By New York Post (Opinion) | Created at 2026-09-12 12:01:56 | Updated at 2026-09-12 13:43:38
1 hour ago
When Neville Chamberlain sold out Czechoslovakia to Hitler in 1938, he said he wouldn’t risk Britain’s security for a “faraway country” and people “of whom we know nothing.”
Britain’s Labour Party has gone one worse by scapegoating a further-away country of which it knows nothing at all.
By placing sanctions on trade with Israeli settlements, Labour damages Britain’s security — and American interests.
Never go full Neville.
Ed Miliband, Labour’s foreign secretary, claims that “settler terrorists” are committing “ethnic cleansing” in Judea and Samaria (which Britain, the colonial power, dubbed the West Bank after being chased out in 1948).
The violence in “the Territories” is really a low-grade, tit-for-tat turf war between Jews and Arabs. The winner controls the historic heartland of the Jewish people, and access to Jerusalem and the ridgeline that overlooks Tel Aviv. It’s the unfinished business of 1948 and 1967.
Israel wants to build on E1, a chunk of empty land on the eastern approach to Jerusalem. Miliband claims this would kill off the “two-state solution.” But every internationally-backed plan for a Palestinian state marked E1 as Israeli territory.
Does Labour not know that Hamas murdered the two-state solution on Oct. 7, 2023?
Labour’s electoral interference will boost Bibi Netanyahu and the settler extremists. By punishing Palestinians who work in West Bank factories, it will boost Hamas too.
Labour’s real target is closer to home. Labour’s new leader, Andy Burnham, inherits a dying party. Since Oct. 7, Labour has hemorrhaged votes to the Green Party and the Muslim candidates known as “Gaza independents.”
Burnham’s predecessor Keir Starmer recognized a fictitious Palestinian state to pander to the mob. Starmer just resigned his seat. Labour will struggle to keep it.
Around 20% of the voters in Starmer’s inner London ward are Muslim. About 2% are Jewish. Labour are economic illiterates, but even Burnham and Miliband can do that math.
Some more numbers for Labour to crunch:
The IMF reports that Israel’s GDP per capita is now higher than Britain’s.
One in seven of the pills dispensed by Britain’s National Health Service are made by the Israeli company Teva.
Britain doesn’t sell a single military system to Israel, but Israel is a key supplier of military tech to Britain.
Israel is a key source of anti-terrorist intel that keeps Britons safe from Islamist murder plots.
Labour claims that the sanctions target only Jews in Judea and Samaria. But the Arab and Jewish economies are entwined.
So are the economies of the West Bank and Israel proper. Sanctions against one sector are sanctions against all.
Labour will prosecute a British Jew for buying a home in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem, but not for buying a home in Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus.
Britain will prosecute banks for trading with Jews in Israel, but accept exports from Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara.
Labour tried to deceive the Trump administration by calling the sanctions “purely symbolic,” and claiming that British-Israeli trade and security cooperation would continue as usual.
They forgot that Israel and America get a vote too.
The Israelis punished Britain by closing Britain’s consulate in Jerusalem, expelling British nationals who train Palestinian Authority security forces in the West Bank and facilitate aid into Gaza and banning 11 far-left British MPs from visiting.
Labour just cost Britain its remaining influence on the ground. The self-harm doesn’t stop there.
Israel’s further options include cancelling export licenses for military and dual-use exports to Britain, and banning all Labour politicians from visiting.
Not forgetting Israel’s nuclear option: no more intelligence-sharing.
As Britain’s chief rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, said, Labour risks “bolstering the very extremism they seek to target.”
Starmer’s Labour enraged the Trump administration by rewarding Hamas with a Palestinian state, failing to step up against Iran and proceeding with a crooked scheme to pay Mauritius to take the Chagos Islands, which host the strategically vital Diego Garcia base.
Andy Burnham wants to reset relations, but his Israel boycott sets Britain on a collision course with the US.
More than 40 US states have anti-Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions laws requiring them to divest from and cut contracts with companies that boycott Israel. And Israeli firms are vital to supply chains for projects such as the F-35 supersonic stealth fighter.
When Britain attacks Israel, it doesn’t just hamper an ally, pander to Islamists and damage its own interests. It harms American interests, breaks American laws and insults its closest ally.
Dominic Green (@DrDominicGreen) is a Wall Street Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
