The paper treats settlement expansion principally as an excess of the present Netanyahu coalition - whereas the Knesset has consistently voted overwhelmingly in favour of annexation of the West Bank. It asks Britain largely to wait for a future Israeli government, tolerate continued construction inside the “major settlement blocs”, and avoid wider measures affecting settlement-related trade, finance or institutions. Its case rests on three claims: land swaps will probably absorb the blocs into Israel; broader action may damage Israel’s opposition before an election; and economic differentiation could become a boycott of Israel and harm Palestinian workers.

That means support for a new Israeli government programme that comprises:

• A 8.5 billion-shekel ($2.3 billion) agreement to expand illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.

• The plan includes approximately 12,000 new housing units and major infrastructure projects.

• Israeli officials described the agreement as a step toward “changing the face of the region.”

E1: delay not a retreat

The immediate priority must remain stopping E1. The timetable has changed. The Israeli State Attorney’s Office has informed Peace Now, which has pending legal action concerning E1, that the relevant tender documentation is now expected to be published on the Israel Land Authority website within the next two to three months rather than by the 5th August. It has also warned that publication could occur sooner and that no precise date can be guaranteed. In the absence of those documents, bidding cannot begin. This is a reprieve but it is not a cancellation, a formal suspension or a change of policy. The tender remains expected in the near future. Israel is an election campaign in which parties within Netanyahu’s coalition are competing to establish themselves as the most uncompromising champions of West Bank settlement. It is entirely conceivable that political pressure will force publication during the campaign.

E1 must therefore not be allowed to slip from the international agenda. The additional time should be used to strengthen deterrence before commercial interests acquire rights in the project. E1 is not simply another settlement expansion. It would consolidate an Israeli-controlled corridor between occupied East Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim, deepen the division of the West Bank and further sever East Jerusalem from the territory of a future Palestinian state. The British government has already said that the project would divide the West Bank in two and constitute a serious breach of international law. It has also warned businesses not to bid for E1 construction tenders. Warnings, however, are not consequences. The UK should announce now that companies, directors, financial institutions, insurers and professional-service providers materially involved in E1 by linkages to the Israeli companies that will bid, will face targeted sanctions, exclusion from public procurement and restrictions on access to British finance. It should coordinate that position with European, Commonwealth and regional partners and make clear that proceeding with E1 would fundamentally alter the basis of Britain’s relationship with Israel.

The election fallacy

The central political assumption in the LFI paper is that the next Israeli election may produce a government willing to dismantle outposts, restrain settler violence and refocus construction towards the major blocs. Such a government would plainly be preferable to the present coalition. But it would not solve the underlying problem, construction in major blocks is still illegal and no viable candidate for PM accepts the existence of the State of Palestine.

Critically, even on LFI’s own analysis, the likely alternative is not an end to settlement construction. It is continued building in those settlements that Israeli leaders expect eventually to annex. International law recognises no such exception. UN Security Council Resolution 2334 states that settlements in the territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, have no legal validity. The International Court of Justice concluded in July 2024 that Israel must cease all new settlement activity and that the settlements and the regime associated with them are being maintained in violation of international law.

Land swaps may form part of a possible future agreement. But a possible negotiating mechanism cannot become advance permission for unilateral annexation. Palestinian negotiators’ past willingness to discuss mutually agreed exchanges did not authorise Israel to determine the borders, enlarge the settlements and then present the resulting map as irreversible. Nor can Britain suspend its responsibilities whenever Israel enters an election cycle. Waiting is not neutral because it accepts the day by day violence against Palestinian homes and people.

A state system, not a fringe problem

LFI rightly condemns settler violence and supports sanctions against its most notorious perpetrators. By late June 2026, more than 6,200 Palestinians, including over 3,000 children, had been displaced since 2023 by settler attacks and related access restrictions; more than 2,300 had been displaced in 2026 alone. Outposts, settler farms, road access, land seizures, demolition orders, planning restrictions and violence increasingly work together to push Palestinian communities from strategically important land.

Sanctions against individual attackers are necessary, but insufficient. A policy directed only at the most visible perpetrators leaves untouched the political, financial and administrative structures that enable settlement growth, retroactively legalise outposts, provide infrastructure and enforce a discriminatory planning regime.

The LFI paper divides settlements into two categories: those outside the major blocs, which should stop expanding, and those inside the blocs, whose continued growth is treated as broadly compatible with a future agreement so can continue. But its focus on violent extremists and unauthorised outposts risks reducing a structural policy to the misconduct of a fringe and it implies that settler violence is spasmodic rather than systematic. The settlement enterprise is not sustained by a few lawless individuals acting beyond the reach of the state. It depends upon government planning decisions, military protection, roads, water, electricity, public subsidies, retroactive legalisation, discriminatory land administration and the systematic restriction of Palestinian construction.

The distinction between authorised settlements and unauthorised outposts may matter under Israeli domestic law. It does not alter their position under international law. The ICJ specifically observed that the distinction is immaterial where communities are established or maintained with state support. Sanctioning individual attackers while leaving the enabling system untouched is therefore inadequate. Britain must be prepared to act against the organisations, state officials, financing arrangements and commercial networks that facilitate settlement expansion and Palestinian displacement. The “practical” objections are excuses.

LFI argues that restrictions on settlement goods and services would be too difficult to administer. Israeli and settlement economies are intertwined; major banks and companies operate on both sides of the Green Line; essential services cross territorial boundaries; and Palestinian workers may lose employment. These issues require careful policy design. They do not make action impossible. The United Kingdom already differentiates between Israel and the occupied territory. Settlement products do not receive the tariff preferences available to Israeli goods. The government’s own business guidance now advises against financial transactions, investment, procurement, tourism and other economic activity in or directly benefiting illegal settlements.

Britain has also demonstrated through its response to Russia’s occupation of Ukrainian territory that it can operate territorial restrictions covering goods, investment, finance and services. Israel and Russia are not identical cases, and measures must be legally tailored. But the administrative argument has already been disproved. The question is not whether Britain possesses the machinery. It is whether it has the political will to use it consistently.

The ICJ found that third states must not recognise as legal the situation created by Israel’s unlawful presence or render aid or assistance in maintaining it. It also identified the need to prevent trade and investment relations that help sustain the unlawful situation. A prohibition on settlement-related trade and investment would not be a boycott of Israel. It would be territorial differentiation between Israel and land that Britain does not recognise as Israeli.

Humanitarian, medical and genuinely necessary municipal services can be exempted. Palestinian workers affected by the transition should receive direct assistance, preferential access to British markets and investment in Palestinian businesses. Dependency produced by occupation cannot be used to justify preserving the occupation’s economy indefinitely.

The strategic assumption must also change

A deeper fallacy continues to shape British policy: the presumption that Israel is necessarily a strategic ally and a net contributor to regional stability. Iran remains a threat. Hamas committed appalling atrocities on 7 October. Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed armed groups have contributed profoundly to regional insecurity. Acknowledging these facts does not require Britain to ignore the destabilising consequences of Israeli policy.

Permanent occupation, territorial annexation, the devastation of Gaza, attacks across national borders and efforts to establish enduring Israeli dominance have consequences for Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and the Gulf. At minimum, it is no longer credible to treat Israel simply as the remedy to the regional disorder it largely produces. Britain should place its intelligence, military and security relationship with Israel under formal review. The review should test the reliability and independence of intelligence received; examine whether cooperation exposes Britain to legal complicity; and determine whether arrangements founded on an assumed identity of strategic interests continue to serve British and regional security.

This is not an argument for trusting Iran. It is an argument against organising British strategy around a false binary in which any state opposed to Iran must automatically be treated as a stabilising ally.

The same review should extend to arms exports. As of February 2026, 395 non-suspended export licences involving Israel remained extant, including 203 classified as military, although many related to re-export, testing, defensive systems or equipment not assessed as usable in Gaza. The distinctions matter, but the appropriate response is a precautionary suspension of remaining military licences pending an open and comprehensive legal review not continued reliance on narrow assessments confined to operations in Gaza.

Palestinian Statehood

Britain recognised the State of Palestine in September 2025 because settlement expansion and the destruction of Gaza were eroding the prospect of Palestinian self-determination. The government accepted at the time that recognition alone would not change conditions on the ground. Recognition must therefore have practical consequences. The United Kingdom should continue to defend Palestinian statehood and should not allow Israel’s unilateral actions to veto it. But it must also critically examine the great diplomatic shibboleth of the past three decades.

The words “two-state solution” have too often become a substitute for preventing the destruction of its territorial foundations. Repetition of the formula has continued while settlements have expanded, annexation has advanced and Gaza has been devastated in a genocidal war.

A sovereign and viable Palestinian state remains the internationally recognised objective. But British policy should begin with principles rather than an incantation: equal rights through parity of esteem, self-determination, physical security, freedom from domination and accountability under law.

If territorial partition remains achievable, Britain must act now to preserve it. If Israel succeeds in making it impossible, the international community will need to consider alternative constitutional and political arrangements capable of guaranteeing those rights to both peoples. What Britain cannot do is defend a diplomatic map while declining to prevent its destruction.

Four fronts for British action

British policy should now move on four connected fronts.

First, the government should use the present window to prevent E1. It should publish in advance the sanctions and commercial consequences that will follow tender publication, bidding or participation in construction.

Second, it should apply to settlement activity the territorial sanctions logic already used in response to Russia’s occupation of Ukrainian territory: prohibiting settlement goods, services, investment and finance; excluding settlement-linked entities from procurement and government support; and suspending remaining military export licences pending review.

Third, it should reassess the intelligence and security relationship with Israel, ending arrangements that assume a common strategic interest where the evidence no longer supports one.

Fourth, it should use Britain’s permanent seat on the Security Council and its convening power to build a coalition prepared to implement international law. That means moving beyond statements towards coordinated economic measures, support for Palestinian sovereignty and a diplomatic process grounded in equal rights rather than indefinite management of occupation.

There is no single “Jewish opinion” that should be invoked to close this debate.

LFI warns that stronger measures may be perceived by British Jews as singling out Israel amid rising antisemitism. Antisemitism is real and urgent, and no policy should target anyone because they are Jewish or Israeli.

Jewish communities in Britain and elsewhere contain a broad range of views, including profound disagreement about the conduct of the Israeli government. Rising antisemitism must be confronted absolutely and without qualification. But sanctions directed at unlawful territorial activity are not sanctions against Jewish identity.

Institute for Jewish Policy Research data show strong continuing attachment to Israel alongside growing moral conflict: 51 per cent said Israel’s conduct in Gaza clashed with their Jewish values. Among those aged 20 to 29, 24 per cent identified as anti-Zionist and a further 20 per cent as non-Zionist. These findings do not support a simplistic claim that British Jews have collectively turned against Israel. They demonstrate something more important: a community that is attached, alarmed, internally diverse and increasingly divided over the conduct of the Israeli state.

The government must protect Jewish communities from hatred and violence. It must also uphold international law. Territorial measures directed at unlawful settlement activity are not sanctions on Jewish identity, and assumed community opinion cannot become a veto over foreign policy.

LFI is right that settlements threaten peace. Its mistake is to imagine that the threat can still be contained through another election, selective action against extremists and renewed expressions of faith in negotiations. E1 is the clearest test of whether British policy means anything. The revised timetable gives ministers more time to act, but no excuse for delay.

Britain helped shape this conflict a century ago. It recognised Palestine because the prospect of Palestinian statehood was disappearing. It has demonstrated over Ukraine that it can mobilise states to defend the principle that territory cannot lawfully be acquired by force. The choice is no longer between action and caution. It is between enforcement and acquiescence—between principle and complicity.

One year ago today, on 28 July 2025, Awdah Hathaleen was standing in his own village, filming an attack on his community. He was not carrying a weapon. He was documenting what was happening as settlers used heavy machinery to damage Palestinian property in Umm al-Khair, in Masafer Yatta. Awdah was an English teacher, a human rights defender, a father of three and a contributor to the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land. He understood the importance of recording what Palestinians endure because he knew how frequently their testimony is ignored or denied. My colleagues at BPP and our friends at Caabu hosted him in the UK before I joined the charity and spoke of him with great warmth and love.

The camera was still running when he was shot.

A new investigation by Al-Haq’s Forensic Architecture Investigation Unit reconstructs the events using synchronised video footage, spatial analysis and a three-dimensional model of the scene. It concludes that Israeli settler Yinon Levi fired the 9mm bullet that struck Awdah in the heart. It finds that Awdah posed no threat, that no armed Palestinians were present near him and that the shooting did not take place in circumstances of imminent danger to Levi.

Video from the Hathaleen family, 3rd July 2026

Awdah was killed while bearing witness.

His death attracted international attention because he was known beyond Palestine and because the circumstances of his killing were captured on film. But the significance of Al-Haq’s investigation lies precisely in its refusal to treat the killing as an isolated crime committed by one violent individual.

The investigation traces the institutional system surrounding Levi: the agricultural outposts, settlement organisations, volunteers, sources of financial and material support, and the protection provided by Israeli military and police forces. Its conclusion is that settler violence is not simply tolerated by the state. It operates within a structure that enables, protects and uses that violence to extend control over Palestinian land.

Awdah’s killing was therefore exceptional only in the attention it received. The violence itself was not exceptional. The form varies. A man is shot while filming. A child is beaten. Shepherds are driven from grazing land. Livestock are stolen. A house or mosque is set alight. Olive trees are uprooted. A water pipe is destroyed. A family wakes to find settlers outside its windows. A road is blocked so that children cannot reach school and ambulances cannot reach the sick.

Each incident may appear briefly in a humanitarian report. Most never enter the international news at all. Another step in the annexation of the West Bank from the State of Palestine to the State of Israel.

Between 14 and 20 July 2026 alone, the UN documented at least 50 settler attacks resulting in Palestinian casualties or property damage. Three Palestinians were killed in incidents connected to settler attacks during that period, while approximately 36 were injured.

Violence is not confined to the moment a gun is fired. It continues through the confiscation of land, the demolition order, the closed military zone, the destroyed water supply and the unanswered complaint. It is present in the knowledge that an armed settler may enter a village under military protection while the Palestinians who resist him are treated as the threat.

One year after Awdah was killed, Umm al-Khair has not been protected.

The process he was documenting has continued. Settlers have established caravans close to the village and taken control of parts of Palestinian property. Barbed wire has been placed beside family homes. The Israeli military has declared Palestinian land a closed military zone, preventing residents from reaching their own facilities and livestock.

In July 2026, members of the Hathaleen family reported that they had been unable to use their own toilets for nearly a month because settlers had occupied the adjoining land. Soldiers reportedly allowed them only a few minutes every three days to feed the sheep and goats on which they depend. The road used by children travelling to school has been obstructed. Ambulances and water trucks struggle to enter. Settlers have walked across roofs, shouted abuse through windows and planted an Israeli flag on a Palestinian family’s home. A recent report from Umm al-Khair describes this harassment continuing in full view of the Israeli authorities.

Levi was held in custody for a single night and placed under house arrest for three days. A year after the killing, he has still not been charged, according to the family and the Israeli police’s response reported on 23 July.

Beyond the “extremist settler”

International governments regularly condemn “extremist settler violence”. The phrase is politically convenient because it separates the violent settler from the state whose policies make settlement possible.

Al-Haq’s investigation dismantles that distinction. It examines the relationship between individual perpetrators, agricultural outposts, settlement organisations, private funding, government support and the conduct of the military and police. It finds what Palestinians have argued for years: settler violence is not external to the machinery of occupation. It is one of its instruments.

Sanctioning a handful of violent settlers, while continuing normal political and economic relations with the institutions supporting settlement, cannot be an adequate response. Yinon Levi was already subject to British and European sanctions when Awdah was killed. Those sanctions did not protect Awdah. Nor have they protected his family during the year since his death.

Videos from Hathaleen’s family, 8th July 2026

The United Kingdom and its partners must move from condemning individual acts to confronting the structure that produces them.

That means sanctions against organisations financing and supporting violent outposts; an end to trade in goods and services with illegal settlements; support for independent international investigations; meaningful consequences for annexation and forced displacement; and practical protection for Palestinian communities facing removal from their land.

Awdah Hathaleen was not a statistic. He was a teacher, a husband, a father and a defender of his community. His final act was to make a record—to insist that what was happening in Umm al-Khair should be seen.

On the first anniversary of his death, remembering him means more than mourning. It means looking directly at the system his camera exposed. It means recognising that the violence which killed him has not ended. It is repeated across the West Bank every week, every day, protected by the same structures and sustained by the same absence of accountability.

Awdah bore witness.

