Britain: Burnham’s token sanctions on Israel change nothing

Last week, the UK government announced a ban on trade with illegal Israeli settlements. The government has presented these measures as Britain standing “for fairness against injustice”, but the reality is that these cynical politicians stand for nothing.

On 8 September, new Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband, announced that the UK would introduce an import ban on goods produced in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

As we will explain, this is nothing more than a symbolic gesture. But that this gesture has even been made is the result of a geopolitical shift. It exposes the rift in the fragile web of western imperialism.

Over the last three years, the Israeli government has been pushing further away from what is in the best interests of western imperialism as a whole. This is epitomised by the Iran War – which Israel dragged the US into – which has had a huge impact on the world economy and been extremely unpopular from the beginning, even within the US.

World leaders, particularly in Europe, have been desperate to distance themselves from this catastrophic mess, and prove they can pursue a foreign policy independent from the US. Obviously, they enjoy no such independence, and continue to cling to the coattails of US imperialism even when repeatedly shunned and insulted by Trump.

However, in these conditions, space has opened up to give the appearance of pursuing an independent foreign policy, and the UK government is opportunistically jumping on the moment.

Another important factor in all this is the impact of the Palestine movement, which has pushed public opinion and been a consistent thorn in the side of the British establishment.

Since coming into office, Burnham has been under pressure to win back much of the left-wing and Muslim vote that Labour has lost. For example, three quarters of Labour deserters who switched to the Greens, Plaid, SNP or the Lib Dems since 2024 said their opinion on the Labour Party would improve if the next leader adopted more measures in support of Palestine.

Starmer, under this pressure, started to go in this direction, with a partial arms embargo and a flimsy recognition of a Palestinian state. But it was too late. Starmer’s legacy on Palestine will always be that Israel has the “right to cut off power and water”.

To put across a new image, the Labour government needed a new figurehead. But it doesn’t represent anything fundamentally different. This is evident in the fact that Burnham’s cabinet is stuffed with supporters of Labour Friends of Israel, including his chief of staff.

In his statement, Miliband said that Britain would continue to support “important and valued trade” with Israel and stressed that, “the sanctions regime will target illegal settlements and settlement expansion, not Israel.”

However, goods originating from the occupied West Bank only make a tiny proportion of the total goods and services that flow from Israel to the UK.

In 2025, total trade between the UK and Israel amounted to £6 billion. Al Jazeera estimates that the actual amount of trade between the UK and illegal settlements is likely to be considerably less than £6 million – 0.1 percent of the trade between the UK and Israel. And the government has acknowledged that it is “difficult to obtain accurate figures for UK trade” with Israeli settlements.

As it stands, goods originating from the occupied West Bank are hidden in supply chains and already mislabeled as ‘made in Israel’ to bypass international trade rules. There is little the government could do to prevent this.

More significantly, illegal settlements in the West Bank cannot be separated from the Israeli state and the Israeli economy.

It is the state itself that is seizing land, displacing people, greenlighting the building of new settlements and arming settlers. The far-right Israeli minister Bezalel Smotrich openly said that the E1 project would “erase the idea of a Palestinian state”.

According to an article by The Times, Burnham spoke to Trump on the phone the day before the announcement to smooth relations with Washington.

The same article reveals that British diplomats privately told US counterparts that the sanctions were largely symbolic and would have little effect on wider UK-Israel trade relations.

There it is. These measures are entirely performative and tokenistic.

What was entirely absent from the government’s announcements was anything about genocide in Gaza / Image: WAFA, Wikimedia Commons

On top of this, what was entirely absent from the government’s announcements was anything about genocide in Gaza.

On Tuesday in parliament, Miliband said that there is “increasing evidence that war crimes appear to have been committed, and we support legal processes to determine this.”

This is pathetic. In the last three years, at least 100,000 Palestinians have been killed. Yet Miliband can’t bring himself to call out the genocide, or commit to any meaningful action against it. Yet, this government wants us to think it is on the side of fairness against injustice.

But Burnham, Miliband and co. have been clear; they still support Israel. And this support means continuing to sell arms to aid the war machine.

The British government is still very much complicit in the countless horrific war crimes that have been committed against the Palestinian people.

The leadership of the Palestine movement needs to move beyond lobbying politicians and attempting to appeal to their better nature.

We need an organised, mass working-class response of workers’ boycotts. Last year, the Italian working class showed the way forward on this with a general strike for Palestine. It is no coincidence that shortly after that, Trump pressured Netanyahu to sign a ceasefire – the US ruling class was fearful that if they did nothing, strikes could spread.

Above all, it means linking the struggle for Palestinian freedom with the fight against British imperialism and the fight against capitalism.