There is something profoundly objectionable about listening to a British Foreign Secretary lecture Israel about territory without acknowledging Britain's own extraordinary role in creating the territorial problem in the first place.
On 8 September 2026, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband told Parliament that Britain would prohibit imports from Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria, impose sanctions upon those involved in their development, prohibit their advertising in Britain and introduce what he called a "double lock" against arms and other export licences which, in the Government's judgement, "materially contribute to the occupation." The restrictions, he said, would remain for as long as that "occupation" persists.
Miliband insists this is not an attack upon Israel or Jews. He invoked his own Jewish ancestry, described himself as a proud Jew and spoke movingly about relatives murdered by the Nazis and his grandmother finding refuge in Israel.
His ancestry is irrelevant.
Miliband has previously described himself as a "Jewish atheist". He married a non-Jew in a civil ceremony while incorporating the theatrical breaking of a glass as a gesture towards his Jewish heritage. None of this makes his policies more or less legitimate. Nor does being born Jewish confer upon a politician some special licence to determine what is harmful to Jews or to the Jewish State. A policy must stand upon its history, facts and consequences, not the ancestry of the minister announcing it.
And history is precisely where Britain's position becomes uncomfortable.
Britain Had Already Partitioned Palestine
Return to 1921.
The government was David Lloyd George's coalition government. Winston Churchill was Colonial Secretary. At the Cairo Conference in March 1921, Britain developed its Hashemite settlement for the territories it had acquired responsibility for after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
The Palestine Mandate subsequently adopted by the League of Nations did something remarkable. Its preamble expressly recognised "the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine" and the grounds for "reconstituting their national home in that country."
Those words matter. The document did not speak of inventing a Jewish connection to Palestine. It recognised one.
But Britain simultaneously secured Article 25.
Article 25 permitted the Mandatory Power to withhold provisions of the Mandate from the enormous territory between the Jordan River and Palestine's eastern boundary. Britain then did precisely that.
On 16 September 1922, the League of Nations approved Britain's memorandum excluding Transjordan from provisions of the Mandate relating to the Jewish National Home. The territory east of the Jordan — representing roughly three-quarters of the geographical area encompassed by the Mandate arrangements — was thereby placed outside the practical scope of Jewish national development.
Emir Abdullah, son of Sharif Hussein of Mecca, was installed over Transjordan under British authority. That political creation eventually became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
This is not Zionist mythology. It is British imperial history.
Before today's British Government lectures Israel about dividing territory, it might therefore acknowledge that Britain performed the greatest territorial division in the history of Mandatory Palestine itself.
Then Came 1948
When Britain departed in 1948, the surrounding Arab states did not accept the creation of Israel alongside an Arab state.
They invaded.
Transjordan's Arab Legion crossed into the remaining territory of the former Mandate and took control of Judea and Samaria, including the Old City of Jerusalem. Jordan subsequently annexed that territory in 1950.
It was during this period that the expression "West Bank" acquired its political meaning: the land was west of the Jordan River, as distinguished from the Hashemite kingdom's original territory to its east.
The expression therefore describes the geography produced by a Jordanian conquest following the failed Arab attempt to destroy the newly established Jewish State. Today its habitual use as though it were the ancient or politically neutral name of the territory conceals rather than illuminates its history. Those who knowingly insist upon it generally reveal the political framework through which they have already chosen to view the dispute; those who do so unknowingly should learn the history before lecturing Israelis about ours.
The Jewish names of this area are Yehudah veShomron — Judea and Samaria.
They are not modern inventions. Judea appears throughout the Tanakh and gives us the very word Jew. Samaria is likewise ancient. The British Government may dislike the modern political implications of those names, but it cannot make several thousand years of Jewish history disappear by adopting twentieth-century Jordanian terminology.
The Counterfactual Britain Never Confronts
History does not permit us to know precisely what would have happened had Britain not created Transjordan as a separate Arab polity. We should therefore distinguish historical fact from reasonable counterfactual argument.