The question now is whether the rest of us will act on the evidence—or allow his killing, and the killings that follow it, to become simply routine.

Further images and video from the family sent today

The Waiting Room began in a classroom. Its first act was originally workshopped with my students at Kingston University and, through collaborative teaching, with students in Baghdad and at the American University of Beirut. We were studying the Holocaust, human rights and comparative genocide: subjects that require students to confront both the historical specificity of each catastrophe and the recurring political processes through which groups of people are classified, isolated and destroyed.

The problem was always how to teach this material without reducing it to a procession of horrors; how to get the students to think both about how these crimes could come about but also how they could be prevented in the future. Dates, casualty figures and legal definitions matter. But they can also create distance. They can leave students knowing what happened without understanding how it became possible or how ordinary language, institutions and professional routines help to make the extraordinary appear administratively normal. These events can also be traumatic to think about and the scale of these events can induce both a sense of hopelessness and an acceptance of inevitability. It is tempting to think that perpetrators as states are unstoppable once on this course and that justice and punishment should come after. I have argued in other work that the prevention part of the the genocide convention is the part we most need. But it can be the hardest part to implement. Finally, it is difficult in events of such profound inhumanness to think about when they end, how they end and if they ever end. Beyond intergenerational trauma in families, social groups and nations, these events change states and unless there states are remade in the ending of the genocide it is unclear if they ever recover. The bureaucratic muscle memory of a genocidal state remains in place. I have struggled with these questions for 25 years and have tried many different ways of approaching them. The Waiting Room began as a way of approaching them from a different direction.

The original Waiting Room

The earliest version of The Waiting Room brought together three writers whose lives and work had shaped my teaching: Walter Benjamin, Primo Levi and Tadeusz Borowski. They appear here as dramatic personae rather than biographical portraits. Their dialogue combines ideas drawn from their writings with theatrical invention and should not be read as verbatim speech or as a complete account of their political views. Benjamin’s presence draws particularly on “Critique of Violence” (an incredibly difficilt piece I still struggle with) and “On the Concept of History”: (Paul Klee’s famous Angel of History from something different comes each time I read it) - law-making and law-preserving violence, the state of emergency, history as catastrophe and literally weight not process, and the warning that every document of civilisation is also a document of barbarism. Levi’s voice draws on If This Is a Man (published 80 years ago) and The Drowned and the Saved, especially his reflections on the “grey zone,” shame, survival, testimony, and the moral danger of allowing one people’s suffering to license suffering inflicted on another. Levi was a God to my mother and his presence was part of my growing up. Borowski’s stories, above all This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, inform the play’s attention to hunger, coercion, compromised survival, “Kanada,” and the collapse of simple divisions in Hilberg’s defining typography between victim, witness and perpetrator within systems designed to destroy human solidarity.

Together, they provide the play’s ethical counterpoint: history is not inevitable, but it is made through institutions, categories, administrative language and choices that can come to appear normal. Their presence does not equate Auschwitz, the Nakba or Gaza. Rather, it asks how never again can come to mean something, how memory and fear can be used to feed either wisdom or violence, and how the witness may become not only evidence of suffering but a claim upon the living.

The central conceit of the play, in homage to a Matter of Life and Death, the 1946 classic Powell and Pressburger film, is that they meet after death in a waiting room that is part railway station, part purgatory and part administrative office. Each is, in different ways, a “difficult case”. Benjamin died while fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe. Levi survived Auschwitz and spent the rest of his life trying to find language precise enough for what he had witnessed before falling or committing suicide. Borowski survived the camps, wrote with brutal honesty about the moral corruption imposed by them, became entangled with post-war communism and died by suicide at twenty-eight.

In the play they become conductors, as in the Powell and Pressburger film, and must consider difficult cases. They argue about law, punishment, complicity, survival and the stories that states, and individuals, construct about themselves. Themes explored in the brilliant work of my wife Professor Meg Jensen, especially in her most recent work which is in effect her story of her family, Griefwork as Autotheory. Sisterhood, Suicide and Art; but which touches on the universal truth that we are all only the stories we tell about ourselves.

The railway station emerged naturally from this homage to A Matter of Life and Death, but also because, of course, railways occupy a particular place in the history of the Holocaust. The metaphor extends beyond the trains themselves. Before a train can reach its destination, tracks have to be laid. Timetables must be written. Categories must be created. Orders must be transmitted. Officials must learn to treat living people as units within a system.

The original purpose of the play was educational: it was tool. It was intended to help students ask how violence is organised and how responsibility is dispersed. Who gives the order? Who writes it down? Who designs the timetable? Who guards the door? Who accepts the official explanation? At what point does a person working within a system become responsible for the destination towards which it is travelling?

These questions stayed with me after I left Kingston as Professor of Human Rights and Life Writing in 2008. In the years that followed, I worked on projects and taught or delivered training in societies profoundly affected by genocide and mass violence, including Armenia, Rwanda, Ukraine, Lebanon, Iraq and Kurdish Iraq giving talks in all these places on these themes and occasionally using the first act of the Waiting Room as a teaching aid. Each encounter altered my understanding of what comparative genocide studies should attempt.

Comparison must never mean equivalence. The Holocaust is not the Armenian genocide. The Anfal is not Rwanda. The Holodomor and Stalinist terror are not Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Srebrenica is not Darfur. The Nakba is not Gaza. But each is connected and each, as Benjamin argues, adds to the weight of the other.

Each has its own history, perpetrators, victims, ideologies and political conditions. Yet refusing all comparison can become another way of refusing to learn. The ethical task is to compare processes without collapsing experiences: to examine how names become categories, how emergency powers harden into systems, how populations are removed from maps, and how the language of security can be made to justify almost anything.

After 7 October

Genocide does not begin with killing. It begins with distinctions: citizen and foreigners, native and intruder, loyal and disloyal, human and less than human. It advances through files, maps, permits, euphemisms and temporary measures that become permanent. The Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, including the deliberate killing and abduction of Israeli civilians, changed the context in which the work had to be written but it did not appear from nowhere.

What followed in Gaza changed the play itself and forms the basis of the Second and Third Acts.

I could no longer treat the questions raised in the original classroom exercise as belonging primarily to the past. The destruction of Gaza, the mass killing and displacement of Palestinians, the devastation of hospitals, universities, homes and cultural institutions, and the restriction of food and humanitarian assistance forced the work into the present, as Darfur force genocide into our midst. This is not the first time we have watched genocide live on TV, as I argue in the concluding essay in The Waiting Room.

The language surrounding Israel and Palestine is intensely policed. Historical explanation is treated as justification. Comparison is denounced as equivalence. Criticism of a state is confused with hostility towards a people. Palestinian history is repeatedly required to begin at the point most convenient to those narrating it. Israeli suffering and Palestinian suffering are placed in competition, as though recognising one required the erasure of the other.

The script is a place in which these pressures can be resisted and explored. It had to acknowledge the victims of 7 October without allowing that day to become year zero. It had to confront the destruction of Gaza without instrumentalising the Holocaust. It had to distinguish between Jewish history, Zionism, the State of Israel and the policies of an Israeli government. Above all, it had to insist that no history of persecution confers a licence to persecute others.

Since January 2025, my work as Director of the Britain Palestine Project has brought me much closer to the legal, political and human consequences of Gaza. That experience inevitably deepened the questions within the play. But The Waiting Room is a private work arising from my teaching and research. It is not a Britain Palestine Project publication and does not represent the organisation’s policy or position. It is for all its flaws and errors entirely my own work and my own opinion.

I returned to the original material during a holiday in July 2026. The first act remained rooted in the Waiting Room and in the arguments between Benjamin, Levi and Borowski. But the work expanded backwards and forwards through history.

The King David Hotel and the grammar of violence

The first destination beyond the Waiting Room became the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on 22 July 1946. The work was completed and published on 22 July 2026.

The bombing, carried out by the Irgun, killed 91 people: Arabs, Britons, Jews, Armenians and others. The hotel was both a functioning civilian space and the centre of British administrative and military power in Mandate Palestine.

The bombing was not genocide, and the play does not present it as such. It was an act of political violence during the final years of British rule. But the arguments made around it contain a grammar that has become painfully familiar: the dual-use target; the disputed warning; the language of necessity; regret for civilian casualties; the struggle to control the narrative; and the claim that violence is justified by the requirements of security and statehood.

From the hotel, the play moves through the creation of Israel, the Nakba, refugee camps, occupation, checkpoints, settlements, administrative annexation and Gaza. The same objects acquire different functions. Milk churns used to conceal bombs become luggage, water containers, land files, urns, aid packages and models for reconstruction. A Palestinian house becomes an assigned property. A temporary security measure becomes a permanent system. Reconstruction becomes a commercial tender conducted over the heads of those whose homes have been destroyed.

The departure board announces the stages:

NAKBA — BOARDING

SECURITY — PERMANENT SERVICE

TEMPORARY MEASURE — RENEWED

ANNEXATION — NO FORMAL ANNOUNCEMENT

GAZA — PLATFORM NOT ANNOUNCED

RECONSTRUCTION — PRIVATE TENDER

RETURN — WINDOW CLOSED

What connects these scenes is not a claim that all violence is identical. It is the persistence of an administrative logic: people are first deprived of their names and then governed through categories.

One of the play’s central sequences presents witnesses from Armenia, Ukraine, China, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Kurdistan. Each refuses the identity imposed before their name: Armenian, kulak, bourgeois, enemy, Tutsi, Muslim, saboteur. Their presence is not intended to produce a competition in suffering. It asks how classification prepares the ground for exclusion and how exclusion can prepare the ground for destruction.

Teaching differently

The experience of writing the later acts also changed how I imagined the play being taught.

Students should not be asked to reproduce trauma through crude simulations. They should not be assigned to “play” perpetrators and victims as though genocide were an empathy exercise. Nor should education demand that young people rank atrocities or decide whose suffering matters most.

Instead, the script is accompanied by five interactive lesson models examining human rights, political institutions, theatre, public history and comparative genocide. Students can work as performers, directors, designers, lawyers, historians, cartographers or critical observers. They can analyse a warning, redesign a memorial, interrogate a map, examine a bureaucratic category or ask when an emergency measure becomes permanent. Better teachers will I hope think of better ways of using the material.

The aim is disciplined inquiry rather than emotional spectacle.

At the end of each session, students are asked to complete three statements:

1. One idea I understand differently now.

2. One question the scene leaves unresolved.

3. One responsibility involved in representing this history.

That final question has become increasingly important to me since 7 October. Representation is never neutral. To tell a story is to decide where it begins, whose testimony is admitted, which bodies are counted and which forms of violence are treated as exceptional or normal. As Professor Jensen would say: Whose story is this?

The tracks are still being laid

The play ends with all its worlds present at once: the Warsaw flat, the railway waiting room, the King David Hotel, a Palestinian house, a refugee camp, a checkpoint, a Gaza kitchen, a hospital without walls and a reconstruction map marked simply: HERE.

The stove remains. The milk churns remain. The clock returns to 12:37.

I began this work as a way of teaching the Holocaust and comparative genocide. I returned to it because the events since 7 October demonstrated that the central problem was no longer how to transmit the memory of “never again”. It was how to respond when the knowledge accumulated over more than a century of genocide studies failed once more to prevent genocide.

We know the warning signs. We know the language of dehumanisation. We know how collective punishment is rationalised, how civilians disappear inside military categories, how starvation becomes policy and how the destruction of homes is followed by plans for reconstruction that exclude the people who lived in them.

The failure is no longer primarily one of knowledge. It is a failure of political will, law and moral imagination.

The Waiting Room does not offer an easy resolution. Theatre cannot adjudicate a genocide case, rebuild Gaza or return the displaced to their homes. What it can do is interrupt the official timetable. It can restore names to categories, voices to statistics and moral choices to processes presented as inevitable.

After the Holocaust, humanity knew where certain trains could lead. Yet we continued to construct the tracks.

Nothing is inevitable. But everything is willed.

The amendment also reaffirmed the Church’s commitment to:

• reject antisemitism and anti-Muslim hostility;

• continue dialogue with Jewish and Muslim communities; and

• review Church investment policy in light of the International Court of Justice’s July 2024 Advisory Opinion on the illegality of the occupation.

It will be particularly interesting to see how the Church implements this last bullet point on its investment policy.

The motion passed comfortably in all three Houses:

• Bishops: 25–0 (5 abstentions)

• Clergy: 115–20 (30 abstentions)

• Laity: 113–27 (35 abstentions).

The amendment from “receive” to “hear” was intended to distinguish between listening to Palestinian Christian testimony and endorsing every theological or political claim contained within Kairos II.

What the Chief Rabbi Objected To

Before and after the vote, Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis argued that Kairos Palestine II is not simply testimony from Palestinian Christians but a theological and political document that:

• presents a one-sided account of the conflict;

• marginalises Jewish history and legitimate security concerns;

• portrays Zionism as inherently racist and colonial - using the term settler colonialism;

• challenges the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state;

• rejects important forms of Jewish-Christian dialogue; and

• risks undermining decades of interfaith relations.

Following the vote, he described Synod’s decision as “shameful”, characterising Kairos II as “a document full of falsehood” that reduces a complex conflict to “a single, warped narrative” and represents “a sad day for Jewish-Christian relations.”

The Board of Deputies of British Jews advanced similar concerns, arguing that implementation of the motion could damage Jewish-Christian relations by encouraging engagement with a document that portrays mainstream Zionism as inherently illegitimate and calls upon churches to boycott dialogue with Zionist voices.

How Far Does the Critique Stand Up?

Many of the Chief Rabbi’s criticisms are supported by the language of Kairos Palestine II itself.

The document:

• describes Gaza as a “time of genocide”;

• characterises the Zionist project as seeking control of all Palestine;

• describes Israel as a settler-colonial and exclusionary state built on Jewish supremacy;

• condemns the Abraham Accords as normalising occupation; and

• explicitly urges churches to distinguish between dialogue with Jews and dialogue with Zionists, including calls to boycott dialogue with Zionist voices.

These passages explain why many British Jews understand the document not merely as criticism of Israeli government policy but as questioning core elements of Jewish national identity and self-determination. The central question before the Synod was however, was whether the Church should listen seriously to Palestinian Christians living through war and occupation—not whether every sentence of Kairos II, even if rooted in international law, should become Anglican teaching.

Archbishop Sarah Mullally made this distinction explicit during the debate, stating that hearing the documents “does not mean we agree with everything in these documents.”

The Significance of the Amendment

The change from “receive” to “hear” was therefore more than semantic.

It reflected an attempt to hold together two commitments:

• taking seriously the testimony of Palestinian Christians; and

• maintaining dialogue and relationships with Jewish communities.

Synod deliberately avoided making Kairos II an authoritative statement of Church teaching while recognising it as an important expression of lived experience. Church-wide encouragement to engage with Kairos II rightly still gives the document institutional visibility and legitimacy, even if it is not formally endorsed.

The Genocide Question

Precision is particularly important regarding the use of the term genocide.

Synod itself did not determine that genocide is occurring. Nor has the International Court of Justice reached a final judgment in South Africa v. Israel. Proceedings remain ongoing but it has determined that provisional measures are necessary to prevent genocide and there is widespread consensus amongst genocide scholars that the IDF’s campaign in Gaza meets the criterion of the genocide convention. The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry also found that Israel committed genocide in Gaza.

The General Synod reached a carefully balanced institutional position.

The General Synod’s decision should be welcomed as an important act of moral listening. By choosing to hear rather than dismiss the testimony of Palestinian Christians, the Church of England has acknowledged that a community facing profound suffering has a legitimate voice that deserves to be heard within the life of the Church. Listening does not require uncritical acceptance of every argument contained in the Kairos documents, but neither should concerns about particular formulations become grounds for silencing the lived experience of Palestinian Christians.

The debate also demonstrates the importance of distinguishing criticism of the policies and actions of the State of Israel from hostility towards Jewish people. As incoming PM Andy Burnham has argued, “being anti-Israel is not being antisemitic.” That distinction is fundamental to democratic debate and to the protection of both freedom of expression and the fight against antisemitism. Robust criticism of states and governments must never become prejudice against peoples or faith communities, but neither should allegations of antisemitism be used to foreclose legitimate discussion of international law, occupation or human rights.

Similarly, much of the language criticised by opponents of the motion—including the description of Israel as a settler-colonial project—should be understood within its intellectual context. The concept of settler colonialism is routinely employed in Palestinian political discourse and is also widely used across substantial bodies of historical, political and post-colonial scholarship to analyse the history of Zionism, the establishment of Israel and the displacement of Palestinians. Although the application of the framework remains contested and strongly rejected by some Israelis and Jewish organisations, it represents a significant and well-established strand of contemporary academic analysis rather than rhetorical innovation.

