The Israeli national flag flutters as apartments are seen in the background in the Israeli settlement of Efrat in the West Bank, Aug. 18, 2020. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

David Lammy’s successor at the Foreign Office, Ed Miliband, announced what he called a “comprehensive reset” of Britain’s relationship with Israel: sanctions on entities in Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”), a UK-French-Canadian ban on “settlement goods,” and a prohibition on advertising Jewish communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines. He insisted, unprompted, that this was not BDS. He should have stopped insisting once the trade ban made the distinction meaningless.

The word itself is telling: “reset.” Not a response to a specific atrocity, a named perpetrator, or a discrete violation of law, but a deliberate change of baseline. Miliband did not announce enforcement action; he announced a new starting position, one in which Jews living in Hebron, Efrat, and the Gush Etzion bloc are themselves the offense to be corrected: not a legal judgment, but a policy of exclusion dressed in the vocabulary of human rights.

We should apply Natan Sharansky’s test for distinguishing criticism of Israel from something older and more nefarious: does it demonize, delegitimize, or hold Israel to a standard no other country on earth must meet. And it’s clear that the UK’s policy fails this test. 

Britain sanctions Jews in Judea and Samaria but not the Turkish settlers Ankara has moved into the third of Cyprus it has occupied since 1974. Britain backed Security Council Resolution 550 in 1984, finding the settlement of Varosha by non-residents “inadmissible,” yet never extended that to the tens of thousands of mainland Turks settled across occupied Cyprus since, producing no British asset freezes, goods ban, or foreign secretary demanding a “reset.”

Britain has not banned trade with Moroccan-settled Western Sahara, whose annexation the UK has never recognized, and whose goods still clear customs. Nor has it challenged Chinese settlement policies transforming Xinjiang and Tibet. Ask the question a Guardian editor will not: what explains why one of these four cases draws sanctions while the other three do not? Not occupation. Not settlement. Not disputed territory. The difference is the ethnicity of the people living there.

The “settler violence” framing carries the same asymmetry and won’t survive the record on the other side. Yes, Mahmoud Abbas signed a February 2025 decree nominally ending the PA’s practice of paying stipends scaled to the severity of an attack on Jews, the program critics call “pay-for-slay.” That is the fact a hostile editor will cite to call this stale; it belongs here anyway: the State Department’s Taylor Force Act report to Congress, submitted this May, found the PA continuing its compensation system “through new mechanisms under a different name,” $156 million spent last year to incentivize the murder of Jews despite the decree.

The finding was serious enough that Washington sanctioned PA and PLO officials for the first time in decades. Miliband’s statement mentions none of it. A foreign secretary who builds a sanctions case on one side’s incident logs while ignoring his own allies’ findings on the other side’s state financing of murder is not monitoring human rights. He is prosecuting one party to a two-sided conflict.

The legal predicate that was never argued. Miliband called the occupation unlawful and never argued the point, because in London that illegality is treated as settled fact. It is neither settled nor, on the sources usually cited, well founded.

Start with what critics will cite first: the International Court of Justice, whose 2004 Wall opinion and 2024 follow-on opinion both found the “settlements” inconsistent with Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which bars an occupying power from transferring its civilian population into occupied territory.

Two things here matter. First, the opinion was advisory: Israel never consented to the Court’s jurisdiction, and advisory opinions, by the ICJ’s own account, bind no state, leaving the requesting organ free to weigh it. Second, Article 49(6) was drafted in 1949 to criminalize what the Nazis did to occupied Europe: forcible deportation of a civilian population into conquered land to entrench conquest.

Voluntary Jewish migration into territory their own national home was chartered to encompass is not remotely comparable. In the seventy-five years since 1949, voluntary civilian migration into occupied territory has occurred repeatedly, from Turkish Cyprus to Moroccan Western Sahara to Indonesian-settled East Timor, and in none did the world treat the migration itself, as opposed to forced deportation, as an Article 49(6) violation. Israel alone is treated as having somehow – through civilians voluntarily moving – committed the very crime the drafters wrote Article 49(6) to prevent.

Then there is the precondition the Court skips: you cannot be an “occupying power” of territory to which no other state held better title. This land was never the sovereign territory of any recognized state when Israel took it in 1967, in a defensive war Israeli leaders begged Jordan to sit out; Israel warned King Hussein, through the UN, that if Jordan stayed out it would not be attacked. Jordan attacked anyway and lost territory it had itself seized in a war of aggression nineteen years earlier.

That interval is the history London’s “reset” needs the world to forget. From 1949 to June 1967, Jordan did not administer a diverse territory; it ethnically cleansed every Jew from Judea, Samaria, and the Old City of Jerusalem, destroyed dozens of synagogues, and barred Jews, by law, from Judaism’s holiest sites, including the Western Wall, for nineteen years. The presence Britain now treats as the original sin was, for the Jews it displaced, a return.

Jordan’s 1950 annexation of the territory renamed the “West Bank,” and was recognized by exactly two governments, Britain and Pakistan. It was rejected by the Arab League and abandoned by Jordan in 1988. London once recognized the very unilateral, internationally rejected claim of sovereignty it now treats Israel’s presence as violating.

Britain has never engaged the rival claim, made under the Mandate it wrote itself, that Jewish settlement there was a chartered right, not a violation. Article 6 of that Mandate called for “close settlement by Jews on the land.” Article 80 of the UN Charter preserved Mandate-era rights rather than extinguishing them. Resolution 2334, the other citation a hostile fact-checker will reach for, restates the “illegal settlements” language but, like the Wall opinion’s predicate resolutions, carries no Chapter VII force: it’s a political statement, not a judgment with teeth.

None of this closes the legal question in Israel’s favor. It makes it exactly what Miliband pretends it isn’t: contested, litigated by serious scholars on both sides, and unresolved by anything stronger than an advisory opinion neither side is bound to accept. Legal scholars Kontorovich and Hausdorff make these aforementioned arguments from binding League of Nations and Security Council instruments and Britain’s own Mandate text, the very text the Foreign Secretary’s department is now sanctioning people for taking at its word.

Miliband called this a reset because reset here is accurate. Britain has not identified a new violation; it has adopted a new premise: that Jews living in land they were expelled from at gunpoint, in land Britain’s own Mandate invited them to settle, and land Israel recovered only in a defensive war it begged Jordan to avoid, are, by their existence, a wrong requiring correction.

Strip the trade bans and asset freezes of their procedural language and what remains is naked: a foreign policy organized around where Jews are permitted to live. Britain does not run that policy against Turks in Cyprus, Moroccans in the Sahara, or Han settlers in Tibet. It runs it only against Jews in Judea. That is not human rights policy. It is not international law. It is discrimination dressed up as diplomacy, and Britain should be ashamed to have embraced it.

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.