Europe Unites to Pressure Israel, Breaking With U.S.

 

News Analysis

Europe Unites to Pressure Israel, Breaking With U.S.

 

Britain once followed in France’s slipstream when it came to pressuring Israel. Under new leadership, it is spearheading opposition to Israeli settlements, risking American anger.

 

Mark Landler

By Mark Landler

Reporting from Paris

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/09/world/europe/britain-france-israel-settlements-trade.html

 

Sept. 9, 2026

Updated 5:35 a.m. ET

 

When Britain confirmed last September that it would recognize a Palestinian state, it was pulled in the wake of France, which had signaled a few months earlier that it planned to take the symbolically freighted step.

 

On Tuesday, almost a year later, Britain was the one to seize the initiative. The British government announced, followed by France and Canada, that it would stop trading with Jewish settlements in the West Bank. It went so far as to accuse some settlers of engaging in the “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians.

 

This diplomatic sequencing speaks partly to domestic politics in each country. Last year, President Emmanuel Macron of France, entering the twilight of his term, was eager to cement his legacy. Now, a new British prime minister, Andy Burnham, wants to mollify Labour Party members appalled by the suffering in Gaza and angry that Britain hasn’t done more about it.

 

Yet the cumulative impact is strikingly united European pressure on Israel. It has left the Israeli government bitterly estranged from Europe, at odds with its two largest military powers — once stalwart allies — and facing economic punishment that analysts said could prove to be more than symbolic.

 

“The idea of boycotting goods from settlements or even treating them differently in terms of customs and duties has always been talked about, but almost nothing has been done to date,” Daniel C. Kurtzer, a former United States ambassador to Israel, said. “Even the idea of clearly labeling goods from settlements, so as to distinguish them from ‘Made in Israel’ has not taken off.”

 

“Bottom line,” said Mr. Kurtzer, who now teaches at Princeton, “this could be a very significant economic blow to the settlements movement and any Israeli government that backs settlements.”

 

Exports from settlements account for only a small fraction of the annual trade, worth $8 billion, between Britain and Israel, though its exact value is difficult to measure, according to a recent assessment by British Parliament researchers. But income from goods like dates, wine and plastics — coupled with subsidies from the Israeli government — plays a vital role in the economies of individual settlements.

 

The ban has underscored Europe’s widening divergence from the United States on Middle East policy. An unhappy Trump administration “obviously” won’t follow Britain, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Tuesday. Such divergence is hardly surprising from independent-minded France, but it is notable from Britain, which has usually been more closely aligned with Washington.

 

Israel’s thunderous reaction suggested that it viewed Britain’s shift as more than just symbolic. It ordered the closing of the British Consulate General in East Jerusalem, which represents Britain’s interests in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. Founded in 1839, it is one of the oldest diplomatic outposts in the region.

 

Israel also banned several mostly left-wing members of the British Parliament from the country, canceled Britain’s training of Palestinian security forces and excluded Britain from the Gaza coordination mission, a U.S.-led international body that coordinates relief efforts in Gaza and is based in Israel.

 

Gideon Saar, Israel’s foreign minister, accused a “hostile Labour government” of “systematically acting against the state of Israel.” He also said that Israel had no choice but to retaliate for a move he called “morally distorted.”

 

Israel did not announce comparable measures against France, though it lashed out at Mr. Macron last year for leading the push to recognize Palestine. Mr. Macron’s campaign also involved organizing a conference with Saudi Arabia in July 2025 on the two-state solution.

 

Part of the challenge for Israel in retaliating across the board this time is that the ban on trading with Jewish settlements was endorsed by nine other countries in addition to Britain, France and Canada: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.

 

In a joint statement, foreign ministers of those countries said they had been pushed to act by “unprecedented levels of settler violence and settlement expansion.” They pointed to  Israeli plans to build a new settlement in E1, a strategic corridor in the West Bank that is considered essential to the viability of a Palestinian state.

 

The countries said they would enact national laws, and support European laws, to restrict trade in goods with the settlements, which are widely viewed as illegal under international law. Britain, France and Canada went further. In addition to halting goods trade, they said they would target services, going after “individuals and companies that support, facilitate or profit from illegal settlement activity.”

 

Analysts said that could prove challenging, citing the theoretical example of an Israeli bank that provides loans for West Bank settlement construction but conducts other banking activities in Israel or abroad.

 

“No one has gone there yet,” said Daniel Levy, who runs the U.S./Middle East Project, a think tank in London and New York that works for Middle East peace. “This is taking it into new terrain, certainly on the U.K. side.”

 

Mr. Levy, who criticized the previous Labour government for taking what he called half measures against Israel, said Mr. Burnham recognized that he needed to do more. Soon after taking office in July, he apologized for how Labour initially handled the Gaza war, which was spurred by Hamas’s attack on Israel in October 2023, saying the government “didn’t get it right.”

 

The policy shift has been fronted by his foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, who has staked out a markedly tougher line on Israel than his predecessors. In Parliament on Tuesday, Mr. Miliband described himself as a “proud British Jew” who supported Israel. But he lashed out at the situation in the West Bank, where settler attacks on Palestinians reached record levels in recent years, leading to Palestinian displacement across strategic tracts of the territory.

 

“The British government agrees that there is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in areas of the West Bank, perpetrated by settler terrorists,” Mr. Miliband said. “All too often the Israeli government has turned a blind eye to this.”

 

Speaking to broadcasters on Wednesday, he added that Britain had assessed whether the cost of taking action outweighed the benefit, but concluded that Britain could not “simply stand by because we feared Israeli reaction.”

 

Britain, Mr. Levy noted, had rejected the argument that it should hold off until after Israel’s election next month, lest its measures helped to rally Israeli voters to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and empower his hard-line government. The hard-liners, he said, were already plenty empowered.

 

Not everybody praised Britain’s new stance. “British policy toward Israel and the wider Middle East has increasingly substituted declaratory positioning for strategy,” wrote Peter Mandelson, a Labour Party stalwart who served as Britain’s ambassador to Washington before being ousted because of his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender.

 

“The result has been a marked erosion of British leverage with Israel,” making a two-state solution less, not more, likely, Mr. Mandelson continued, in an essay in The Spectator, a conservative magazine.

 

Britain’s government clearly hopes for the opposite result and has persuaded allies to follow its path. Devising the trade sanctions will take months, Mr. Levy noted, and enforcing them will be tricky. But it is the kind of diplomatic heavy lifting at which Britain has often excelled, he said.

 

“It is testing a theory that the U.K. still has some heft,” Mr. Levy said. “This is Britain taking a leadership ownership role, and it does give other countries room for maneuver.”

 

Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting.

 

Mark Landler is the Paris bureau chief of The Times, covering France, as well as American foreign policy in Europe and the Middle East. He has been a journalist for more than three decades.