A welcome Vote

Taken as a whole, the Synod’s decision places the Church of England in line with public opinion in the United Kingdom and much of the wider international community. It also reflects the growing body of international legal opinion accepting that serious violations of international humanitarian law have occurred in Gaza and the ICJs advisory that the occupation of the State of Palestine by the State of Israel is illegal under international. Genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity are the subject of proceedings before international courts and investigations by United Nations bodies. While legal proceedings remain ongoing there is broad agreement among international legal experts that grave breaches of international law have been committed and that accountability mechanisms must be allowed to operate.

The vote also reflects the dominant approaches within contemporary historical scholarship on Palestine and Israel. Modern historical research has increasingly relied upon documentary, archaeological and comparative historical methods in reconstructing the history of Palestine, distinguishing these approaches from normative accounts grounded primarily in biblical narratives and theological traditions. The Church’s willingness to engage seriously with Palestinian historical experience places it within the mainstream of contemporary historical inquiry rather than confining discussion to exclusively confessional understandings of the past.

The significance of the Carlisle motion therefore lies not simply in its endorsement of listening to Palestinian Christians but in its recognition that justice, historical understanding and international law require the voices of those who have experienced dispossession, occupation and war to be heard alongside others. In doing so, the Church of England has taken a significant step towards aligning its witness with the concerns expressed by many churches worldwide, by a substantial body of international legal opinion, by much contemporary historical scholarship and by growing sections of British and global public opinion, while retaining its continuing responsibility to foster respectful dialogue between Palestinians, Israelis, Christians, Jews and Muslims alike.

The Commission examines the use of torture, inhumane and degrading treatment, including sexual and gender-based violence, against Palestinian children, particularly during mass arrests and in detention. It analyses pattern of Israel’s targeting of critical infrastructure essential to children, such as healthcare facilities and its short- to long-term consequences, as well as the impact of reproductive violence on newborns, resulting in poor neonatal health and birthing outcomes; attacks on orphanages and schools, impacting the loss of care for orphans and unaccompanied children, and inducing academic harm and learning disruptions for children, respectively. The Commission examines the impact of the conditions of life imposed by Israel in Gaza resulting in preventable mortality of children, exacerbating morbidity, and serious mental trauma from the relentless and widespread attacks by Israel over two years – collectively revealing severe, multi-layered harm to Palestinian children’s survival, health, and development. Further, the Commission examines how Israeli soldiers mock and weaponize symbols of childhood in Gaza, raising ethical, disciplinary and legal questions about the conduct of the Israeli security forces during the ground invasion of Gaza.

UN Commission of Inquiry

The UN Commission of Inquiry report on the intentional targeting of Palestinian children in IDF military operations in the State of Palestine presents extensive evidence based on well established evidential methodology used in comparable UN reports. The report concludes that this targeting resulted in genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, as well as war crimes in the occupied West Bank of Palestine. The Commission examined violations against Palestinian children from 7 October 2023 onward, and found that at least 20,179 Palestinian children were killed and 44,143 injured, between 7 October 2023 and 7 October 2025 around 30% of the overall official death toll. There was a campaign of intentional destruction of the infrastructure that creates life – maternity and neonatal clinics for example - and sustains childhood – paediatric healthcare facilities, nurseries, schools, playgrounds. The report not only links this policy to the charge of genocide in Gaza but also to the sustained violation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child to which Israel is a signatory, and war crimes, in the West Bank.

The IDF has accepted the Palestinian Authority’s casualty figures, which the Lancet and other sources say understate the level of killings. Having accepted these casualty figures, the IDF is also accepting the proportion of those killed who were children. The question is therefore one of intent not of the facts of their killing. The Report lays out compelling evidence that the tagretting of children is part of the Israel security strategy and an extension of the Israeli government’s policy of preventing a viable Palestinian state becoming a reality. It also demonstrates a policy of destroying education infrastructure with the clear intention of forcing parents to leave Gaza so that their children can have an education and a childhood. A policy of deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction and imposing measures intended to prevent births. Two clauses of the definition of genocide that are cited less often than the killing of members of group but which constitute elements of the crime.

The Commission found Israeli forces continued to use high-payload munitions and wide-area-effect weapons in densely populated residential areas despite mounting child casualties. The Commission said this indicated that attacks killing children in such high numbers were intentional. The Commission focused on children killed by quadcopter drones and sniper fire, often by single gunshots. Doctors interviewed by the Commission said autopsies suggested a high degree of precision, pointing to carefully aimed shots rather than accidental or indiscriminate fire. The Commission criticised Israeli forces for describing some children killed near military-control lines as “suspects,” arguing that this language shifted responsibility onto the children themselves.

Israel’s response

Israel’s response was not simply to reject the findings. Its mission in Geneva called the report a “defamatory advocacy report” but to also dismiss it as a “libelous sham.” Israel said it does not deliberately target children, that it strives to minimise civilian harm, and that the report ignored Hamas’s tactics of using civilians as human shields and embedding military facilities in civilian infrastructure. Israel’s supporters took up the libel claim and linked the report to medieval antisemitic tropes of the blood libel. Antisemitism is real. It is rising in many places. It has a long and lethal history. It includes genocide, pogroms, conspiracy theories, collective blame, Holocaust denial, threats against Jews, and old myths about Jewish cruelty and child murder. Key texts of the Holocaust like Mein Kampf and of European antisemitism like the Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, can be easily purchased across Arab world. The “blood libel” - the medieval accusation that Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes - is one of the most poisonous antisemitic lies in history. Which is why alleging its use should be done with precision.

The widely discredited definition of antisemitism developed by the Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, gives examples of antisemitic speech, including the use of classic antisemitic symbols and images, such as blood libel, to characterise Israel or Israelis. But the same IHRA text also states that criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic. If someone claims Jews as Jews murder children, that is antisemitic. If someone holds Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the Israeli state, that is antisemitic. If someone uses Gaza to launder ancient fantasies of Jewish blood-guilt, that must be confronted directly as antisemitism. But a UN-mandated inquiry alleging that a state military targeted children with drones, sniper fire, heavy munitions, military detention and abuse is not the same thing as a medieval blood myth. It is an evidence based claim about a government and its armed forces. It cannot be dismissed as antisemitism merely because the state accused is Israel. This is where Israeli propaganda does real damage to the fight against antisemitism itself.

When every grave allegation against Israel is folded into the language of the hatred of Jewish people, the term antisemitism is weakened. It becomes less a warning against a real danger and more a failing government strategic communications device. The public begins to hear “antisemitism” and suspect that what is really meant is “criticism we do not want to answer.” That, as many Israeli critics of the current government, like Peter Beinart, and experts on anti semitism, like Deborah Lipstadt, have argued, is a disaster for the Jewish community globally. It makes it easier for cynics to dismiss the very real fight that is needed against genuine antisemitism. It turns a word that should protect Jewish people into a shield for state power. And it asks Jewish history to perform a grotesque function: not remembrance, not warning, but the basis for immunity.

In addition to the slurs against the report, Israel also attacked the methodology. We are told the evidence is unreliable, the investigators are biased, the witnesses are suspect, the process is political, the standard of proof is too low, and the conclusions are predetermined. Some methodological criticism can be legitimate. UN commissions are not courts. They do not prove guilt they assert facts and patterns of behaviour based on reasonable grounds. They often work under severe access constraints, security restrictions, witness-protection concerns and state non-cooperation. But that is true across conflicts. It is not unique to Israel and Palestine.

The Report uses the same methodology and standard of proof as previous UN Commissions of Inquiry, “reasonable grounds”, combining thousands of verified open-source records with remote and in-person interviews, documentary evidence, medical records, forensic analysis, satellite and digital verification, and testimony from victims, witnesses, healthcare workers, journalists and other experts. The Commission placed children’s rights and welfare at the centre of its investigation, interviewing children wherever possible while following strict ethical safeguards, including informed consent, the principle of “do no harm,” and measures to minimise re-traumatisation. Where direct interviews would have risked further harm, investigators relied on independently verified evidence and forensic analysis.

The UN Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine used the same “reasonable grounds” standard. It relied primarily on first-hand interviews with victims and witnesses, sought corroboration from primary and secondary sources, consulted documents, inspected graves, detention sites, torture sites and weapon remnants, and selected incidents for investigation based on gravity, patterns, access and available documentation.

The UN fact-finding mission in Myanmar used the “reasonable grounds” standard too. It conducted 875 interviews with victims and eyewitnesses, used satellite imagery, authenticated documents, photographs and videos, checked information against secondary sources, consulted experts, reviewed open-source material and relied only on information it considered verified and corroborated. Myanmar, like Israel, did not cooperate.

The UN Commission of Inquiry on the DPRK had no access to the country. It therefore used public hearings, confidential interviews, written submissions, expert evidence and the “reasonable grounds” standard. It explicitly recognised the need to protect witnesses from reprisals and stored information in a confidential database.

“Context” cannot erase the child

Israel’s strongest contextual argument is Hamas. The war began with the Hamas-led attack of 7 October 2023, in which around 1,200 people were killed and 251 people were taken hostage. Hamas has committed war crimes. It embeds itself in civilian areas. It has shown contempt for Israeli and Palestinian life alike. None of this should be minimised but the use of human shields, a policy established by the British in Palestine in 1930s, substantiates the claim of intentionally targeting children: if Hamas was using them as human shields then Israel was intentionally killing those human shields. The move from “Hamas uses civilian areas” to “therefore Israeli conduct cannot be scrutinised” is one of the central evasions of the war. International humanitarian law exists precisely because armed groups and states fight in conditions of fear, rage, concealment and asymmetry. The harder the battlefield, the more necessary the law becomes not the less. The purpose of this rhetorical strategy is not simply to persuade people that Israel is innocent. It is to try to make the asking of questions illegitimate.

A serious Israeli response would not begin with charges of “sham” and “libel”. It would begin with disclosure. It would allow independent investigators access to sites, witnesses, detention facilities and operational records. It would publish the rules of engagement governing fire near so-called control lines. It would explain how children came to be shot by drones or snipers. It would release evidence for claims that those killed were combatants or immediate threats. It would investigate commanders as well as individual soldiers. It would cooperate with international mechanisms rather than denounce them from a distance. Most importantly, it would stop treating the publication of evidence of children’s deaths as an attack on the Jewish people. There is no fight against antisemitism worthy of the name that requires silence about dead children. There is no defence of Jewish safety that depends on denying Palestinian reality. And there is no credible rebuttal to a UN report alleging the deliberate targeting of children that consists mainly of calling the report a blood libel.

The Report concludes with these demands of member States of the UN - including the UN Security Council Member the UK and its soon to be new PM:

The Israeli Property Road show, the “Great Israeli Real Estate Event”, taking place in London on June 14th had originally included property in the State of Palestine among the developments for sale. These have now been removed from the website. They of course could still be on offer because the settlement involved in the sale is a flagship of the settlement movement and a cornerstone of the narrative that the land of these settlements was legally purchased by Zionists before 1948. To unpick this history, see this excellent article by the Israeli magazine 972. It is that development that was, and might still be, for sale in London tomorrow. This is an example of the way in which the Israel state and private sector have collaborated for decades in the annexation of the Palestinian land through settlement.

The property roadshow is perhaps an unusually large scale example but a major cross-border investigation on the export of agricultural products from the settlements conducted by Global Echo found evidence of an “organised, widespread, and long-standing system” through which agricultural goods from settlements in illegally occupied territory of the State of Palestine entered European markets while being presented as Israeli. In the sample it analysed, more than 17% of agricultural shipments to Europe and nearly 20% of those bound for the EU contained settlement-origin products. Just as the settlement property for sale in London tomorrow was hidden within the plain sight of the other properties for sale, so settlement goods are routinely hidden within the exports of the State of Israel. And remember these are not exports from the State of Israel. These are exports from the State of Palestine.

The report identifies three recurring methods of concealment, including:

• “hiding in plain sight” through origin statements that include settlement localities but still present them as “Israel”;

• “sham addresses” using proxy Israeli addresses unrelated to the true origin;

• “mingling” settlement produce with Israeli produce at packing or cooling facilities so that the mixed consignment travels under Israeli-origin paperwork.

Under EU law, settlement goods are not entitled to Israeli preferential tariff treatment, and food from settlements must not be labelled as coming from Israel. Global Echo argues that weak enforcement, coupled with the EU–Israel technical arrangement on origin paperwork, has left structural openings that exporters, certifiers, and downstream retailers can exploit. The same report also argues that some phytosanitary and organic certifications for settlement produce are invalid under EU law where Israeli bodies certify goods originating in occupied territory of the State of Palestine.

For services, the evidence is more uneven but still important. The clearest cases are tourism and online marketplaces. The UN human rights office’s updated settlements database in 2025 listed 158 companies connected to settlement-related activity, including Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia and TripAdvisor. That is not proof of identical legal responsibility across all firms, but it is a strong signal that settlement-linked services continue to be marketed and normalised through global platforms. Reuters reported that Airbnb reversed its 2018 pledge to delist West Bank settlement rentals in 2019 after lawsuits, and that in 2025 Ireland’s High Court required police to reconsider a complaint about Airbnb’s settlement operations.

For the UK the central policy point is plain: label-based differentiation is too weak on its own. It depends on accurate disclosure by exporters, effective verification by customs, traceability through distributors, and honest retail presentation. The UK last week tightened sanctions against settler-violence networks and issued sharper business guidance warning firms not to engage economically in Israeli settlements, but it still has not adopted a full settlement trade ban. At the same time, 141 Labour MPs have publicly urged the government to end trade with settlements.

The best-documented concealment techniques are not random mistakes: they are recurrent commercial practices that exploit known regulatory weakness. If Parliament wants meaningful compliance with international law and truthful consumer information, it should move beyond voluntary guidance to institute a ban on settlement goods and settlement-linked services as well. Given the complicity between the State of Israel and the settlement enterprise would this really be enough?

The case for a full sanctions regime against the State of Israel, based on the sanctions imposed on Russia following the seizure of Crimea and the subsequent full scale invasion, is overwhelming.

It rests first on the crime of aggression represented by the invasion and destruction of Gaza, and on the genocidal conduct of that war. It rests on the continuing aggression of settlement expansion in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem: territory recognised as part of the State of Palestine and subjected, year after year, to seizure, fragmentation and colonisation. It rests on the planned E1 development, whose purpose and effect would be to sever East Jerusalem from the rest of Palestine and make any viable Palestinian state impossible. It rests on the systematic concealment and perfidious export of goods and services from the occupied territory, on tax breaks and financial incentives that reward complicity in the settlement enterprise, and on the dense web of commercial, diplomatic and military relations that embed the occupation in the global economy.

Above all, it rests on international law. The International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion on the illegal occupation, made clear that Israel’s occupation is illegal, that states must not recognise or assist that illegality, and the ICJ’s provisional measures on genocide prevention, made clear that they have duties flowing from the prevention of genocide. The question for Britain is therefore no longer whether it disapproves of particular policies, particular ministers, particular settlers or particular acts of violence. The question is whether the United Kingdom will continue to sustain normal relations with a state in fragrant breach of authoritative statements by the ICJ on international law.

The Foreign Secretary claimed last week that the UK was a world leader in sanctions. Not quite. Britain has sanctioned some individuals and some extremist settler entities. It has not sanctioned the State of Israel. Nor has any other state. That is precisely why leadership is required. A sanctions regime that targets only the agents of occupation while leaving the occupying state untouched allows ministers to claim action while preserving the impunity of occupation.

Britain has a particular responsibility here. It is not simply another state watching from a distance. The United Kingdom was one of the architects of this crucible of human cruelty. Its historical role in Palestine cannot be separated from the catastrophe that has followed. But that history now converges with a present legal duty. The ICJ Advisory Opinion, together with the Court’s provisional measures in the genocide case, provides not only a moral imperative but a strong legal basis for action.

Whether Britain acts alone or with allies is, in the end, beside the point. The law does not wait for consensus. Nor did global public opinion wait for governments in the struggle against apartheid South Africa. Israel should now be placed on the same global plane as apartheid South Africa: subject to comprehensive diplomatic, economic, military, cultural and trade sanctions until it changes its policies, ends its illegal occupation, dismantles the settlement enterprise, complies with international law and recognises the equal rights and self-determination of the Palestinian people.

