The problem with Ed Miliband’s West Bank sanctions
From our UK edition
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.
