Britain Institutes a De Facto Boycott of Israel

T oday, in a joint statement signed by twelve countries, Britain announced a national ban on trade with Israeli communities in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem. The ban covers goods and services such as financing and advertising. It comes three days before Rosh Hashanah, on the same day the Commons debates the safety of British Jews, in a year when the Community Security Trust logged nearly 2,000 antisemitic incidents in six months and a record number of assaults. The Chief Rabbi told Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband to his face that the measure will disproportionately harm British Jews and will spiral into a de facto boycott of Israel. The government scheduled it anyway.

The Foreign Office already keeps a list of settlement postcodes whose goods are denied preferential tariffs. It was last updated in August 2025, and under the heading “East Jerusalem,” it includes the range 9378301 to 9378399. The United States Embassy is at 14 David Flusser Street, Jerusalem 9378322. On Britain’s map, the American embassy is a settlement.

Miliband will say the settlements are illegal under international law. They are not. Britain itself administered the Mandate for Palestine, and Article 6 directed it to “encourage . . . close settlement by Jews on the land” while ensuring that “the rights and position of other sections of the population” were not prejudiced, and Article 80 of the U.N. Charter preserved “the rights whatsoever of any states or any peoples” under that instrument when the Mandate ended. The word “occupation” assumes a lawful sovereign displaced, and the West Bank had none. The Mandate was never repealed; Jordan seized the territory by invasion in 1948 and annexed it in 1950, and Britain, which recognized that annexation, told the Commons in the same statement that it could not recognize Jordanian sovereignty over any part of Jerusalem. Israel took the land back in a defensive war in 1967 from an occupier that had no title to lose, and a state that recovers its own territory from an aggressor is not an occupier of it. Even on his own premise, the provision Miliband will rely on, Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention, says an occupying power “shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population” into occupied territory. The Red Cross’s own commentary explains that the clause was written to stop the forced population transfers of the Second World War, not to stop a Jewish family from buying an apartment in Jerusalem. And in every other occupation on earth, Turkish Cyprus, Moroccan Western Sahara, Russian-held Ukraine, the occupier’s citizens have moved into the territory, and no one ever called it a violation of Article 49(6).

British courts have already looked at settlement trade and found nothing illegal. In Richardson v. Director of Public Prosecutions (2014), protesters who occupied a London shop selling these products argued that the shop was aiding the transfer of Israelis into occupied territory. A unanimous U.K. Supreme Court held that no such crime had been shown and that none had anything to do with the ordinary business of selling. The highest court in Britain looked for a crime in selling settlement goods and did not find one.

British trade policy has dealt with occupied territory before. Morocco has controlled Western Sahara since 1975, and Britain’s 2019 trade agreement with Morocco gives “products originating in Western Sahara subject to controls by customs authorities of Morocco” the same low tariffs as products from Morocco itself. When campaigners sued, the government defended the arrangement in the High Court and won, in Western Sahara Campaign U.K. v. Secretary of State for International Trade (2022). Occupied territory gets a tariff discount when the occupier is Morocco and a ban when the occupier is Israel. Britain has run the substitution test for us and failed.

The same is true of property. A ban drawn around “settlements” draws its line around Jewish neighborhoods: A British citizen may still buy an apartment in an Arab neighborhood of eastern Jerusalem, and a British bank may finance it, while the same arrangement a mile away in a Jewish neighborhood becomes untouchable. Meanwhile, Rightmove lists more than 1,800 homes for sale in Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus, priced in pounds, and no British government has ever proposed to stop a single sale.

The ban will not stop a single home in E1, the tract between Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim where Israel published tenders last month for some 1,200 homes. Britain’s entire trade with the areas in question was about £38 million last year, against £6 billion with Israel. What it will do is frighten British banks, insurers, and advertisers into dropping anything with a Jerusalem address rather than risk guessing wrong about the customs rules, which is what Labour Friends of Israel meant when it warned of “a de facto boycott” of Israel. The Chief Rabbi named the other victims: tens of thousands of Palestinian workers employed by the very businesses Britain is targeting.

The services ban is also where Britain runs into American law. Congress wrote the anti-boycott laws in the 1970s to stop the Arab League from conscripting American companies into its boycott of Israel. Section 999 of the Internal Revenue Code requires Treasury to list countries that require cooperation with an international boycott and strips tax benefits from any taxpayer who cooperates. Its only exceptions are for complying with a foreign ban on importing goods from the boycotted country or exporting goods to it. Refusing to finance, insure, advertise, or provide services is not excused, and those are exactly the refusals Miliband is demanding. The Commerce Department’s regulations reach any foreign subsidiary “controlled in fact” by an American parent, so a London bank owned in New York that refuses to finance a building in a Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem because British law tells it to is, under the regulations, an American person breaking American law. And in 2016, Congress defined boycotts of Israel to include measures aimed at anyone doing business “in any territory controlled by Israel.”

Washington already has the tools. When Turkey announced a trade embargo on Israel in May 2024, Commerce issued an anti-boycott advisory telling American companies in Turkey what they could not do and what they had to report. Treasury published its boycott list on August 10; it names eight countries, all Arab League members. The State Department said of Ireland’s settlement bill in July that the United States “firmly opposes this effort and rejects any efforts to economically isolate, or discriminate against, Israel.” London should get the same statement, then the same advisory, and, if the services ban becomes law, a place on the Treasury list.

The states will also not wait. Many have anti-boycott statutes that apply to anyone limiting commercial relations with businesses in Israeli-controlled territories — the exact conduct Miliband is mandating — and those laws bar such companies from state contracts, require state pension funds to divest from them, or both. Florida’s alone knocked Airbnb off the state’s approved list in 2019 until it reversed its settlement policy, and British companies are the top foreign investor in Florida, with more than 88,000 jobs there. British lawyers will answer that federal law preempts state rules on compliance with foreign boycotts, and it does. It does not preempt state laws against discrimination, which is how most of these statutes are written. The rest run in the same direction as federal policy, and the Supreme Court strikes down state laws that obstruct Washington’s foreign policy, not state laws that carry it out. A British bank that announces it has stopped serving Jerusalem to satisfy London will be answering to Austin and Tallahassee before Treasury has finished its paperwork.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s spokesman, asked on Monday about the charge that the government is driven by Jew hatred, answered by citing the £318 million it spends protecting Jewish communities from the sort of people who firebombed a synagogue in Kenton this spring. The Chief Rabbi wrote that “when rhetoric towards Israel escalates, hostility towards Jews is never far behind.” Today, the government has scheduled both: the debate on Jewish safety in the morning and a fresh reason for it in the afternoon.