FOREIGN Secretary Ed Miliband said yesterday that Britain ‘could not simply stand by because we feared Israeli reaction’.
This was after Israel ordered the closure of the UK consulate in occupied East Jerusalem and banned 12 Britons, including 11 MPs, from entering the country in retaliation for Tuesday’s ban on trade with illegal West Bank settlements.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar announced four ‘counter-measures’ within hours of Miliband telling Parliament that the UK regards the entire occupation of the West Bank as illegal and that ‘settler terrorists’ are carrying out ‘ethnic cleansing’ while the Netanyahu government turns a ‘blind eye’.
The consulate is expected to shut within 30 days.
Sa’ar later telephoned Tory leader Kemi Badenoch to thank her for opposing the sanctions, after she accused Labour of antisemitism.
In broadcast interviews yesterday morning, Miliband called the Israeli measures ‘regrettable and damaging’ and said the consulate closure would be ‘damaging for the Palestinian people’.
‘But it is right to act because the bigger danger here is the wider suffering and oppression of the Palestinian people, which is continuing unabated and we have a responsibility to seek to make a difference to that,’ he said.
The government had feared that waiting longer would leave it ‘too late’ for a two-state solution, which he said was ‘being destroyed by the facts on the ground’, pointing to the tender for construction in E1, which Israel’s far-right finance minister has said would ‘bury the idea of a Palestinian state’.
Asked whether the move would bolster Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of Israeli elections, Miliband said: ‘We don’t set our compass by what is happening in the Israeli elections.’
Israelis would make their own decisions, he said, but their government was making the country more isolated.
He was ‘confident’ the sanctions could be enforced and said they would seek to ‘have an impact on the services provided to expand the occupation’, declining to say whether Israeli banks would be covered.
Describing himself as a ‘proud British Jew’, Miliband rejected the chief rabbi’s description of the announcement as ‘a truly dark day for British Jews’, saying Britain could uphold the rule of law and counter antisemitism at the same time.
Canada and France joined the UK in banning settlement trade on Tuesday, with nine other European states considering similar measures.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham said the suffering of Palestinians was ‘a scar on the conscience of the world’ and that ‘Britain will continue to act in support of our values.’