Ed Miliband has overturned decades of Foreign Office inertia on illegal Israeli settlements

The indefatigable ability of UK Foreign Office ministers over decades to issue boilerplate statements of concern about the extension of illegal settlements in Israel has long been a matter of ridicule. Even some of the Conservative ministers who issued them, notably Alan Duncan and Alistair Burt, have agreed. Duncan described the UK stance towards settlements as weak and naive, while Burt wondered at the ability of the Foreign Office to find new forms of diplomatic condemnation that never amounted to any specific action.

Margaret Thatcher, often torn as prime minister between her natural sympathy for Israel and her fear of the Gulf states falling under the sway of the Soviet Union, similarly expressed her anger at the settlements. But in the face of the Israeli disillusionment with a two-state solution – to which the UK had been committed at the UN since 1946, if not before – the UK produced little practical policy to prevent the spread of Israel’s illegal settlements. The UK-Israel trade agreement prevented preferential tariffs applying to goods coming from territories brought under Israeli administration after June 1967.

The business department also advised companies not to trade with the settlements – but many simply ignored the advice or, to secure the preferential tariff, relabelled their goods as from Israel. The then trade minister Chris Bryant told the business select committee in June it was very difficult to be certain of the origin of goods. At the same time, the legal advice was the UK regime could sanction entities only if they were linked to settler violence, but could not sanction a contractor for simply working on settlements.

It was this unhappy moral and legal mess that Ed Miliband inherited. As soon as he took office as foreign secretary, he said he refused to be a bystander to further suffering and the destruction of the two-state solution that settlement expansion represented. In this he had the support of the prime minister, Andy Burnham.

Above all, Miliband felt that the UK could not feign powerlessness, and to do so, or pay lip service to action, would prove disastrous to Israel’s own future. He was perhaps the only front rank Labour politician that could push this argument through at such pace, overturning the inertia and caution built into Foreign Office legal advice. His Jewish heritage – his mother, Marion Kozak, was a holocaust survivor who fled to Israel – his life growing up with the Palestinian question and empathy for those subjected to antisemitism put him in a near unimpeachable position to adopt the role of Israel’s critical friend.

The US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, might this week say the Labour government is gripped by Jew-hatred, a charge he laid at Miliband’s door knowing he is Jewish, but Miliband’s riposte is simple. The best route to Israel’s security lay in Palestinian self-determination and the introduction of the two-state solution in its fullest form. To equate Israel only with the current Likud-led government as too many Conservatives have been prone to do was a category error, he said: “Holding Jewish people responsible for the actions of the Israeli government is antisemitism, plain and simple.” He is thus the first UK foreign secretary to describe what is happening in the West Bank as ethnic cleansing, and in so doing to in effect accuse Israel of turning a blind eye to acts that amount to war crimes.