This is not a call for exceptional treatment because Israel is a special case. It is a call for the opposite: for Israel to be held to the same standards Britain claims to defend everywhere else. If aggression, annexation, apartheid and genocide prevention mean anything in international law, they must mean something in Palestine. The United Kingdom should stop pretending that partial measures amount to leadership. It should become the first state to sanction the State of Israel itself, and in doing so help bring into being a new international order that finally catches up with global public opinion, the rule of law and the demands of justice.

The same architecture should now be applied to Palestine and Israel. The UK should take the lead.

The United Kingdom formally recognised the State of Palestine on 21 September 2025, joining “over 150 countries” that already recognised a Palestinian state. Palestine has also held non-member observer State status at the United Nations since General Assembly Resolution 67/19, which reaffirmed the Palestinian people’s right to independence in the State of Palestine on the territory occupied since 1967.

The contexts of Ukraine and Palestine are different. The test is the same.

1. First principle: stop the fighting

Ukraine formulation:
First, a stop to the fighting. The E3 called on President Putin to agree to an immediate and complete ceasefire.

Palestine/Israel formulation:
There must be an immediate and complete ceasefire across the Israel-Palestine theatre: in Gaza, in the West Bank, across Israel’s borders, and in all areas where civilians are exposed to violence. A real ceasefire. Over 900 Palestinians have been killed during the current ceasefire.

For Palestine, a ceasefire cannot mean a temporary humanitarian pause while the structure of domination remains intact. It must mean an end to the occupation of the State of Palestine by the State of Israel, an end to bombardment, siege conditions, forced displacement, military incursions, settler violence, attacks on civilians, hostage-taking, and all armed action that targets or endangers civilians.

For Israel, a ceasefire must an end to rocket fire and attacks on civilians, and credible guarantees that Palestinian armed factions will not use a pause simply to prepare the next round of violence.

The chain:
If a ceasefire in Ukraine is the necessary first step towards diplomacy, then a ceasefire in Palestine and Israel is also the necessary first step. But in both cases, a ceasefire is not peace. It is the opening condition for a political settlement.

A ceasefire that freezes Russian gains in Ukraine is not a just peace.
A ceasefire that freezes Israeli occupation over Palestine is not a just peace either.

2. Second principle: lines of contact are not borders

Ukraine formulation:
The current line of contact should be the starting point for negotiations. International borders must not be changed by force, and Ukraine’s sovereign right to choose its own security arrangements and alliances must be fully respected.

Palestine/Israel formulation:
In Palestine, the relevant legal baseline is not the route of the wall, the pattern of settlements, the position of checkpoints, the expansion of municipal boundaries, the military control of the Jordan Valley, or any other fact created by occupation. The baseline is the territory of the State of Palestine occupied since 1967: the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza.

Current realities can be discussed as matters of sequencing: withdrawal, security transition, policing, guarantees, access, reconstruction, and border administration. But they cannot become the legal basis for annexation.

Palestine’s sovereign right to choose its own security arrangements, alliances, treaties, institutions and international affiliations must also be respected. Israel’s security concerns are real and must be addressed. But they cannot amount to a permanent Israeli veto over Palestinian sovereignty.

The chain:
If Russia cannot turn a line of contact into a new border, Israel cannot turn settlements, walls, military corridors or annexationist facts into sovereign title.

If Ukraine has the sovereign right to choose its own security arrangements, Palestine must have the same right.

3. Third principle: legally binding security guarantees

Ukraine formulation:
Ukraine must have robust and legally binding security guarantees in place once a ceasefire enters into force, building on commitments made in Berlin in December 2025 and Paris in January 2026. This includes the deployment of the Multinational Force – Ukraine.

Palestine/Israel formulation:
A just peace between Palestine and Israel also requires legally binding guarantees. For Palestine, those guarantees must protect recognised sovereignty: borders, territorial integrity, East Jerusalem, Gaza-West Bank connection, control over resources, freedom of movement, airspace, maritime access, ownership of natural resources like gas, inclusive reconstruction, and protection from renewed occupation or annexation.

For Israel, those guarantees must protect civilians from attack, ensure border security, prevent armed groups from operating outside lawful state authority, and provide international mechanisms for monitoring compliance.

The Ukraine principle points towards a necessary conclusion: if Ukraine needs an international force to guarantee the ceasefire and deter renewed aggression, then Palestine and Israel may also require an international implementation architecture. But the purpose must not be to police Palestinians on Israel’s behalf. It must be to guarantee the agreement, protect civilians on both sides, oversee withdrawal, support lawful Palestinian security institutions, and prevent either side from violating the settlement.

The chain:
If Ukraine cannot be expected to rely on Russian assurances, Palestine cannot be expected to rely on Israeli assurances.

If Israel cannot be expected to rely on declarations from Palestinian factions, then both states need binding third-party guarantees.

Security must be mutual, legal and enforceable.

4. Fourth principle: assets, compensation and the cost of illegality

Ukraine formulation:
Russian assets will remain immobilised until Russia ceases its war of aggression and compensates Ukraine for the damage caused by the war.

Palestine/Israel formulation:
The equivalent principle is that the cost of occupation, destruction and unlawful control cannot be externalised to Palestinians, aid agencies, Arab states, European taxpayers or future generations.

The International Court of Justice’s 2024 advisory opinion concluded that Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Territory of the State of Palestine is unlawful and that Israel is under an obligation to bring that presence to an end as rapidly as possible. The Court also identified obligations relating to reparation for damage caused by internationally wrongful acts.

Applied to Palestine, the assets principle should mean this: states that recognise Palestine should not treat occupation as cost-free. Settlement-linked assets, trade preferences, arms transfers, financial flows, and institutional relationships connected to maintaining unlawful occupation should be conditioned, suspended or redirected until the unlawful presence ends and compensation mechanisms are established and the right of return is applied.

The occupying power cannot be allowed to destroy, control and dispossess, then ask the world to pay for reconstruction while the underlying system remains in place.

The chain:
If Russian assets can be immobilised until Russia stops the war and compensates Ukraine, then occupation-linked benefits and assets should be conditioned until Israel ends its unlawful presence and contributes to repairing the damage done to Palestine.

No compensation without cessation.
No reconstruction without de-occupation.
No peace without accountability.

5. Fifth principle: wider security interests and consent

Ukraine formulation:
Fifth, that European security interests must be safeguarded in any deal. Elements of any negotiation related to the EU and NATO would need the consent of the EU and its Member States and NATO Allies respectively.

Palestine/Israel formulation:
The Palestine equivalent is that no deal can be imposed over the heads of the sovereign parties and affected peoples.

Palestine must be at the table as the State of Palestine on the basis of parity of esteem. Israel must be at the table as the State of Israel. Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, the Arab League, the EU, the United States, the UN and other relevant actors may have roles, guarantees and interests, but they cannot trade away Palestinian sovereignty or Israeli security for their own convenience.

There can be no arrangement in which Washington and Tel Aviv define Palestine’s future while Palestinians are invited only to live with the consequences. There can be no regional normalisation architecture that bypasses Palestinian sovereignty. There can be no security deal that treats Palestine as a zone of management rather than a state.

Equally, there can be no Palestinian settlement that ignores Israel’s legitimate security needs or the consent of those states expected to guarantee the agreement.

The chain:
If NATO and the EU must consent to arrangements affecting NATO and the EU, then Palestine must consent to arrangements affecting Palestine.

If European security is inseparable from Ukraine’s sovereignty, then regional and international security are inseparable from Palestine’s sovereignty too.

The redrafted five principles for Palestine and Israel

First, an immediate and complete ceasefire.

Second, negotiations based on the principle that force cannot change borders: the lawful baseline is the territory of the State of Palestine occupied since 1967, not the facts created by occupation.

Third, robust and legally binding security guarantees for both states, including international mechanisms to guarantee Palestinian sovereignty, Israeli security, civilian protection, withdrawal, reconstruction and non-repetition.

Fourth, occupation-linked assets, privileges and flows should be conditioned until the unlawful presence ends and compensation is made for damage caused and the right of return is realised if only with land swaps.

Fifth, any settlement must safeguard the interests and consent of the sovereign parties and affected regional actors. No one can negotiate Palestine away without Palestine.

The conclusion

The Ukraine principles refuse a false peace.

They reject a ceasefire that rewards conquest.
They reject borders changed by force.
They reject sovereignty subject to the aggressor’s veto.
They reject reconstruction without consent and compensation.
They reject a settlement imposed over the heads of those whose security is at stake.

Those same principles must apply to Palestine.

A just peace between Israel and Palestine begins from a simple recognition: Palestine is a sovereign state, recognised by the UK and by more than 150 other states. Israel is a sovereign state with a right to security.

Ukraine’s sovereignty must not be sacrificed for European stability.

Palestine’s sovereignty must not be sacrificed for Israeli security.

In both cases, the lesson is the same: peace built on domination is not peace. It is only the next war waiting to start.

Tuesday 2 June 2026, 09.30 – 18.00 (followed by reception to 20.00), Greenwood Theatre, London Bridge

BOOK ONLINE AND IN-PERSON TICKETS VIA THIS LINK

THERE ARE A LIMITED NUMBER OF IN-PERSON TICKETS AVAILABLE.

After a welcome from our host, Professor Adam Sutcliffe and BPP chair, Andrew Whitley, the conference will open with two diplomats, Ambassador Husam Zomlot of Palestine and Ambassador Manar Dabbas of Jordan.

The title of the Britain Palestine Project’s 2026 conference, Recognition is the Beginning, frames questions for the UK and other states that have belatedly recognised the State of Palestine: what diplomatic and political obligations follow once a state has recognised Palestine, and what does recognition mean if it is not accompanied by political, legal and diplomatic action?

Recognition is not a substitute for policy; it should shape that policy and underpin it. At the time the UK recognised the State of Palestine in September 2025 it was occupied by the State of Israel. The occupation expands everyday. The State of Israel is carrying out de facto annexation of the West Bank and working to ensure that the congruity of Palestinian territory is made impossible by authorising the E1 development cutting the rest of the West Bank off from East Jerusalem. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has now ordered that the IDF take control of 70 percent of the Gaza Strip. The facts on the ground stand in stark contrast to the statements of recognition. There should be clear consequences for the policy of the UK in the recognition of the State of Palestine. Palestinians should be treated as a people with equal political rights, equal standing in international law and an equal claim to sovereignty. The UK should treat both Israel and Palestine as States with Parity of Esteem. The theme of the conference is therefore to unpack what the UK should be doing to build on recognition and to reinforce Britain’s historic responsibility for the position both peoples find themselves in today.

The conference continues, therefore, with that history: William Dalrymple, Professor Avi Shlaim and Dr Anne Ifran

The position of Palestine today has been shaped by empire, nationalism, theology, diplomacy, war, and the presence and the absence of the application of international law. Britain’s role is not incidental to that story. From the Balfour Declaration to the Mandate, from imperial administration to post-imperial diplomacy and today as a member of the UN Security Council, Britain helped create the structures within which Palestinian political claims were recognised, deferred, constrained or ignored and it has a role in working to assert international law today. Historical responsibility does not mean Britain alone can resolve the conflict. It does not have the agency of the United States. It does mean Britain cannot be a neutral bystander and that it should show the leadership it has shown on Ukraine against Russian aggression and occupation. Arguably, Britain has a much greater moral responsibility because of its historical legacy to lead coalitions of the willing in support of the State of Palestine than it does for Ukraine. It should and can do both.

One of the most important themes raised by the programme is representation. What is the position of Palestine in history and in the historical record? Who has been authorised to speak for Palestinians? Who has been denied that authority? Palestinian political identity has been repeatedly fragmented: between those under occupation in Gaza, those in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, citizens of Israel, refugees in neighbouring states, and a global diaspora. The effect has often been to treat Palestinians as objects of diplomacy rather than actors with agency. But after the atrocities of 7th October and the genocidal war waged on Gaza in response, global attitudes have shifted and are shifting.

The next session therefore considers global public opinion with Max Rodenbeck, Nour Odeh and Dahlia Scheindlin.

[See Max Rodenbeck briefing UN Security Council on current situation HERE]

Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem are places where civilians live under conditions shaped by genocide and state enabled settler violence. Any serious discussion of recognition must therefore connect sovereignty to the realisation of the human right to life. A recognised state that cannot protect its civilians, operate functioning institutions, secure humanitarian access or control its territory remains trapped between its legal status and its powerlessness to enact sovereignty. States that have recognised the State of Palestine have a duty to counter that powerlessness to help realise that sovereignty. Humanitarian access can only be enabled with political will, so considerations of the current humanitarian situation [with Professor Nick Maynard] are followed by an analysis of the current geopolitical situation. [Daniel Levy]

This is where international law enters the discussion as a test of the international order. The legal issues were clearly laid out in the ICJ Advisory Opinion: occupation and annexation are illegal, self-determination is the basis of statehood, the duties of third states are to uphold the law and ensure that there is accountability for violations, including in the treatment of children as detainees and the use of sexual violence. The role of the ICJ and ICC must be fully supported. If international law applies only when enforcement is convenient, then it becomes a language of selective condemnation rather than a system of obligation. The Palestinian question has long exposed this weakness.

This session asks, amongst other things, whether law can constrain power, or whether power will continue to decide when law matters with Shawan Jabarin, Baroness Helena Kennedy and Jessica Stober.

For the UK, recognition should therefore trigger a policy audit. What changes in practice should have followed Palestinian recognition? Does trade policy change? Does it implement the ICJ Advisory opinion on occupation? Does it respond to the ICJ provisional measures on genocide? Does policy on settlements and settlers change to align with others cases like Russia? Does the government treat annexation, occupation and forced displacement as legal red lines with consequences, or as regrettable developments to be criticised in statements? Does Britain support accountability mechanisms even when they are politically uncomfortable? Does it work through the UN and international courts, or continue to rely on ad hoc diplomacy shaped by Washington, regional pressure and short-term crisis management?

There is also a domestic political dimension. Public opinion on Palestine and Israel has shifted markedly across many societies, especially among younger generations and this has been expressed in recent UK devolved [Scotland and Wales], local and by-elections [with others coming soon]. Governments that once assumed the issue could be managed through elite diplomacy and allied impunity towards Israel, now face electorates more alert to humanitarian suffering, digital evidence and advocacy, legal arguments and accusations of double standards. The gap between public sentiment and official policy is becoming harder to sustain. That does not automatically produce better policy, but it changes the political cost of inaction for UK MPs.

The questions of what the UK could and should do will be considered by Chris Doyle, Emily Thornberry MP, Debbie Abrahams MP, and Paul Gerrard

The final question raised by the conference is Lenin’s question - What is to be done? It is the hardest but the most important. Recognition was necessary, but it is not sufficient. A viable strategy would need to align law, alliance diplomacy, economic leverage, humanitarian reconstruction to impose sanctions and costs on Israel sufficient to enforce a change of policy and an end to the greater Israel project, while at the same time empowering Palestinian political representation. It would need to impose real and tangible costs on Israel for continuing its illegal occupation of the State of Palestine. It would need to address Israeli security and Palestinian sovereignty without allowing the former to permanently negate the latter. It would need Arab, European, American and international institutional engagement, but not in a way that sidelines Palestinians themselves.

The old diplomatic vocabulary is badly depleted. “Peace process” has too often meant process without peace. “Two states” has too often functioned as a slogan detached from the asymmetry of power on the ground that shapes territorial, legal and political reality. “Reconstruction” can become a technocratic substitute for freedom if the underlying structures of control remain untouched. The challenge is not to invent another formula, but to restore meaning to the principles already present in international: self-determination, equality, security, accountability but the question is given the current geopolitical balance of power, how can this be achieved.

The final panel will comprise: Daniel Levy, Julie Norman, Nomi Bar‑Yaacov, and Shawan Jabarin

On 1^st June, BPP will be publishing its new Statement of Principles. These have helped shape the agenda for the conference. The conference will be asked to reflect on how these principles can be turned into actions. The very final session of the conference will sum up these actions and layout the asks of our government that will shape our education and advocacy over the coming year.

Come and join the conversation and tell us what you want to see our government do alone and with allies.

Speaker Profiles

Andrew Whitley: Chair of the Britain Palestine Project. Former senior UN official, journalist and Policy Director of The Elders.

Professor Adam Sutcliffe: Professor of History at King’s College London and conference chair. Specialist in intellectual, religious and political history.

H.E. Dr Husam Zomlot: Ambassador of the State of Palestine to the United Kingdom. Former Ambassador to the United States and adviser to the Palestinian leadership.

H.E. Manar Dabbas: Ambassador of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan to the United Kingdom. Former senior adviser to King Abdullah II and experienced diplomat and policy practitioner.

William Dalrymple: Award-winning historian, author and broadcaster. Founder of the Jaipur Literature Festival and co-host of the Empire podcast. Currently writing a history of Palestine.

