Miliband has decisively broken with decades of UK inaction on Palestine
Chris Doyle writes in Middle East Eye on 9 September 2026:
In a meeting with the British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband on 7 September, I heard him proclaiming that the UK was genuinely serious about taking action against Israeli violations of international law. Britain’s diplomat-in-chief did not spell out what these actions would be, but he was insistent this would be part of a reset on Israel-Palestine. Miliband was also clear this was an issue he would take the lead on.
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A genuine moral courage
For the first time ever in the House of Commons, a British foreign secretary showed genuine moral courage and a robust willingness to act against Israel.
All the hesitancy, evasiveness and cowardice of previous governments vanished. It was a courageous exercise in truth-telling. He rightly referred to ethnic cleansing going on in the Occupied West Bank, a phrase none of his predecessors had dared use. He outlined a host of examples of where Palestinian communities had been attacked and terrorised by Jewish settlers. He gave voice to their daily suffering in a way that so much of the mainstream media coverage had failed to do.
On Gaza, his language was also far more forthright than his predecessors describing what the government of the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was doing as “a stain on the conscience of the world.”
At no point in the Starmer or Sunak administrations did the UK ever state that Israel had violated international law except on one occasion when the then Foreign Secretary David Lammy misspoke, and was forced by Downing Street to correct the record.
Miliband went further. He backed the international legal processes to determine whether Israel had violated international law, and made reference to the UN Commission of Inquiry report that accused Israel of genocide.