Britain’s limited Gaza action will do little to curb Israel’s wider territorial ambitions

The announcement last week that Britain would suspend 30 weapons export licences to Israel prompted a predictable firestorm. Critics of Israel’s war in Gaza accuse the UK government of being criminally soft on Israel. From the other side, Britain’s chief rabbi was outraged. The Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu cleaved to his theme that his country is fighting both Iran and Hamas, whom he regularly compares to Nazis, and his closest associate, the minister of strategic affairs, Ron Dermer, suggested that the policy was like denying Churchill the weapons to fight Hitler.
Others understandably lambasted the UK government for deeply insensitive timing, the announcement coming even as Israel was convulsed in anguish after six hostages were executed by Hamas. The hostages had survived in captivity for nearly 11 months before being shot in the head as Israeli forces approached.
But beyond its critique of the policy announcement’s poor timing, the Netanyahu government’s caricature of the limited UK embargo won’t protect Israel from accelerated international sanctions if its current policies continue.
His claim that Israel alone is battling Iran on behalf of the west fails to note that the UK also announced sanctions against specific members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds force and an IRGC unit for supplying weapons to Iranian proxies including Hezbollah. This rather weakens the claim that the UK is indifferent to the Iranian threat.
Britain’s decision was not about Israel’s fight against Iran but its policy in Gaza. The legal review of weapons export licences addressed three possible violations of international humanitarian law: Israel’s failure to get humanitarian aid to Gaza’s civilians; the mistreatment of Palestinian prisoners; and its conduct of hostilities in Gaza. In other words, the review was designed to protect minimum humanitarian standards in wartime. Britain identified likely transgressions in the first two cases, but could not determine conclusively whether Israel was breaking the law in the conduct of the war itself.
But Gaza is integral to the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in the West Bank and Jerusalem as well. In this bigger picture, Israel’s accelerated breaking of international law is too extreme to ignore.
Over the course of six decades, efforts at a negotiated peace foundered, and Israel’s occupation came to seem like a juggernaut. A weary international community continued to issue statements condemning settlements as an obstacle to peace; but the words became rote. Global audiences could easily forget that settlements are not simply an unpleasant manifestation of land theft, displacement and sometimes religious fundamentalist violence. From a legal perspective, civilian settlements in the West Bank represent the permanent annexation of land captured in war. This is precisely what the international community has prohibited, in order to remove the incentives for war.
Well before the current war, the government that Netanyahu established in December 2022 ripped the veil off Israel’s longstanding efforts at de facto annexation; its public coalition agreements specified the exclusive right of self-determination for Jews in the land of Israel – including “Judea and Samaria”. A special ministerial position was created to transfer governing authorities from a putatively temporary military body to a civilian arm of the state, a bureaucratic, de jure mark of permanent possession.
Since October 2023, the material situation of Palestinians in the West Bank has reached a new nadir. Israel immediately cancelled work permits for about 160,000 West Bankers working in Israel or in settlements – slashing incomes and propelling unemployment up to about one-third. It also withheld tax revenues it collects for the Palestinian Authority; as a result the PA cut public sector salaries in half. All infrastructure has suffered, even the availability of water – an emergency-level crisis in Gaza, but also a pan-Palestinian shortage affecting some West Bank towns and cities, and even Palestinian neighbourhoods of Jerusalem.
As the PA’s authority has crumbled, factional militia groups have sprung up, committing violence against Israelis, alongside, and increasing, Israeli military and settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank – all before 7 October.
After October 2023, it seemed only a matter of time until Israel saw the need for overwhelming force to quell the threat. Finally, last month, a Palestinian man from the West Bank appears to have accidentally blown himself up while preparing a suicide bomb intended to kill civilians in Tel Aviv. On 28 August, Israel forces moved in on several Palestinian towns and refugee camps in the northern West Bank. The army called it “Operation Summer Camps” and it is the most extensive such campaign in more than 20 years.
On Friday, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reportedly left Jenin after nine days of what some have described as a siege. But there is no telling if and when the operation will truly end. Israel is well versed in letting intense fighting peter out, while maintaining a strong military grip – sometimes for years, like its original 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon after the invasion of 1982, and for the likely future for Gaza. In the West Bank, the Israeli army was already firmly in control of “Area C” – 60% of the territory, based on the Oslo accords. The latest operation seems geared towards pushing forces into areas nominally under Palestinian Authority control, and making partial withdrawal look like progress. But each new push – under the legitimate pretext of routing out terror threats – advances the aim that Netanyahu’s government has never hidden: total control and permanent sovereignty over all of the West Bank.
Israel won’t stop there. Key ministers relish the prospect of dominating Gaza too. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, has called for the re-establishment of Jewish settlements in Gaza, and for pressing Palestinians to leave for this purpose. A Knesset caucus was established by far-right lawmakers to advance his call; activists are setting up fledgling communities close to Gaza’s fence, waiting for the day they can cross. The minister of finance, Bezalel Smotrich, another ultra-nationalist, has advocated since January for the IDF to take over humanitarian aid distribution, as the kernel of a future military government. Then last week, reports emerged that Netanyahu had instructed the IDF to prepare for aid distribution in Gaza.
Leftwing critics are probably correct that the suspension of a small number of British arms export licences won’t be enough to stop Israel’s wider agenda. Far more severe sanctions have failed to curb the actions of regimes such as Iran or Russia.
On the other hand, those attacking the UK for taking measures to constrain Israel’s most dangerous decisions should themselves challenge the Netanyahu government to abandon its fateful wider strategy.