Professor Avi Shlaim: Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford and Fellow of the British Academy. One of the world’s leading historians of the modern Middle East and Israel-Palestine.

Dr Anne Irfan: Historian at University College London specialising in Palestinian displacement, refugee politics and the history of Gaza. Author of Refuge and Resistance and A Short History of the Gaza Strip.

Max Rodenbeck: Israel-Palestine Project Director at International Crisis Group. Former Middle East correspondent and bureau chief for The Economist.

Nour Odeh (Virtual): Political analyst, communications specialist and former spokesperson for the Palestinian Government. Journalist with Al Jazeera English and founder of Ramattan News Agency.

Dr Dahlia Scheindlin (Virtual): Israeli political strategist, pollster and public opinion expert. Columnist for Haaretz and policy fellow at Century International.

Professor Nick Maynard: Consultant Surgeon at Oxford University Hospitals and Chair of Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP). Recipient of the UK Humanitarian Medal for his medical work in Gaza.

Daniel Levy: President of the U.S./Middle East Project. Former adviser to the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office and participant in the Oslo and Taba peace negotiations.

Shawan Jabarin: General Director of Al-Haq, the leading Palestinian human rights organisation. Internationally recognised advocate for human rights, accountability and international law.

Baroness Helena Kennedy KC: Barrister, human rights advocate and member of the House of Lords. Founder of the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at Oxford and one of Britain’s leading legal voices on justice and accountability.

Jessica Stober: Human rights lawyer and Legal Director of Global Echo Litigation Center. Specialist in corporate accountability, international law and strategic litigation.

Salma Duncan: Barrister, Managing Partner of Anaraa Law and Trustee of the Britain Palestine Project. Specialist in public international law and Middle East affairs.

Chris Doyle: Director of CAABU and one of the UK’s leading commentators on Middle Eastern affairs, with more than three decades of experience in the field.

Dame Emily Thornberry MP: Chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee and Member of Parliament for Islington South and Finsbury.

Debbie Abrahams MP: Labour MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth and Co-Chair of the Britain-Palestine All-Party Parliamentary Group.

Paul Gerrard: Campaigns, Public Affairs and Policy Director at the Co-op Group. Former senior civil servant and leader of major national public policy campaigns.

Nomi Bar-Yaacov: International mediator, arbitrator and negotiator specialising in diplomacy, conflict resolution and Track II dialogue initiatives.

Dr Julie Norman: Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations at UCL and Director of the Israel-Palestine Initiative. Expert on conflict transformation, nonviolence and peacebuilding.

See analysie from Tawfiq Al-Ghussein here:

Tawfiq’s Substack

The Fifteen-Point Illusion: Gaza and the Politics of Managed Submission

The Fifteen-Point Illusion: Gaza and the Politics of Managed Submission…

Read more

3 months ago · 1 like · Tawfiq Al- Ghussein

This is the text:

Points 1-5 discuss the plan’s principles, points 6-11 speak to security elements, points 12-13 are about an international stabilization force and IDF withdrawal, and point 15 is about reconstruction.

Recommended

Point 1: This point defines the purpose of the entire process

The objective is not simply to preserve a ceasefire but also to move Gaza out of a permanent cycle of war and humanitarian collapse toward recovery, reconstruction, and Palestinian self-governance.

Point 2: Completion of Existing Ceasefire Obligations

This point exists because implementation cannot move forward while commitments already made under the ceasefire remain incomplete. That means that measures promised at the start of the ceasefire, including humanitarian aid, fuel, crossings, shelter, as well as others, must be implemented before moving to the next stage.

Point 3: Verification Before Moving Forward

Because “trust between Israelis and Palestinians is effectively non-existent,” the process cannot rely on promises alone. Each obligation by one side triggers an obligation by the other, and every stage must be independently verified before the process can move forward.

Point 4: Role of the Board of Peace (BoP), Office of the High Representative (OHR), and the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG)

The National Committee for the Administration of Gaza would serve as the Palestinian-led civilian administration responsible for governing Gaza during the transition period. The OHR is intended to connect the BoP to the NCAG and coordinate the civilian, reconstruction, and security tracks of the implementation process.

These entities are transitional and will not permanently replace Palestinian governance.

Point 5: Hamas and Governance

This separates armed factions from governing institutions while also protecting ordinary civil servants and public employees. Gaza cannot recover while armed groups simultaneously operate as governing authorities.

Civil servants are to be treated lawfully, fairly, and with dignity.

Point 6: One Authority, One Law, One Weapon

Only authorized Palestinian institutions would exercise security authority inside Gaza; only authorized personnel carry weapons, armed groups cease military activity, and governance and security structures become unified under one civilian authority.

Point 7: Police Reform and Integration

The Roadmap calls for vetting police personnel, integrating trained officers into civilian structures, offering non-armed roles or compensation where appropriate, and transferring police weapons to NCAG control as soon as it enters the Gaza Strip.

The objective is to rebuild law enforcement gradually and professionally while maintaining public order and avoiding institutional collapse.

Point 8: Gradual Decommissioning Process

There will be a graduation phasing out of weapons through a Palestinian-led and internationally verified process. Weapons are not transferred to Israel. Weapons would first transfer to Palestinians operating under the NCAG with international monitoring arrangements.

Point 9: Personal Weapons Under Palestinian Law

The NCAG would become the sole Palestinian authority responsible for registering weapons, issuing licenses, revoking licenses, and collecting unlicensed weapons. The process would happen gradually through buy-back programs, reintegration assistance, and social support mechanisms.

Point 10: Conditions for Surrendering Personal Weapons

No one will be required to give up their personal weapon until appropriate security and implementation milestones are met and verified by the authorized bodies. This ensures that personal safety is protected throughout the transition. The process is designed to happen alongside the establishment of functioning security arrangements.

Point 11: Social Peace Agreement

This point seeks the prevention of internal Palestinian violence during the transition. The Roadmap includes commitments to stop internal killings, prohibit reprisals, ban armed demonstrations, and end displays of armed force.

Point 12: International Stabilization Force (ISF)

An International Stabilization Force will be established as a temporary buffer and support mechanism during implementation. It will deploy between Israeli and Palestinian-controlled areas, protect humanitarian operations, and support the decommissioning process. The force is not intended to govern or police Gaza. The NCAG remains responsible for policing and civilian administration.

Point 13: Phased Israeli Withdrawal

This point links Israeli withdrawal directly to verified implementation of the decommissioning process. The roadmap commits Israel to a phased withdrawal on an agreed timetable and will be replaced with a Palestinian-led NCAG.

Point 14: Palestinian Responsibility in Certified Areas

Responsible for maintaining security in certified and fully decommissioned areas to Palestinian civilian authorities under the NCAG. The broader objective is to move Gaza gradually toward governance and security administration under Palestinian transitional institutions rather than under military confrontation or parallel armed structures.

Point 15: Reconstruction

Finally, large-scale reconstruction will be directly connected to verified stability and civilian administration. Financing and major rebuilding efforts will not move forward sustainably in areas where parallel armed structures remain active and instability persists. Reconstruction will be tied to civilian governance and a functioning administration under the NCAG. Gaza cannot move from emergency humanitarian relief to genuine long-term recovery unless there is stability, functioning civilian institutions, reconstruction access, and confidence that rebuilding efforts can be sustained.

Abstract

BPP hosted two fascinating webinar/screenings recently that engaged with the central question of the nature of the State of Israel. For an organisation like BPP, which works for a Just Peace for Palestinians and Israelis, it is a central and recurrent question. Israeli government spokespeople are fond of saying that they have no one on the Palestinian side to talk to about peace. Palestinians, excluded from Trump’s Board of Peace, ignored in reconstruction planning for Gaza, and constantly undermined by US-Israeli collusion when talks used to happen, as at Oslo, say not only is there no peace camp to speak to in Israel but the absence of parity of esteem means any talking that does happen is pre-fixed against them.

Omer Bartov, one of the greatest living historians of genocide, unique in the sweep of his historical vision but also in the depth of his analysis of specific sites of the holocaust like Galicia, is that rarest of writers: in Tolstoy’s view of historians, he is both a fox who knows many things and a hedgehog who knows one big thing. He has collected a series of his essays in his new book, Israel: What went wrong? It echoes some of the themes on the nature of Israeli society he explored in his essay “Apocalyptic Visions”, from classic collection, Mirrors of Destruction, but presents a much more extensive argument on contemporary events, especially with respect to the question of genocide in Gaza, than he has collected before. Bartov spoke about his book in a webinar with BPP you can listen to here.

In this piece I want to look at Bartov’s view of the nature of the Israeli state. One of the most welcome features of his new volume is the way Bartov weaves his own family story into the story of Zionism. His family first came to Palestine to join a Zionist colony (early Zionist communities were called colonies) in 1882, fleeing the terrible pogroms in Russia that defined the term. Their arrival combines the two strands of Zionism that Bartov discusses, the colonial settlement project and the rescue project. Bartov argues that you cannot ignore rescue in the earlier period of the Zionist project anymore than you can in the mandate period. It is the inter-relationship and conflicts between these strands of Zionism - or ideological currents - and within the Zionist movement in general that seem, overtime, to have been resolved into the Greater Israel project we see today. Bartov asks the critical question: why? The settlement strand, which Zionists would argue was resettlement or return, is rooted in biblical archaeology. This is archaeology as a tautological practice of going to look for places that might be places that were described in the disparate and random collection of books collected in the Old Testament then saying they were the places described and they have been since biblical times those places and now they have been discovered again and can be Jewish again so they belong to the state of Israel.

The rescue strand supports the settlement project but was not always fixed on Palestine as the place of safety. Kenya had been suggested by an earlier generation of Zionists, as a possible refuge from persecution. Rescue and the pursuit of safety from Russian and Eastern European anti-semitism and then from the western European Nazis eliminationist project, were the drivers for the ever increasing numbers of arrivals in Palestine. As Bartov makes clear, the problem was that the land was not empty and the people that were there had to be displaced or murdered to make way for rescued Jews. Despite this reality, culminating in the displacement amid extreme violence of 100,000s of Palestinians before 1948 and 750,000 during the Nakba of 1947-1948, Bartov argues for the possibility of a different kind of Israel. He rejects the inevitability of the development of the kind of state that was born out of the Nakba. He argues that if the the Declaration of Independence had been the basis for a Constitution that enshrined equal rights and if the borders of the State of Israel had been defined and respected, then the Israeli train leaving the station of 1948 might have taken a track toward being a liberal democracy. The ethnonationalism of Zionism might have evolved as other European ethnonationalist movements evolved into political parties and not state defining projects. A polity could have developed that would have formed the basis of what he calls a “normal state”. (I assume that the electoral system used under this constitution would also have been different? This is not a subject for this essay but an important element of the polarisation of Israeli politics is derived from the pure PR electoral system).

The second webinar we featured recently was a screening and a Q and A on the new film by Gillian Mosley - you can follow the link for the Q and A, there are screenings around the country. -see here. Mosley made the BPP film from Nakba to Camp David and the wonderful Tinderbox. She grew up in a Zionist household in London and comes from a long line of Rabbis. Her new film is called Planet Israel. It takes her on a journey through contemporary Israel which becomes a quest to discover why a majority of Israelis, 73%, support the war on Gaza. Mosley looks at collective psychology and the steps that a democratic state takes on the road to becoming an authoritarian state. She asks herself what has happened to the people of Israel that has allowed the extreme ethnonationalist ideology to take such a stranglehold on the State. She seeks answers from Israeli experts and academics on how the peace party in Israel disappeared and how the country now be faces a choice in its forthcoming election between different personalities expressing the same extreme right wing ideology. It is a fascinating film that has been described as brave. It is brave in the sense that at this time for a Jewish intellectual and film maker to produce such a work of reflection will invite a backlash of criticism and abuse but the point is that it should not be brave to make such a film about a polity if that polity is, or ever was, a liberal democracy. It should be commonplace, it should be a badge of honour that such a film is made and debated. That it is not cuts to heart of the matter. If you are looking at the world from the perspective of Planet Israel then this film becomes part of the existential threat to the State itself. And that is the problem. We need to stop seeing these questions from the perspective of the sword and its problems and see it from the perspective of the neck that sword is aimed at.

One of the greatest adverts of all time was the 1986 Guardian advert, Points of View.

If you change the perspective the skinhead running towards the man with the briefcase is not a threat but a saviour. The story told depends on the position you are sitting in.

Or as Ghassan Kanafani put it: you are talking about a conversation between the sword and the neck.

Seen from the perspective of the neck rather than the sword - from those subjected to power rather than those wielding it - the decisive turning point comes far earlier than the genocidal war on Gaza. And all that follows is not shocking but inevitable.

The Zionist aim to provide rescue and safety, which must form a key part of the history, became inseparable from a project of hegemony over the land and people of Palestine, and later from a wider assertion of power across the region. This occured as the Great Powers began their long collaboration with this project in the Balfour Declaration and the suppression of the Arab Revolution 1936-39 and in the terrorist campaign for and realisation of the State of Israel 1945-48 culminating in the Nakba. The capacity of a Constitution or a defined border to outweigh these historical forces, in the forging of the State of Israel as a hegemonic project both internal and external, are, in my opinion, so limited as to be almost meaningless. And, a sense of surprise that 73% of the Israel population supported the eliminationist project of the Israeli state in Gaza, and supported the war on Iran and still supports the elimination of Gaza, given the history, is itself surprising.Why is it surprising?

Hegemony is not a single act of domination, but a continuous process through which the exercise of power makes itself appear natural, necessary and administrative. Gramsci argued that hegemonic domination depends on more than direct repression. A ruling order survives when its assumptions become embedded in law, institutions, culture and common sense. In the Israeli-Palestinian context, this means that control over Palestinians is not maintained, from the mandate period onwards, only through military force, but through courts, land administration, planning regimes, permits, labour regulation, infrastructure, demographic discourse and the presentation of settlement as both security and nation-building. Coercion becomes hegemonic when it is translated into “normal” government; a state created by one nation through the displacement of another nation cannot therefore ever become a “normal” state.

The idea of continuous war sharpens this argument and is based on old and familiar ideas that we seem reluctant to apply to Israel. Hobbes sees war as a condition rather than only an episode of active combat; Clausewitz argued that war is an instrument of policy; and Foucault shifts attention from the battlefield to the management of populations, bodies, movement and conduct. Taken together, these approaches suggest that the line between war and peace has been systematically blurred from the suppression of the Arab Revolution of 1936-1939, through to the Nakba and beyond. Raids, siege, detention, zoning, checkpoints, biometric systems, work permits, land registration and settlement-building are not separate mechanisms. They form a connected apparatus of control in which war is institutionalised through complete mobilisation of the population. The IDF is an instrument of nation building but also the instrument of hegemony. The Israeli state therefore appears not simply as a state that periodically goes to war, but as one in which military dominance through administration and through the self-identify of citizens has become a normal mode of rule.

The concept of the state of exception explains how this condition is legally and politically sustained. Agamben’s argument that law may be suspended in order to preserve the legal order is the basis for a system in which emergency powers, military governance and unequal legal statuses become permanent. In the Israeli case, the absence of a fully entrenched constitution, the absence of finally defined borders, and the occupation of the State of Palestine by the State of Israel has allowed exceptionality to become part of ordinary governance but if they had been present would they have stopped these processes? Security is continually invoked to justify the apartheid of differentiated citizenship, administrative detention, demolitions, surveillance, movement restrictions and territorial control. The exception, beginning in the counter-insurgency of 1936-39, is the method by which a particular order is produced and reproduced.

Settler-colonial theory adds the territorial and demographic dimension. Patrick Wolfe’s formulation that settler colonialism is “a structure, not an event” clarifies why the issue is not simply occupation in a narrow military sense, but the cumulative production of irreversible facts on the ground. Settlement expansion, land declarations, planning monopolies, restrictions on Palestinian construction, limits on family unification, and the legalisation of illegal settlements all point to a state project in which sovereignty remains elastic and the frontier remains open. Add the Palestinian body as the cite of torture, physical control, and mutilation and we see that viewed through these combined frameworks, the nature of the State of Israel is that of a hegemonic security state: a state in which continuous war, legal exception, settler expansion and administrative normalisation work together to block Palestinian sovereignty while presenting domination as order, security and historical entitlement.

