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Plan to Sanction Israeli West Bank Communities Is Performative Politics
(The Times-UK) Editorial - British Prime Minister Andy Burnham is planning a sudden ill-advised departure from Britain's existing relations with Israel. He is poised to announce a "robust" sanctions regime targeting Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Such a trade embargo would be almost impossible to implement. The pretext for the sanctions is the long-planned construction of 1,200 homes by Israel just east of the densely populated city of Jerusalem, a zone known as E1. In practice, as Labour Friends of Israel warns, any attempted embargo would probably become a de facto ban on trade with Israel. It is a bleak irony that many Palestinian businesses would be hit hard too. However, it is the very notion that sanctions are justified in the first place that does not survive scrutiny. Ed Miliband, the foreign secretary, has joined those who allege the E1 project jeopardizes the eventual creation of a Palestinian state. But those alarmist claims are overblown. There has never been any realistic two-state solution under which E1 would fall outside Israeli territory. Under the borders presented at Camp David in 2000 - when the Palestinians disastrously spurned a viable offer of statehood - E1 would have remained part of Israel. The Oslo accords, too, placed the land under Israeli administration. Yet Israel's critics still alight on every zoning decision as an opportunity to accuse it of wrongdoing.