But the question deserves to be asked.
Imagine that the territory originally placed within Britain's Palestine arrangements had developed as the Jewish national territory contemplated after the First World War, rather than approximately three-quarters of it being removed from application of the Jewish National Home provisions.
The demographic and strategic circumstances confronting Israel in 1948 would have been radically different.
There would have been vastly greater territory upon which Jewish immigration and settlement could develop. The Jewish State would not have begun life as the extraordinarily narrow strip of territory which its enemies repeatedly sought to exploit. The Jordan River would not have represented essentially the eastern limit of Jewish territorial aspirations because Jewish national development would already have extended beyond it.
Would the Arab states have launched the same war in 1948? Would Jordan have been positioned to seize Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem? Would the territorial circumstances producing the wars of 1967 and 1973 have existed in anything resembling their historical form?
Nobody can prove the answers.
But neither can Britain pretend that its decisions were irrelevant.
And Then There Is the Word “Settlement”
The terminology deserves attention too. The Hebrew word Yishuv (יישוב) does not carry the political accusation now attached to the English word “settlement.” It describes an inhabited locality or community and is used in Hebrew for communities without implying that their inhabitants are foreign colonists. Professor Eugene Kontorovich has pointed to the way “settlement” became embedded in international discourse concerning Israel and subsequently acquired a uniquely loaded meaning. A Jewish family living in Judea and Samaria is consequently described internationally as living in a “settlement,” language which already invites the reader to regard its presence as anomalous or illegitimate. I therefore do not use the term as a supposedly neutral description. These are Jewish or Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria. When non-Hebrew speakers knowingly employ “settlement” in this politically loaded sense, as the British Government routinely does, the word ceases to be a neutral translation and becomes part of the vocabulary used to portray Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria as inherently illegitimate.
Gaza Is Another Legacy of the Failed War
Gaza likewise did not become detached from Israel because some ancient Palestinian sovereignty was restored there in 1948.
Egyptian forces occupied Gaza during the war launched against Israel. Egypt administered the territory until 1967. Israel captured it during the Six-Day War and eventually withdrew its soldiers and every Jewish civilian from Gaza in 2005.
The result was not peace.
It eventually became an Arab terrorist-controlled enclave from which thousands upon thousands of rockets were launched at Israeli civilians and from which the atrocities of 7 October 2023 were perpetrated.
When British ministers speak casually about "occupation" as though territorial withdrawal necessarily produces peace, Gaza should be the first exhibit placed upon the table.
Israel withdrew.
The Jews who lived there for generations left.
These Jews were forced out of their homes, some at gun point, by Israeli solders.
Then the soldiers left.
The homes were dismantled.
The Arabs destroyed anything that had been built by Jews.
And then, on 7 October 2023, the Arab terrorists crossed the border to murder Jews.
That history cannot simply be wished away.
Britain Is Now Sanctioning the Consequences of Britain's Own Map
There is an almost unbearable historical arrogance in Britain's present position.
A century ago Britain helped determine where Jews could settle.
Britain excluded Transjordan from the Jewish National Home provisions.
Britain presided over Mandatory Palestine.
Britain departed amid war.
And now Britain proposes to punish Jews for living in Judea and Samaria while presenting itself as an impartial custodian of the territorial settlement.
Miliband says settlements are illegal and "should not be promoted in our country."
But Jews did not arrive in Judea because David Ben-Gurion invented a clever name for somebody else's land. Jews lived in Judea when London was still Londinium.
Hebron was Jewish when Britain was inhabited by ancient tribes.
Jerusalem was the capital of the Jewish kingdom approximately a millennium before Christianity existed and more than sixteen centuries before Islam.
That does not by itself settle every modern question of sovereignty, private property or borders. But it makes the language increasingly employed in Britain — in which Jewish presence in Judea is treated almost intrinsically as a foreign implantation — historically grotesque.
