Britain must sanction Israel, not just its settlers
Israeli forces detained our parliamentary delegation and barred us from the West Bank. The violence is state policy.
This week I tried to enter the illegally occupied West Bank, along with two other British parliamentarians and an international delegation of observers. We were all interrogated and detained by Israeli forces for nearly eight hours and finally prevented from crossing the border.
Our unpleasant experience pales in comparison to the daily experience of Palestinians living under occupation. Year after year, decade after decade, Palestinians have faced not simply inconvenience but a systematic attempt to eradicate their existence. We have seen a genocide in its most brutal form in Gaza. But in the West Bank we see a slow-motion form of ethnic cleansing, perpetrated by Israeli forces and their settler militias.
And it gets worse. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called on Israel last month to do the same in the occupied West Bank as “what we did in Gaza”. And so we came to shed light on Israel’s crimes, including the brutal attacks on olive harvesters which seek to deprive Palestinians of the livelihood that sustains them.
First, the foreign secretary’s sanctions package must be enacted in the broadest way possible. The core problem here is not simply about fanatical settlers. It is state policy. Israel’s government has used settler militias to carry out brutal attacks on Palestinians and their land. It is therefore the state that must face sanctions.