The UK’s sanctions on settlements matter. So do their limits

Nagham Zbeedat writes in Haaretz on 9 September 2026:

The day after the U.K. announced that it would ban imports from Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, I was there, in Tarmusayya. Some Palestinians wanted to believe the decision could mark the beginning of a change. Others could already see the loophole.

“It’s nothing,” one elderly man told me. “They’ll change the name from ‘made in a settlement’ to ‘made in Israel.'”

That skepticism should not obscure what has, indeed, changed. The UK has declared Israel’s continuing occupation of Palestinian territory unlawful and announced plans to prohibit settlement goods, the promotion of settlement properties and some services connected to the settlement enterprise. France and Canada are moving to restrict settlement trade too, and nine other countries have said they are considering similar measures or intend to support European action.

After decades in which European governments denounced settlements while trading with the businesses that sustain them, an import ban establishes a meaningful principle: goods produced on land seized in violation of international law should not be sold on European shelves.

But the ban also preserves a distinction that has become impossible to defend: Europe may now be prepared to penalize settlements, but it maintains far larger commercial, academic and military relationships with the state that creates and protects them.

Trade in goods between Israel and the European Union reached 43.3 billion euros ($50.3 billion) in 2025, making the bloc Israel’s largest trading partner. European countries also received 54 percent of all Israeli defense exports in 2024, which amounted to nearly $15 billion. Against those figures, banning settlement dates, wine, cosmetics and manufactured goods carries far greater political meaning than economic force. These exports are hardly the backbone of Israel’s economy.

The Palestinian discourse, too, has its own contradictions. Some Palestinians welcome any measure showing that their cause has not disappeared from the international agenda. Others question who will bear the immediate consequences of the ban.

“Before you celebrate, have you thought about who works in these factories and who produces these goods?” one Palestinian asked on a WhatsApp group. “These products are made by Palestinian hands.” Indeed, Palestinian laborers are routinely employed by settlement factories and farms, producing some of the products Europe now plans to reject.

The concern about workers’ livelihoods is real, but it cannot justify preserving the economy that made such work necessary. Israel controls Palestinian movement, land, water, imports and exports. It has weakened the possibility of an independent Palestinian economy while settlements, enjoying state protection and incentives, exploit land and resources denied to neighboring Palestinian communities. Palestinian employment in a settlement does not turn it into a Palestinian enterprise. The worker receives a wage, but it is the settlement business that accumulates the profit and strengthens its hold on occupied land.

If European governments expect Palestinian workers to bear any part of the cost of their policy, they must also support alternative employment solutions and strengthen Palestinians’ capacity to produce their own goods in the face of the Israeli occupation. A boycott that removes a laborer’s income while leaving the structure that created their dependency intact merely relocates the burden.

The underlying problem is Europe’s portrayal of settlers as an extremist fringe that can be separated from the state. Israeli governments have been allocating land, authorizing construction, connecting settlements to infrastructure, building roads serving them and deploying soldiers to protect them for decades. Outposts established without authorization are repeatedly connected to state infrastructure and later legalized.

The UK acknowledged part of this reality when it declared the occupation unlawful and accused the Israeli government of turning a blind eye to settler violence and, at times, supporting forced displacement. Yet its response still draws a clean border between the settlement and the state – a border Israel has spent decades erasing on the ground.

The ban matters because it introduces tangible consequences where Europe previously offered only condemnation. But its limits matter just as much. If economic activity sustaining illegal settlements is unacceptable, then the government agencies, military and companies that build and protect them cannot remain beyond scrutiny simply because their official address is inside Israel.

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