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I listened with increasing outrage and disbelief as a series of Israeli figures, including the country’s Foreign Minister, Gideon Saar, accused the British Government of imposing trade restrictions on illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank for purely domestic political reasons. They alleged that the British Government’s action is nothing more than virtue signalling, in order to appease the Labour Party’s left wing in the run-up to the party’s annual conference, to fend off an electoral challenge from the Green Party, and to win the support of pro-Palestinian voters, in the upcoming by-election in Keir Starmer’s old seat of Holborn and St Pancras.
The charge is ludicrous on its surface, given that the UK was taking action in concert with eleven other countries, who presumably weren’t at all motivated by concern for UK electoral politics. It’s also deeply insulting, since it implies that the British Government has become so shallow that it is willing to take a decision of serious strategic importance for purely trivial domestic reasons.
But, most of all, it is nakedly hypocritical, because for decades the UK, far from bending the knee to its most progressive and pro-Palestinian voters, has actually repeatedly gone out of its way to appease pro-Israeli groups, and tacitly turned a blind eye to Israeli actions which would have earned far more robust Government censure, had they been committed by almost any other country.
I know of what I speak. In the late-1990s, I was the head of the Middle East Peace Process section in the UK Foreign Office, charged with overseeing efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including through trying to establish a two state solution. The big challenge of the time was to secure successful implementation of the Wye River Memorandum, an agreement brokered by President Bill Clinton in October 1998, requiring steady Israeli withdrawal from areas of the West Bank in return for stepped up security cooperation by the Palestinians to clamp down on terrorism.
The deal quickly began to unravel, as both sides accused the other of failing to deliver on their commitments. It eventually collapsed altogether when right-wing opposition in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, including elements of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s own coalition, forced the dissolution of the Government.
Though both parties bore some responsibility for the agreement’s failure, it was always a lopsided arrangement, because it imposed the most stringent requirements on the Palestinians, and failed to address many of their fundamental concerns, such as the right of return, or control of land and water in the West Bank. Many suspect Prime Minister Netanyahu never had any intention of allowing the agreement to succeed – a suspicion borne out by his boast years later that he had single-handedly destroyed the Oslo Accords, and his many actions since then to expand settlements in the West Bank.

Since the October 7 attacks, the number of Palestinian bodies held by Israeli state incommunicado has soared
Byline Times Team
Yet, whenever we in the Foreign Office tried to get Downing Street to sign off on statements urging Israel to comply with its commitments, or criticising its breaches of the Agreement, we were repeatedly rebuffed by the team around the-then Prime Minister Tony Blair. We were always being told that it would not be “helpful”, or was “not the right time”; or that “private engagement would be more productive.” No such restrictions were imposed on our suggestions for public statements concerning alleged Palestinian shortcomings.
In the mid-2000s, I was head of the Foreign Office’s Human Rights and Democracy Department, charged with overseeing UK policy on human rights abuses worldwide. Again, there was the same reluctance by British political leaders to publicly criticise Israel, even in the face of persistent…