The question inherent in the new book by Bartov and the new film by Mosley is whether or not the drive for hegemony that, in my opinion, defines Zionism and the policy of the state of Israel, is a recent development and not the inevitable destination of that train leaving 1948? Implicit in both works is an idea that Israel, despite the manner of its creation, despite the legacy of the mandate, despite the epochal destruction of the holocaust, could have become a “normal state”, a functional liberal democracy. Much as I hugely admire and learn from the work of Bartov and enjoy and learn from the films of Mosley, I do not believe that there was another road or that we have recently come to a different Israel. The genocide in Gaza was present at the creation, in my opinion, because Nakba is not an event, anymore than hegemony is an event, it is a process and it is rooted in the mandate and has continued since 1948.

The State Department’s formal structure of justification for the joint US-Israeli war on Iran begins with an attempt to answer to Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter which prohibits the use of force. It does this by evking Article 51 which permits the use of force but only in self-defence - “if an armed attack occurs.” The jurisprudence of the International Court of Justice has consistently reinforced the narrowness of that exception. Not every hostile act qualifies as an armed attack; not every threat of force justifies force as a response; attribution must be clear; necessity must be immediate; proportionality must be tightly linked to the defensive objective. This is the orthodox position to which the UK has, historically, adhered or has at least consistently argued that it has adhered to this position.

The Rubinstein memorandum does not challenge this framework directly. Instead, it reinterprets its application. The central claim is that Epic Fury is not a new use of force at all, but the continuation of an existing international armed conflict with Iran. From that premise flows a series of consequences: if the conflict is ongoing, there is no need to identify a fresh armed attack and US and Israel can attack again at will; there is no need to re-establish imminence; no requirement to re-apply necessity and proportionality in a discrete, event-specific way. The legal threshold shifts from justifying each act of force to sustaining the claim that hostilities never ended, taken to its logical conclusion every combatant in every conflict in which there is no Peace Agreement since 1945 can attack their enemy legally and at will at any time. (There are at least 15 wars that could be re-started on this basis.)

The UK’s position, articulated repeatedly in parliamentary statements and legal summaries over the past decade, has been to maintain a strict separation between jus ad bellum and jus in bello. The is a separation between how wars start and the conduct of the war: even if a war is illegal it should be fought in compliance with the rules of war. The International Committee of the Red Cross has been unequivocal on this point: a state may be engaged in an armed conflict and still be acting unlawfully in resorting to force. The U.S. argument collapses that distinction by shifting the centre of gravity away from identifiable legal triggers. Rather than pointing to a specific armed attack in February 2026, because there was no armed attack by Iran, it constructs a cumulative narrative: decades of Iranian hostility, proxy warfare, missile and drone attacks, threats to U.S. personnel, and the continuing development of nuclear capabilities. Each element is real. But the legal question is not whether Iran poses a threat in general terms. The legal question is whether, at the moment force was used, the threshold of an armed attack had been met in a way that justified that use of force.

This is where the UK’s legal tradition diverges most sharply from the U.S. approach and Starmer and Lord Hermer, the Attorney General’s, stubborn insistence that they would keep the UK out of the core operations of Epic Fury has been proven right. British legal advice, particularly since Iraq, has emphasised the need for a clear, identifiable trigger, something that can be articulated publicly and defended in legal terms. The absence of such a trigger in the Epic Fury case creates a vacuum that cannot easily be filled by reference to cumulative threat. The move from “armed attack” to “enduring threat environment” is unsustainable within the Charter framework the UK continues to endorse.

The issue of collective self-defence deepens the problem. The United States asserts that it acted at the request of Israel and the UK has asserted that it took part in operations and allowed its bases to be used in operations that constituted collective self-defence of UK allies in the Gulf. In principle, this is a recognised basis for the use of force. But the ICJ has been clear that such a claim requires more than assertion. The victim state must declare itself under attack and request assistance. At the moment there is no public record of requests for help from the GCC or evidence of a imminent attack from Iran or the rapid development of a nuclear weapon. That does not mean a request was not made. But for the UK, which must justify its actions not only internationally but also domestically - before Parliament, the courts, and the public -the absence of a clear, documented request creates a evidentiary gap.

Much of the U.S. case rests on Iranian support for non-state actors. But the ICJ’s Nicaragua judgment established a high threshold for attributing the actions of such actors to a state. Funding, training, and equipping are not enough; there must be effective control or substantial involvement in the specific operations in question. The U.S. argument effectively lowers this threshold by aggregation, treating a pattern of support across multiple theatres as sufficient to establish a continuous armed attack.

For the UK, this is problematic. British legal advice has traditionally adhered closely to the ICJ standard. To accept the U.S. aggregation approach would be to move towards a more expansive doctrine of attribution - one that could, in turn, justify a wider range of uses of force in other contexts and comes at the cost of weakening a legal principle the UK has long defended.

The proportionality issue is perhaps the most visible point of divergence. The stated objectives of Epic Fury - destroying missile systems, eliminating production capacity, degrading naval power, preventing nuclear acquisition - are strategic in nature. They go beyond the immediate objective of halting an armed attack. In Oil Platforms, an ICJ case between Iran and the US, , the ICJ emphasised that proportionality includes the nature of the targets chosen. Force must be directed at stopping the attack, not at achieving broader political or military goals.

For the UK, aligning with a campaign framed in such expansive terms creates a clear legal tension. Even if specific actions, such as intercepting missiles or defending shipping lanes, can be justified as self-defence, participation in a broader campaign aimed at degrading an entire state’s military infrastructure is much harder to reconcile with the requirement of proportionality. This is why the UK has, in its public statements, drawn careful distinctions between limited defensive actions and wider offensive operations. It is an attempt to preserve legal coherence.

The nuclear argument adds a final layer of difficulty. The U.S. position is that the unique destructive potential of nuclear weapons justifies anticipatory action before a threat becomes imminent in the traditional sense. This pushes the concept of imminence to the point where it risks losing meaning. If capability is sufficient, then timing becomes irrelevant. The law shifts from preventing imminent harm to pre-empting potential risk. It is the law of King Herod - kill all the first born because one may grown up to challenge your power.

For the UK, which has consistently emphasised the role of the International Atomic Energy Agency and diplomatic mechanisms in managing nuclear proliferation, this creates a strategic and legal dilemma. Accepting the U.S. argument would align with the logic of pre-emption; rejecting it would reinforce the existing non-proliferation framework but has created further divergence with a key ally.

What emerges, then, is not simply a disagreement over a single operation, but a deeper divergence over the direction of international law itself. The United States is articulating a model of self-defence based on forever wars which accumulate justifications over time, and strategic necessity. The United Kingdom remains, at least formally, committed to a model based on discrete triggers, strict attribution, and tightly constrained responses. China with its open conflicts with India and Taiwan, will have taken careful note of the Rubinstein Memo.

How law, violence, and narrative converge to sustain a continuous structure of dispossession and generational harm

Trauma, when applied to nations, is often narrated as rupture, a moment of exceptional violence interrupting an otherwise stable historical trajectory. That framing does not fit the Palestinian experience. The Palestinian condition is not best understood as a sequence of isolated shocks, however grave, but as a continuous political structure in which injury is organised, administered, and made durable across generations. What distinguishes this history is not only the scale of violence, but the way law, administration, diplomacy, and force have repeatedly interacted to convert violence into a governing condition rather than a temporary departure from order.

This is why Jenny Edkins remains so important to the argument. In Trauma and the Memory of Politics (2003), Edkins argues that trauma exposes the violence concealed within sovereign narratives and unsettles the stories states tell about themselves. Yet her work also explains how political systems survive such exposure. Trauma is not merely suffered, it is managed. Its memory is curated, legalised, displaced, or neutralised so that the structures that generated it may persist. The Palestinian case pushes that insight further. Here, trauma is not only retrospectively managed, it is continuously reproduced while being narrated, regulated, and normalised by the institutions that claim to contain conflict.

The roots of that condition lie not only in military conquest, but in imperial knowledge. The British Arab Bureau, formally established in Cairo in January 1916 under General Gilbert Clayton, with figures such as T. E. Lawrence, David Hogarth, and Ronald Storrs moving through its intellectual and administrative orbit, was far more than an intelligence office. It was a mechanism for translating Arab societies into categories legible to imperial rule. It gathered political, tribal, economic, and social information, then turned that information into policy. It identified intermediaries, mapped loyalties, and helped create the conceptual framework through which Britain could intervene while presenting domination as administration. Palestine, in this setting, was not simply occupied, it was first rendered governable from outside.

That imperial grammar was quickly expressed in diplomacy. The Sykes–Picot Agreement of May 1916 divided Ottoman Arab lands into zones of influence without the participation of the populations concerned. It established the principle that the region could be partitioned and administered externally, with local society treated as an object rather than a source of sovereignty.

The Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917 extended that logic in a more fateful form. Arthur Balfour declared support for the establishment in Palestine of a “national home for the Jewish people”, while referring to the Arab majority only as “non-Jewish communities” whose political rights were not recognised. Crucially, this declaration was made before Britain had completed its military conquest of Palestine. It promised the future of a territory not yet under full control, and did so in language that erased the political status of its indigenous population.

Under the Mandate, this asymmetry became institutional. Jewish immigration increased, particularly as antisemitism escalated in Europe and culminated in Nazi persecution. That context is indispensable. Yet in Palestine, immigration unfolded within a colonial legal framework that facilitated one national project while denying equivalent recognition to another. The result was not a neutral conflict, but one structured through unequal law.

Palestinian resistance to this order reached its most coherent political expression during the Arab Revolt of 1936–1939. On 25 April 1936 the Arab Higher Committee was formed under Haj Amin al-Husseini. It brought together Jamal al-Husseini, Yacoub Al-Ghussein, Awni Abd al-Hadi, Husayn Fakhri al-Khalidi, Ahmad Hilmi Pasha Abd al-Baqi, Fuad Saba, Alfred Roch, and Raghib al-Nashashibi.

The Committee’s importance lay in its unity. It represented the first sustained attempt to construct a Palestinian national political authority capable of coordinating resistance and articulating collective demands. Composed of religious figures, both Muslim and Christian, alongside political leaders, notables, and representatives of organised labour and trade unions, it reflected a broad social coalition rather than a narrow elite formation. It transformed a population into a political actor. That is precisely why it was dismantled.

Following the assassination of Lewis Yelland Andrews on 26 September 1937, Britain outlawed the Committee, arrested its leadership, and exiled key figures to the Seychelles. This was not administrative suppression, but structural dismemberment. It severed political leadership from territory and fractured national organisation at its most critical moment.

The Peel Commission of 1937 proposed partition. The St James’s Conference of 1939 failed. The White Paper of May 1939 attempted recalibration. All revealed an imperial power attempting to stabilise a crisis it had produced, after destroying the only unified Palestinian leadership capable of negotiating it.

The final years of the Mandate saw escalating violence, including the assassination of Lord Moyne in 1944 and the King David Hotel bombing in 1946. Armed force became central to shaping the post-Mandate order.

Within this context, the events at Deir Yassin on 9 April 1948 must be understood in full. The village, located west of Jerusalem, was attacked by Irgun and Lehi forces. It was not a major military stronghold and had reportedly maintained local non-aggression arrangements. The assault resulted in the killing of approximately one hundred civilians, including women and children. The significance of Deir Yassin lies not only in the killings themselves, but in their effect. News of the massacre spread rapidly and generated widespread fear, contributing directly to the flight of Palestinians from other areas. Violence here operated as a psychological instrument, extending beyond the immediate site and becoming part of the mechanism through which depopulation occurred.

The assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte in September 1948 further demonstrated the fragility of international mediation. Israel’s declaration of independence on 14 May 1948 and the Nakba that followed displaced over 700,000 Palestinians. Resolution 194 affirmed the right of return, but was never enforced.

Yet the Nakba did not produce a single, unified Palestinian condition. It fractured Palestinian society across different regimes of control. In the Gaza Strip, Palestinians came under Egyptian administration, while in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, they fell under Jordanian rule. These were not conditions of sovereignty. Gaza was governed without granting its population full political agency, and the West Bank was annexed by Jordan in a move recognised only by a limited number of states.

For Palestinians, this period entrenched a different form of trauma. Displacement became prolonged, refugee camps became permanent, and political fragmentation deepened. Families were divided across borders, return remained unrealised, and Palestinian political expression was mediated through external state structures. The absence of an independent Palestinian political centre during this period was not a passive condition, it was actively produced through regional and international arrangements that subordinated Palestinian self-determination to broader strategic concerns. Trauma, in this phase, was not only the memory of expulsion, but the lived experience of suspended political existence.

The Palestine Liberation Organization was established in 1964, prior to the 1967 war, under the auspices of the Arab League and initially led by Ahmad Shukeiri, whose leadership reflected a post-1948 phase of Palestinian political leadership shaped within an Arab state framework rather than an autonomous national movement.

The transformation came after 1967. The defeat of Arab states and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza created a political vacuum. Palestinian movements, most notably Fatah under Yasser Arafat, assumed control of the PLO by 1969. The organisation shifted from externally mediated representation to an independent national movement combining armed struggle with diplomatic engagement.

Over time, the PLO gained international recognition, culminating in its role in the Oslo Accords and the creation of the Palestinian Authority in 1994. Yet this did not produce sovereignty. It produced constrained administration under occupation.

Palestinian vulnerability was never confined to the territory of Mandate Palestine itself. The Sabra and Shatila massacres of 16 to 18 September 1982 in Beirut must be understood in full. Following the evacuation of the PLO under international guarantees, Israeli forces surrounded the camps and permitted the entry of the Lebanese Forces militia. Over the course of approximately two days, civilians were systematically killed, with estimates ranging from around 1,300 to 3,500 victims.

Israel did not carry out the killings directly, but exercised effective control over the area, controlled access, facilitated the militia’s entry, and remained aware of the unfolding violence. The Kahan Commission later found Israel indirectly responsible, concluding that its leadership knew or should have known the risks and failed to act.

Sabra and Shatila demonstrated that displacement did not produce safety. It extended Palestinian exposure to organised violence across borders. It also revealed how violence could be mediated through proxy actors while remaining structurally enabled. The trauma produced was not only immediate, but cumulative, reinforcing the condition of insecurity in exile and embedding the understanding that refuge itself could become a site of annihilation.

Events such as the Hebron massacre in 1994 and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 demonstrated that violence continued to shape political limits. On 25 February 1994, during Ramadan, Baruch Goldstein entered the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron and opened fire on Palestinian worshippers, killing 29. The aftermath institutionalised further restrictions on Palestinians, including the division of Hebron.

On 4 November 1995, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir, demonstrating that violent opposition could reshape political trajectories at the highest level.

Taken together, these events reveal a pattern in which violence operates as a structuring force, defining the limits of political possibility.

The present moment represents the most explicit manifestation of this structure. The genocide in Gaza, carried out against a population without a sovereign army and within a territory under prolonged occupation, has produced devastation on a scale that has led to proceedings before the International Court of Justice, which recognised the plausibility of genocidal acts and ordered provisional measures. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israeli leadership on war crimes and crimes against humanity charges.

Reports by Francesca Albanese document patterns of destruction, detention, torture, and sexual violence, arguing that these are systemic rather than incidental.

Even within Israeli discourse, figures such as Ehud Olmert now invoke the language of criminality and international jurisdiction. His call for intervention by the International Criminal Court over settler violence is significant not only for its content, but for its source. It reflects a moment in which the vocabulary of international law is no longer confined to external critique, but has entered the discourse of the Israeli political establishment itself.

Yet this shift does not resolve the structure, it reveals it. The language of criminality may be acknowledged, but without enforcement it risks becoming another layer of recognition without consequence.

A similar dynamic is visible in international diplomacy. A growing number of states have recognised Palestine, affirming in principle the right to self-determination. Yet recognition without sovereignty raises a fundamental question. What does statehood mean in the absence of control over territory, borders, and governance? Without enforcement, recognition risks becoming declarative rather than transformative, acknowledging rights while leaving the structures that deny them intact.

Seen in full, this is not deviation. It is culmination.

We learn the state of the world not through its declarations, but through what it permits. In Palestine, what is revealed is not the breakdown of order, but its design. What presents itself as crisis is, in fact, structure.

The central claim is not that Palestinians have suffered a sequence of tragedies. It is that they have been made to endure a system.

And this returns the argument to Jenny Edkins. Trauma reveals the instability beneath sovereign order, yet here that exposure does not dismantle the system, it is absorbed into it. Unless law is enforced, accountability realised, and self-determination achieved, the structure will persist. And with it, the trauma, not as rupture, but as system.