The “Double Lock” Hurts British Businesses
Then there is Miliband’s threatened “double lock” on military and other export licences.
It sounds formidable when announced from the Dispatch Box. Its practical effect may prove rather less impressive.
Since 2015, Britain has authorised approximately half a billion pounds in standard military export licences to Israel. That figure must be understood correctly: the value of licences granted is not necessarily the value of equipment actually exported. More importantly, Britain represents only a small proportion of Israel’s overall defence procurement. The United States is vastly more important, while Israel itself possesses one of the most sophisticated defence industries in the world.
That creates an economic reality which the Government appears remarkably willing to overlook.
When Britain refuses an export licence, the first business prevented from trading is not Israeli. It is British.
The British manufacturer loses the order. Its employees lose the work. Businesses within its supply chain lose the associated trade. The British economy loses the activity, and the Exchequer loses the taxation generated by it.
Israel, meanwhile, still requires the equipment.
Where an alternative supplier exists, Israel can purchase from the United States or elsewhere. Where domestic production is possible, Israel has both the technological capability and an increasingly powerful incentive to replace foreign dependency with Israeli manufacture.
There will undoubtedly be specialised British components for which substitution is neither immediate nor costless. But that is very different from imagining that Britain possesses sufficient leverage over Israeli defence procurement to dictate Israeli security policy.
The economic imbalance is therefore obvious: British businesses suffer first and with certainty; Israel suffers only to the extent that it cannot obtain or manufacture an alternative.
There is also a longer-term consequence which Miliband appears not to have considered.
Once an Israeli manufacturer redesigns a system around an American, Israeli or other foreign component because Britain has made itself an unreliable supplier, there is no reason to suppose that the business will return when a future British government changes policy. Supply relationships can be lost permanently.
Britain may therefore succeed not in weakening Israel, but in weakening its own defence-industrial position while encouraging Israel to become still more self-sufficient and still less dependent upon British suppliers.
That is a peculiar form of economic statecraft.
A sanction intended to demonstrate British leverage may instead demonstrate how little leverage Britain actually possesses — while British companies, British workers and the British economy pay the price.
Perhaps British businesses should be grateful for small mercies: at least Miliband stopped at a “double lock” rather than imposing a "triple" one!
Washington Is Already Warning London
The United States has declined to follow Britain's course. The Trump Administration has been watching the proposed restrictions closely, and US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has said there would "without a doubt" be an American response if Britain proceeded with sanctions.
That should matter.
Britain is entitled to formulate its own foreign policy. But governments should calculate consequences rather than congratulate themselves for moral gestures.
Israel will survive a British ban on Judea and Samaria produce.
Israeli defence procurement will adapt to British restrictions.
The people who may discover that sanctions have consequences are British exporters, British manufacturers and ultimately British workers.
Britain's Convenient Amnesia
But Britain cannot credibly discuss this conflict as though history began in June 1967.
Nor did it begin in May 1948.
Britain helped construct the political geography from which the modern conflict emerged.
It made promises.
It drew boundaries.
It created Transjordan.
It restricted the application of the Jewish National Home provisions.
It governed Palestine.
It departed.
And generations later, British ministers stand at the Dispatch Box expressing astonishment that the territorial consequences remain unresolved.
Miliband told Parliament that there is no contradiction between being a proud Jew, supporting Israel and supporting a Palestinian state.
Perhaps not, with the exception that one exists and the other does not.
But there is a contradiction in Britain carving an Arab kingdom from territory east of the Jordan, watching Arab armies attempt to destroy Israel and seize further territory west of the Jordan, and then treating Jewish residence in the territory recovered from that occupation as though it were the original sin of the conflict.
Britain is entitled to criticise Israel.
It is entitled to disagree with its government.
What it is not entitled to do is rewrite its own history.
Before Britain sanctions Jews for where we live, Britain might finally reckon with the map that Britain itself drew — and with a century of consequences that followed.