish. If political forces in Israel traditionally regarded as Labour’s natural interlocutors have urged restraint, that would suggest not merely a rupture with Benjamin Netanyahu, but a growing estrangement from the Israeli political centre and centre-left with which a future British government would need to rebuild the relationship.
Further sanctions, wider restrictions and stronger rhetoric may be politically attractive. They may distinguish Burnham from Starmer, satisfying parliamentary pressure or recovering support from voters attracted to the Greens. But none of this brings the government’s ‘North Star’ closer. Indeed, if the measures complicate post-election engagement, they may make the stated destination more distant.
So how can Britain and post-election Israel’s relationship improve? The government shouldn’t assume that Israel will accept symbolism. A future Israeli government may reasonably expect evidence of substantive British reconsideration before it is willing to provide the political appearance of restored relations.
Britain may expect a new Israeli government to demonstrate moderation before relations improve; a new Israeli government may expect Britain first to demonstrate that it has reconsidered the assumptions underlying its approach. British policy towards defence cooperation, regional security, the United Nations and its agencies, international legal institutions and the treatment of contested evidence will all form part of that judgement. Does Britain apply the same evidential standards to allegations made by Hamas, Palestinian political actors, UN agencies and advocacy organisations as it demands when claims are made by Israel?
Today’s statement matters beyond the bilateral relationship. Britain risks moving from being a country capable of connecting Israel, the Gulf, Washington and Europe to one whose positions are increasingly predictable but whose involvement is decreasingly necessary. We could soon experience a remarkable loss of influence in pursuit of policies which have yet to demonstrate that they have made peace, Palestinian statehood, regional security, the safety of British Jews or Britain’s national interests more attainable.
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