David Kretzmer’s recent study responds to claims made by the Israeli Cabinet Secretary in 2022, when the current government was formed, that the West Bank is not occupied territory and that there is therefore no legal barrier to Israeli settlements. Kretzmer argues that the British Mandate ended in 1948 and did not create any continuing legal right—erga omnes or otherwise—to settle the territory. As such, the Mandate is irrelevant to the present legal status of the West Bank. Under international law, occupation is determined by effective control, not by historical or sovereignty claims. The International Committee of the Red Cross is clear on this point: an occupying power does not acquire sovereignty over occupied territory, but it does assume binding obligations toward the population living under its control and subject to their belligerent occupation. The West Bank is part of the State of Palestine and any occupation by citizens of the State of Israel is simply that, occupation it is not sovereignty. That the Israeli Cabinet Secretary wrote in these terms shows the extent to which the end of the mandate and the meaning of the end of the mandate still frames so much of the discourse of Israeli political discourse.

The shadow of the British Mandate continues to shape Israeli political and legal discourse in ways that are often unacknowledged but structurally decisive. The Mandate left behind not a settled legal and constitutional order, but a repertoire of governing through states of exception: borders left deliberately indeterminate to maximise the possibility of gaining more land through war, authority concentrated in executive and military hands, and law deployed as an instrument of security rather than rights. That legacy is visible today in the persistent ambiguity over Israel’s final territorial boundaries which are now being expanded towards Greater Israel, in the central role of the military commander in governing the West Bank and the conduct of the illegal occupation, and in the continued reliance on administrative detention as a preventive tool rather than a judicial outcome. It is also visible in the deeper legal grammar - what Rephael Stern describes as Israel positioning itself both as heir to and revisionist of Mandate authority - retaining the mechanisms of emergency rule even as it rejects the political constraints that once accompanied them. Even the reappearance of capital punishment by hanging, the last person hanged in Israel was Eichmann, in military law echoes Mandate-era regulations, where execution formed part of a broader system of colonial control. Orders in Council, military commanders, special courts, curfews, censorship, collective punishments, house demolitions, land seizures, and detention without trial were features of the mandate that have echoed in and shaped the Israeli state since 1948. Stern examines this in detail with respect to the Courts, but concludes:

The 1937 Palestine (Defence) Order in Council gave the High Commissioner vast discretion to legislate for “public safety” and the suppression of rebellion. The 1945 Defence (Emergency) Regulations then systematised that logic. Regulation 111 allowed executive detention for up to a year without trial; the Regulations also empowered military courts and included provisions for death sentences by those courts, specifying hanging as the mode of execution.

What happened in 1948 was not a clean break but a selective inheritance. As Stern shows, Israel’s 1948 Law and Administration Ordinance carried Mandate law into the new state while retroactively voiding the pieces Zionist leaders most hated: the White Paper-era restrictions on Jewish immigration and land transfer. That choice is revealing. Israel rejected British limits on colonisation, but preserved much of Britain’s machinery of emergency rule. It wanted freedom from British restraint, not freedom from British techniques of control.

Administrative detention shows the continuity most clearly. Under the Mandate, detention was justified as prevention, not punishment: the state claimed the right to lock up those it predicted might become dangerous. That logic survived. Inside Israel, it was reconstructed in the Emergency Powers (Detention) Law of 1979. In the West Bank, it now appears in Military Order 1651, which permits renewable six-month detention orders, including orders issued in absentia, with review before a military judge and evidentiary rules that make secret evidence easier to use.

Administrative detention in the occupied Palestinian territory is best understood therefore not as a legal anomaly but as the survival of a colonial instrument first embedded in Palestine under British rule. As B’Tselem’s report notes, Israel’s detention regime in the territories drew directly on the British Defence (Emergency) Regulations of 1945, especially Regulation 111, which empowered military commanders to imprison people without charge, initially for fixed periods and then, after a 1946 amendment, without meaningful time limit. Under the occupation, that Mandate framework was not abandoned but re-enacted and adapted through military orders: powers that had been narrowed inside Israel after 1948 were preserved in expansive form in the West Bank and Gaza, with military commanders able to issue renewable detention orders, rely on secret evidence, and subject detainees to delayed and often ineffective review. B’Tselem argues that this system had, by the first Intifada, become sweeping and routine rather than exceptional, with more than 14,000 orders issued and detention often functioning as punishment, administrative convenience, or political control rather than a narrowly tailored preventive measure.

The deeper continuity is historical as well as legal: Britain created the emergency architecture, and Israel retained and redeployed it in the occupied territories as a standing technology of rule. The same continuity appears in the court system itself. Britain’s emergency regime blurred the line between civil government and military command. Israel’s occupation preserves that blur by routing Palestinians into military courts while Israeli settlers in the same territory remain overwhelmingly under civilian law.

The 2026 death-penalty law, if not overturned by the Supreme Court, sharpens that duality: it turns the West Bank military court into the site of exemplary punishment for Palestinians while largely insulating Jewish Israelis from the same penal track. Even before the new law, Military Order 1651 already contained a death-penalty provision for intentional killing; what the new legislation does is strip away old procedural brakes, including the unanimity requirement that had made executions far harder to impose.

The genealogy is not only penal. Robert Home’s study of land law in Israel/Palestine shows that Mandate-era planning, expropriation, road, and closed-area laws created a ready-made legal kit for territorial engineering. British compulsory-purchase law, planning acts, road-alignment rules, and emergency closure powers were later absorbed or adapted by Israel. After 1967, West Bank planning powers were transferred to the military commander, Mandate district plans were largely kept in force, and planning became an instrument for tightening Palestinian village boundaries while facilitating Jewish settlement growth. Here too, colonial law outlived colonial rule. House demolitions and land confiscation are not marginal to the story; they are central to it. Robert Home describes how Mandate emergency law enabled closed areas and demolition, and how post-1948 Israeli law used planning boundaries, expropriation, highways, and security zones to detach Palestinians from land while making settlement expansion look technical or administrative. The occupation is not maintained by force alone. It is maintained by a legal geography first assembled under British rule and later refined by Israel into a system for producing “facts on the ground.”

The 2026 death-penalty law shows how far that inherited toolkit can be pushed. The historical point is simple. Britain did not bequeath Israel a lawful right to dominate Palestine forever. It bequeathed a grammar of rule: govern through emergency, suspend ordinary rights, territorialize security, and let military discretion do what civilian legality would not openly permit. Israel discarded the parts of British law that obstructed Zionist immigration and land acquisition. It kept, repurposed, and expanded the parts that made rule through exception possible. The continuity is intentional because it provides support for claims of sovereignty and the negation of Palestinian statehood. This history matters because it underpins the constant claims of sovereignty, the constant thirst for land. Stern quotes Yehuda Blum in 1968, the same arguments could are used today:

In other words international law should be determined by the facts on the ground and the facts on the ground will be determined by military superiority. This logic of domination is being played out in the domestic legislation of capital punishment which might be struck down and which will also be very difficult to be impose retrospectively on important prisoners like Marwan Barghouti because of the residual checks of a mostly acquiescent Supreme Court. [The state could bring a new charge against Barghouti which would carry the sentence of the law stands]. It is being given full a brutal expression in Lebanon and Iran as an impotent international law system of checks and balances looks on.

The reintroduction of hanging within Israel’s evolving military legal framework brings a long historical arc to a grim and telling close. Under British rule, execution by hanging stood at the outer limit of the Mandate’s emergency powers. That lineage is not merely historical; it is constitutive. The apparatus of occupation deployed by Israel today is not Britain’s fault but it is part of Britain’s post-colonial responsibility. The point is not one of crude causation, but of inheritance: Britain helped shape the repertoire through which such measures became normalised, embedded, and sustained over time. And it is precisely this normalisation that defines the present. What began as exceptional has, over decades, hardened into structure; what was justified as temporary endures. The state of exception is systemic, forming a durable framework within which Palestinian life is regulated and gradually decimated. Britain’s position is not one of distant bystander but of historical perpetrator. The obligation that follows is therefore not abstract. It is to confront the gap between principle and practice: to uphold international humanitarian law where it is being eroded; to challenge systems of justice structured around discrimination; to offer all and any support that can be given to Israeli judicial push back against legislation of this kind, and to refuse the quiet acceptance of permanence in what was once defended as emergency. If the exceptional has already become the rule, then the task is to refuse to accept it and to reverse it.

The rise in violence in early 2026 appears to be part of a wider pattern: expanding settlements and outposts, increased militarisation of settlers, repeated attacks on livelihoods and infrastructure and large-scale displacement in the context of persistently weak accountability. It is part of an annexation project as outlined HERE: War, Annexation, and Israeli hegemony. These four linked trends: show an overlap between civilians and state security, including reports of settlers operating in military uniform or with military-issued firearms; and coercive displacement, particularly in the Jordan Valley, alongside attacks on water systems, livestock, trees, homes, vehicles, schools and mosques.

OCHA reports covering January and February 2026 noted 193 settler attacks resulting in casualties and/or property damage, with 136 Palestinians injured. By late March, OCHA’s updated reporting indicated that the picture had worsened further: since 1 January 2026, 1,697 Palestinians from 33 communities had been displaced in the context of settler violence and access restrictions, exceeding the total for the whole of 2025, with more than 68 per cent of this displacement in Jordan Valley communities. OCHA also reported that since the onset of the regional escalation on 28 February, more than 150 settler attacks resulting in casualties or property damage had been documented in about 90 communities, an average of more than six attacks per day. Illustrative incidents cited in March reporting include attacks on water and electricity infrastructure near Turmus’ayya and Beita on 22 March; the 17 January attack on the Mikhmas Bedouin community involving arson and injuries; the progressive displacement of Ras Ein al ‘Auja between 19 and 26 January, affecting around 600 people; a cluster of 86 attacks in the 3–16 February reporting window across 60 communities, with more than 800 trees reportedly vandalised; arson attacks on mosques in Tell on 23 February and Duma on 12 March; reported fatal settler shootings near Khirbet Abu Falah and in Qusra; allegations of severe assault and livestock theft in Humsah in the Jordan Valley; and coordinated raids during Eid on 22–23 March across multiple villages involving arson and assaults. In its 27 March report, OCHA noted that 46 settler attacks were recorded between 17 and 23 March across 41 communities, causing 32 Palestinian injuries, damage to homes, livelihood structures, electricity infrastructure and other property, and the displacement of 45 people from four communities. It further reported that between 21 and 23 March settlers carried out 32 seemingly coordinated attacks across 30 Palestinian villages and communities, and that 22 March alone saw 16 attacks affecting 15 communities, the highest daily levels recorded since the start of the year; in Jalud, settlers damaged community and livelihood structures and partially burned the building housing the village council and a medical clinic serving about 1,000 people.

The immediate effect has not been limited to casualties. Displacement is increasingly produced through a combined coercive environment of repeated attacks plus access restrictions. By early February, nearly 700 Palestinians across nine communities had reportedly already been displaced in 2026 due to settler attacks, including about 600 from Ras Ein al ‘Auja. By mid-February, more than 90 per cent of displacement linked to settler attacks and access restrictions was reported to be in the Jordan Valley area.

Israeli authorities reportedly opened some investigations and made arrests in several high-profile March cases, and the IDF Chief of Staff publicly condemned settler violence in March 2026. However, accountability remains limited and long-run indictment and conviction rates cited by Israeli rights groups remain very low.

On 23 March, the UN Secretary-General’s office said quasi-daily settler attacks had become increasingly intense and were causing deaths, injuries, major property destruction and, at times, the displacement of whole communities. Outside the UN reporting structures there has been some media coverage of the West Bank but in the main the story has been completely buried by the Iran War. Some of the coverage that has taken place has included:

• On 28 February, Al-Haq said settler militias attacked Palestinian homes in Huwwara with the support and protection of Israeli forces. This makes Huwwara one of the first documented cases from the Iran war period itself, rather than a later spillover.

• On 12 March, Palestinian News Agency, documented an arson attack on the Mohammad Fayyad Mosque in Duma, south of Nablus. Al Jazeera Arabic reported that settlers burned part of the mosque entrance and spray-painted racist slogans, while Palestinian religious authorities said attacks on mosques were increasing during Ramadan.

• On 14 March, settlers attacked two more communities in incidents not covered in the earlier briefing. Al Jazeera English reported that in Qusra, a Palestinian man was shot dead and two others wounded, while in the Rashayda/Kisan area east of Bethlehem five Palestinians were injured and more than 100 sheep were seized.

• In mid-March, Reuters reported one of the most severe abuse cases of the month in the Bedouin community of Humsah/Khirbet Humsa in the Jordan Valley. A Palestinian man said around 80 settlers raided the area, beat and stripped him, bound his genitals with zip ties and paraded him naked in front of his children while also stealing hundreds of sheep. Reuters said Israeli military and police opened an investigation and arrested seven suspects.

• On 22–23 March, there was a wider Eid-period wave of coordinated raids across several villages. The Guardian reported attacks in al-Fandaqumiya, Seilat al-Dahr, Masafer Yatta, Qaryout, Jaloud, Haris and Tuqou, involving arson, beatings and destruction of homes and vehicles while Israeli forces stood by. Al Jazeera said the same wave injured at least 13 people and left burned homes and cars in al-Fandaqumiya.

• A second late-March wave followed immediately. Associated Press reporting on 22 March said settlers later rampaged in Deir al-Hatab, injuring at least 10 Palestinians, including a man shot in the foot and a woman with smoke inhalation, after an earlier funeral for an 18-year-old settler. This shows that the late-March violence was not confined to one locality.

• By late March, the cumulative picture had hardened. On 26 March, The Guardian reported that settlers, often acting with the complicity or in the presence of Israeli forces, had killed at least 10 Palestinian civilians in March alone.

Taken together with the cases above, the pattern up to 30 March 2026 is not only one of more attacks, but of wider geography, more arson and live fire, more attacks on religious sites and larger villages, and more evidence of violence being facilitated by wartime closures and impunity.

The UK can act against illegal occupation of territory of the State of Palestine and oppose annexation of the West Bank through well-established instruments, including:

• Arms export licensing and defence cooperation decisions (risk-based controls; suspension/denial where risk is clear)

• Sanctions and financial measures (asset freezes, travel bans, restrictions on services and financing)

• Trade and procurement policy (differentiation, exclusions, bans, guidance, enforcement)

• Diplomatic conditionality (benchmarks, refusal to participate in illegitimate processes)

• Multilateral diplomacy (UN voting, statements, coalition-building where multilateralism is blocked)

• Accountability support (support for international justice and evidence-preservation; non-interference)

• Responsible business enforcement (due diligence expectations; sanctions compliance; supply chain transparency)

OHCHR, Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan, A/HRC/61/70 (4 February 2026).

OHCHR, Human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and the obligation to ensure accountability and justice, A/HRC/61/26 (16 February 2026).

These two recent OHCHR reports and other sources from inside and outside Israel have highlighted the extent of the violence perpetrated by the State of Israel on the occupied territory of the State of Palestine since the ceasefire in Gaza and in the year before it. There has been no ceasefire or intervention against violence by non-state actors in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Each of these acts is a crime by the occupying power and taken together they constitute a record of unfolding genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes underpinning an illegal occupation based on a war of aggression by one State on a neighbouring State. These two reports cover the period before the launching of the US-Israel war on Iran and violence has ratchetted further up since then with the additional threat from missiles and drones fired on Israel by Iran. Three Palestinian women were killed when a beauty salon was struck by Iranian cluster munitions on 19th March.

Before the “Ceasefire”

Report: Human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and the obligation to ensure accountability and justice, UN Human Rights Council, A/HRC/61/26, 16 February 2026.

This report, submitted by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to the Human Rights Council, covers the period from 1 November 2024 to 31 October 2025 and provides an overview of the human rights situation across Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, with a particular emphasis on accountability and justice (p. 1) . It provides the background to the events up to 31 October 2025.

The reporting period was marked by grave and repeated violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law, committed in a pervasive climate of impunity. The report states that Israeli conduct in Gaza continued to kill and maim unprecedented numbers of civilians, displace virtually the entire population, destroy civilian infrastructure, and impose conditions of life increasingly incompatible with the continued existence of Palestinians in Gaza as a group. The ceasefire in Gaza did not come into effect on 10th October 2025. It says that these patterns raise concerns of ethnic cleansing and serious concerns regarding Israel’s compliance with its obligations under the Genocide Convention and the binding provisional measures ordered by the International Court of Justice (pp. 2–3, 16) .

In Gaza, the report records that at least 25,594 Palestinians were killed and 68,837 injured during the reporting period, bringing the total reported death toll since 7 October 2023 to 68,858, while noting that the true figure is likely higher because many remain buried under rubble. That base estimate has now increased to over 73,000. The Report emphasises the very high proportion of women and children. It raises serious concerns that attacks on homes, tents sheltering displaced civilians, aid access routes and civilian infrastructure may have been indiscriminate, disproportionate, or in some cases directed at civilians and civilian objects, which would amount to war crimes (pp. 3–5) .

