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By Dan Perry
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I am not often accustomed to siding with the Trump administration against the Europeans. On the new boycott of goods from Israeli settlements, however, Washington has the smarter take.
The move by Britain, France and Canada manages to combine bad politics with questionable foreign policy. It hands Benjamin Netanyahu a campaign gift weeks before an Israeli election that his opponents desperately need to make about his failures, while risking valuable economic, intelligence and security relationships with Israel—and America—for sanctions whose impact will be largely symbolic.
There is also something hypocritical about governments that have no intention of giving up the benefits of close relations with Israel advertising their moral disapproval through a crudely simplistic boycott. Britain and France value Israeli technology, intelligence and security cooperation, including against Iran and jihadist terrorism. They are not about to sever those relationships, because doing so would carry real costs. Instead they have selected a highly visible punishment with relatively little economic bite, allowing them to retain the parts of the Israeli relationship they need while satisfying small but hysterically anti-Israel constituencies at home.
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Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s reaction was almost a shrug. Washington would not follow Britain’s lead, he said, while warning against measures that could destabilize the West Bank or complicate American efforts in Gaza.
And the timing could hardly be more helpful to Netanyahu. His opponents need the coming election to be about the catastrophic failure preceding October 7, the conduct of the wars that followed, his corruption trial, his attacks on independent institutions and his effort to push Israel toward something resembling an elected autocracy. Their path to victory runs through center-right Israelis who have grown exhausted by Netanyahu while remaining deeply concerned about Israel’s security.
The boycott gives him a much better subject. Netanyahu can tell those voters that foreign governments are once again trying to dictate Israel’s borders, punish Jews for living on the wrong side of a fairly random line drawn when the fighting stopped in 1949 and treat businesses in parts of Jerusalem that Israel has annexed and where Arabs have rights to citizenship as if they were radical distant hilltop outposts.
The policy may please some of Western left-wing voters demanding that their governments punish Israel—but it simultaneously helps the Israeli politician they presumably most want to weaken.
None of this requires defending the settlement movement. Radical settlers who attack Palestinians are thugs, and their violence is abhorrent. Outposts deliberately planted deep inside the West Bank can be intended to make a future partition impossible. Israel’s government has tolerated and sometimes encouraged conduct that deserves condemnation.
But a blanket boycott treats fundamentally different places as if they present the same problem. The result is so ridiculous that it will be difficult to enforce, and it will probably be mostly ignored.
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There is therefore a substantial difference between large settlement blocs close to the border and ideological outposts planted deep inside the West Bank to fragment the potential Palestinian state. The boycott recognizes none of that.
Jerusalem makes the policy even more problematic. Most Western governments regard East Jerusalem as occupied territory and reject Israel’s annexation. But hundreds of thousands of Jewish Israelis now live beyond the city’s pre-1967 line, outnumbering its Arabs. To most Israelis this is simply their capital, not a remote settlement in the West Bank.
The boycotts come at a moment when Israelis already feel demonized abroad. The Gaza war has been brutal and Palestinian civilians suffered terribly. Israel’s conduct deserves scrutiny. But Israelis remember that the war began when Hamas crossed the border on October 7, murdered more than 1,000 people and took hundreds hostage.
Many Israelis expected democratic allies to understand the extraordinary predicament they faced even while criticizing their government. Instead, they increasingly see Israel itself becoming an international pariah.
Listening to some European rhetoric, including from the UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband, one might imagine the West Bank to be among the greatest human-rights catastrophes currently unfolding. Across Africa, the Middle East and Asia, wars, massacres, persecution and mass displacement have killed and uprooted vastly more people, attracting an absurdly small fraction of the diplomatic energy devoted to Israel. Israelis can still reasonably ask why their country attracts such singular outrage. Hypocrisy and ignorance appear to be facilitating this kowtowing to anti-Israel hysteria whipped up by the global left and backed by shady foreign social media campaigns.
The domestic politics are difficult to ignore. In Britain, Labour faces pressure from Greens, independents and Muslim voters angered by Gaza. But Britain—and the others—also have valuable commercial, technological, intelligence and security relationships with Israel. Israel has already retaliated against Britain by closing its East Jerusalem consulate and curtailing British participation in regional security initiatives. These are relationships Western governments cultivated because they advance their own national interests.
If Britain truly regards Israel’s behavior as sufficiently intolerable to justify economic isolation, there is a more coherent policy available: seriously reconsider the relationship. It will not do that, because Britain benefits from it. Instead, it risks damaging useful cooperation for a sanction small enough to preserve most of the economic relationship, absurd enough to help Netanyahu inadvertently, but conspicuous enough to demonstrate virtue signaling at home.
There are better ways to address the actual abuses. Sanction violent settlers. Punish organizations financing attacks on Palestinians. Oppose outposts deliberately designed to prevent a viable Palestinian state. Pressure an Israeli government when it protects extremists. And mainly, find clever ways to help Israel’s moderates win on October 27.
Dan Perry is the former London-based Europe-Africa Editor and Cairo-based Middle East Editor of The Associated Press, chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem and the author of two books.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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