A major part of the report concerns the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. It states that Palestinians faced the inhumane choice of starving or risking being shot while trying to obtain food.

It records that famine was confirmed in Gaza Governorate in August 2025 and that at least 463 Palestinians starved to death during the reporting period, including 157 children. It explicitly attributes the famine and malnutrition to actions taken by the Israeli Government, including blockade, severe restrictions on aid, destruction of food systems, attacks on distribution mechanisms, and the replacement of the UN aid system with militarised aid distribution that failed to meet humanitarian need. The report states that starvation of civilians as a method of war is a war crime and, depending on intent and context, may also amount to crimes against humanity or genocide (pp. 7–8) .

The report also concludes that Israel’s conduct in Gaza indicated mass forcible transfer. It notes that by 31 October 2025, around 1.9 million Palestinians, roughly 90 per cent of the population, remained displaced, often repeatedly, and that 81 per cent of structures in Gaza had been damaged or destroyed. It argues that repeated displacement orders, the lack of safe shelter, widescale destruction of housing and civilian infrastructure, and statements by senior Israeli officials collectively suggest a pattern aimed at permanent demographic change (pp. 5–7) .

In the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, the report records 255 Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces during the reporting period and 130 of those killed posed no imminent threat to life. It criticises the use of military-style methods, including airstrikes, in law-enforcement contexts, and documents apparent extrajudicial executions. It also highlights “Operation Iron Wall” and other operations that caused mass displacement and widespread destruction in refugee camps and urban areas. By the end of the reporting period, it says at least 31,919 Palestinians remained forcibly displaced as a result of these operations (pp. 9–12) .

The report devotes substantial attention to detention and abuse. It states that more than 9,200 Palestinians were in Israeli prisons or detention facilities as of 31 October 2025, including large numbers held in administrative detention without charge or trial, as well as children and women. OHCHR interviews with former detainees indicated widespread torture and ill-treatment, including sexual violence, beatings, starvation, stress positions and medical neglect. It records 79 verified Palestinian deaths in Israeli detention since 7 October 2023 and says such practices may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity (pp. 12–13) .

The report also documents grave violations by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups, particularly the continued holding of hostages and evidence of torture, sexual violence and other mistreatment, which it says amount to war crimes and possibly other atrocity crimes. It also criticises the Palestinian Authority for unlawful killings, arbitrary detention, torture, and suppression of journalists and critics in the West Bank (pp. 3, 9–15) .

On accountability, the report says it was not aware of meaningful steps by Israel’s justice system to ensure accountability for violations committed in Gaza during the reporting period, and that impunity also remained pervasive in relation to killings and abuse in the West Bank. It therefore highlights the continuing importance of international accountability mechanisms, especially the ICC and ICJ (pp. 15–16) .

The report’s final conclusion is that Israeli practices across Gaza and the West Bank indicate a concerted and accelerating effort to consolidate annexation of large parts of the occupied territory of the State of Palestine while maintaining a regime of oppression and domination over Palestinians. It says that in the West Bank this amounts to a violation of article 3 of ICERD, which prohibits racial segregation and apartheid, and it calls on states to pursue accountability, cooperate with the ICC, and cease the sale or transfer of arms and military equipment facilitating violations of international law (pp. 16–17) .

Israeli Settlements

Report: Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan, UN Human Rights Council, A/HRC/61/70, 4 February 2026.

This report, submitted by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to the Human Rights Council, covers the period from 1 November 2024 to 31 October 2025 and assesses developments relating to Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan (p. 1) .

Its central conclusion is that the reporting period saw a sharp acceleration of settlement expansion, land appropriation, legal and administrative annexation measures, and settler violence, all of which contributed to an increasingly coercive environment for Palestinians and deepened the fragmentation of Palestinian territory. It is clear from the report that this is an official policy of the State of Israel.

The report argues that Israeli laws, policies and practices amount to a deliberate policy of physical and juridical separation intended to maintain oppression and domination over Palestinians, and that acts carried out to sustain such a system violate article 3 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which prohibits racial segregation and apartheid (pp. 2–3) and wider violations of international law and international humanitarian law.

The report is explicit that settlements are illegal under international law. It states that Israel’s transfer of parts of its own civilian population into occupied territory is unlawful and recalls the International Court of Justice’s July 2024 advisory opinion that the settlement enterprise forms part of a wider policy of annexation and denies Palestinians their right to self-determination. It says Israel is under an obligation to cease all new settlement activity and evacuate all settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory (p. 5) .

The report highlights intensified annexation-related measures. It places particular emphasis on the 11 May 2025 decision to resume settlement of land title in Area C, warning that this risks becoming a new instrument for the seizure of Palestinian land, as the report says has already occurred in East Jerusalem. It also points to multiple legislative efforts in the Knesset to extend Israeli law across the West Bank, facilitate direct settler land purchases, incorporate settlements around Jerusalem into a metropolitan bloc, and otherwise entrench the legal foundations of annexation. The report says these measures threaten to further fragment the West Bank, isolate East Jerusalem, and deepen the denial of Palestinian self-determination and other human rights (pp. 4–5).

On settlement expansion, the report records that the Israeli Security Cabinet approved 35 settlement projects in the occupied West Bank during the reporting period, excluding East Jerusalem. It highlights the 29 May 2025 decision authorizing 22 settlements in a single move, including nine entirely new settlements, the legalization of twelve outposts, and the recognition of one area previously treated as a neighbourhood as a separate settlement. It also notes major funding for roads and infrastructure intended to connect settlements more closely to Israel and to make sovereignty over the territory a fait accompli on the ground (p. 5).

The report treats the E1 block as especially significant. It states that on 20 August 2025 the Higher Planning Council formally approved 3,401 housing units in E1, the strategically sensitive area between Ma’ale Adummim and East Jerusalem. According to the report, building there would cut East Jerusalem off from the rest of the West Bank, deepen Palestinian territorial fragmentation, and place thousands of Palestinians from 18 Bedouin communities inside the E1 block at risk of displacement. It says that such displacement would amount to forcible transfer and could entail individual criminal responsibility (pp. 5–6).

The scale of expansion is approximately 27,200 housing units in settlements in the occupied West Bank were advanced or approved during the reporting period, compared with 8,694 in the previous period. In East Jerusalem, it says 36,973 units were advanced through new settlements, expansion plans or urban renewal schemes. It also notes an agreement signed in September 2025 to accelerate construction of around 7,600 units in Ma’ale Adummim and adjacent areas, including E1, together with major infrastructure investment intended to double the settler population there (p. 6).

The report says the outpost phenomenon also accelerated dramatically. It records that 84 new settlement outposts were established during the reporting period, bringing the total to more than 300, including outposts in Area B. It presents these outposts as the spearhead of a broader pattern in which settlers establish a presence, are then supported with infrastructure and legalization, and use harassment, violence and resource seizure to push Palestinians off their land (pp. 6–7).

The report further details land appropriation, demolitions and displacement. It states that Israeli authorities continued to declare Palestinian land as “State land”, issue military expropriation orders, and demolish Palestinian homes and structures on a large scale. During the reporting period, it records 1,773 Palestinian-owned structures demolished or ordered for demolition across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, resulting in the displacement of at least 2,490 Palestinians. It notes especially severe impacts in Area C, East Jerusalem, Masafer Yatta and the Jordan Valley (pp. 7–9, 13–14).

A particularly important part of the report concerns settler violence. It records 1,732 incidents of settler violence causing casualties and/or property damage during the reporting period, plus a further 1,452 incidents involving harassment, intimidation, trespass or property takeover. It also notes the destruction of more than 26,000 Palestinian trees. The report presents this violence as coordinated, strategic and largely unchallenged, with Israeli authorities playing a central role in directing, participating in or enabling it. It adds that support for the militarization of the settler movement has made it increasingly difficult to distinguish between settler violence and State violence, including because of the growing role of “settler-soldiers” armed, equipped and trained by State authorities (pp. 10–12).

On accountability, the report says impunity remains pervasive. It notes that very few complaints against settlers lead to indictments and that many Palestinians do not report attacks because they have no faith in the system and fear retaliation. It also says international sanctions on individual settlers have had limited effect where wider networks and organizations remain untouched (p. 12).

The report concludes that the cumulative effect of settlement expansion, discriminatory governance, land seizures, demolitions, State-enabled settler violence and large-scale displacement is the reshaping of the occupied West Bank’s physical and demographic reality in favour of permanent Israeli control. It says that more than 36,000 Palestinians were displaced in the occupied West Bank during the reporting period and that the pattern appears to indicate a concerted policy of mass forcible transfer, raising concerns of ethnic cleansing. It calls on Israel to cease and reverse settlement expansion and related activity, evacuate settlers, halt demolitions and forced evictions, and prevent and punish settler violence. It also recalls the ICJ’s position that third States must not recognize as lawful the situation created by Israel’s continued unlawful presence and must not render aid or assistance in maintaining it. Separately, the High Commissioner calls on all States to cease the sale, transfer and diversion of arms, munitions and other military equipment to Israel that facilitate violations of international law (pp. 14–16).

The UK response to Settler Violence

If the British government is serious about its commitment to international law, then its response to this escalation cannot stop at condemnation. The UK has been clear that settlements are illegal and that the West Bank remains occupied territory. That position carries obligations. Under international humanitarian law, and the wider law of state responsibility, the UK must not recognise as lawful a situation created by serious breaches of international law, nor aid or assist in maintaining it.

That means treating settler violence not as a series of unfortunate incidents, but as part of a wider unlawful system of settlement, dispossession and coercive displacement. Where that system is sustained by economic activity, political support or the absence of consequences, the UK has a duty to act. At a minimum, this requires sanctions on those directly involved in settler violence, a prohibition on trade and investment linked to settlements, and clear steps to ensure that British institutions- public or private -are not complicit in the infrastructure of occupation.

The principle is straightforward. A rules-based order only has meaning if it applies to allies as well as adversaries. If the UK believes that international law binds, then it must be willing to use its own legal and economic tools to uphold it.

The UK response to Gaza

As a consequence of the evidence set out in the report, the United Kingdom should align its policy with its obligations under international law and international humanitarian law by taking concrete steps to ensure it does not recognise, assist or contribute to unlawful acts in the occupied territory of the State of Palestine - and specifically Gaza. This requires, at a minimum, the suspension of arms exports and related transfers where there is a clear risk they may be used in violations of international law; the prohibition of trade and services linked to settlements; the prosecution of UK and duel citizens implicated in war crimes or crimes against humanity; and active diplomatic measures to uphold the ICJ’s findings, including support for accountability mechanisms and the protection of Palestinian civilians. In doing so, the UK would move from rhetorical support for the rules-based international order to practical compliance with its legal obligations.

Having grown up in a home in which Primo Levi - a friend of my aunt Laura- was a household god, I tend to go back to him to grasp the experience of the victim as a I sit safe by my fire as a bystander. The poem which opens his first book he published seems apposite - the You in the first line is of course, We:

If this is a Man

You who live safe

In your warm houses,

You who find, returning in the evening,

Hot food and friendly faces:

Consider if this is a man

Who works in the mud

Who does not know peace

Who fights for a scrap of bread

Who dies because of a yes or a no,

Consider if this is a woman,

Without hair and without name

With no more strength to remember,

Her eyes empty and her womb cold

Like a frog in winter.

Meditated that this came about:

I commend these words to you.

Carve them in your hearts

At home, in the street,

Going to bed, rising;

Repeat them to your children.

Or, may your house call apart,

May illness impede you,

May your children turn their faces from you.

Lord Hermer’s speech at his alma mater Manchester University yesterday only once gets close to talking about the State of Israel. A State that is currently occupying the State of Palestine, invading Lebanon, bombing Iran, occupying part of Syria and Jordan:

Hermer’s Harry Street Lecture was a powerful statement in defence of the international law and the Human Rights Act and by extension the European Convention. The international rules-based order is not soft idealism but hard national interest, he rightly argues, it helps Britain trade, cooperate, protect rights, and avoid the chaos of a world where power alone decides outcomes. He also rightly argues that the ECHR is not an elite lawyers’ toy, but a practical shield for ordinary people against overreach by the state. In Hermer’s telling, law is not a restraint on Britain’s influence in the world; it is part of what makes Britain influential.

That is why the speech is more than a general defence of post-war institutions. It is also a rejection of two current temptations. On one side, Hermer pushes back against the revived “might is right” mood in international affairs - in quoting Hobbes he agrees with some of the points made [HERE - Hobbes in the White House]. On the other, he rejects the idea that commitment to rights means weakness, pacifism, or retreat from NATO and defence. He explicitly argues that a strong military and a strong commitment to law belong together, and he grounds his ECHR defence in concrete cases: LGBT personnel such as Jeanette Smith and Graeme Grady, the Hillsborough families, and victims of John Worboys. This is classic Labour legalism at its best: rights are universal, concrete, and worth defending institutionally.

Hermer’s central claim is that the rules-based order is both morally right and materially beneficial. He rejects the “might is right” argument not only on ethical grounds but because it undermines Britain’s national interest. Shared rules, he argues, enable trade, cooperation, and security. They give smaller and mid-sized powers like the UK predictability in a world otherwise dominated by great power coercion.

But this, Lord Hermer knows only too well, is only half the story. The real crisis today is not a collapse of legal frameworks. The Geneva Conventions still exist. The International Court of Justice still functions. The language of human rights is still, for now, embedded in UK law. The crisis is that enforcement and the political will that enables is uneven. In other words, we are not entering a Hobbesian world without rules. We are entering a world where rules are applied differently depending on who is acting. The rules-based order is not dying. It is being selectively applied.

As quoted above, Hermer references Gaza, alongside Ukraine, Sudan and Iran, as evidence of a dangerous world. But he does not engage with the central legal question that now sits at the heart of British foreign policy: what does it mean to uphold international law when an ally is credibly accused of its most serious violations and is currently occupying the territory of others States by force in exactly the same way as Russia is occupying Ukraine. The occupation of Palestinian territory is illegal. The expansion of settlements is illegal. The ICJ has issued provisional measures in relation to Gaza, Lord Hermer himself has written advice on these measures, that have not yet, 20 months after the advisory appeared, been published. There are credible allegations of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The question is not whether legal frameworks exist. It is whether they are being acted upon. And here, the gap between Hermer’s principles and current policy becomes difficult to ignore.

From rhetoric to complicity?

State responsibility does not begin and end with direct participation in unlawful acts. It extends to facilitation. States can incur responsibility not only by acting - but by enabling. This includes:

• allowing military bases to be used for unlawful acts,

• providing intelligence or logistical support to unlawful acts,

• maintaining arms exports to carry out unlawful acts,

• or sustaining economic relationships that underpin unlawful activity.

Hermer himself acknowledges that international law should act as a “compass” guiding decision-making. But a compass only matters if you follow the course it charts. If settlements are illegal, as the UK repeatedly affirms, then trade and services connected to those settlements cannot simply be treated as a reputational risk. A practical reading of Hermer’s argument suggests the UK could already be doing far more than it is: moving from voluntary to mandatory enforcement of settlement labelling; publishing clear import data to expose the scale of settlement trade; issuing binding guidance to financial institutions whose lending and services underpin settlement expansion; enforcing existing consumer and money-laundering laws where goods are falsely labelled or derived from unlawfully occupied land; and, ultimately, aligning policy with principle by restricting or banning trade and services that sustain settlements - just as the UK has done in other contexts of illegal occupation. None of this requires new primary legislation; much of it sits within existing powers that remain unused in the case of the occupation of the State of Palestine, leaving a gap between what the UK says international law requires and what it is actually prepared to do.

One of the strongest sections of the lecture is Hermer’s defence of the ECHR - not as an external imposition, but as a British achievement that protects ordinary people. The examples he gives - Hillsborough, victims of violence, LGBTQ personnel - are powerful because they show how law constrains power. But this too connects directly to the arguments about Gaza and the wider political climate. Because the erosion of international law abroad often mirrors pressures on democratic norms at home:

• restrictions on protest,

• attempts to delegitimise legal scrutiny,

• attacks on international courts,

• and a growing narrative that rights are obstacles rather than safeguards.

If the rules-based order is, as Hermer puts it, the “operating system” of modern life, then weakening it externally inevitably destabilises it internally. You cannot defend the ECHR at home while treating international law as negotiable abroad without creating a deeper inconsistency.

Labour’s values adrift?

Hermer’s speech is, in many ways, a statement of Labour’s best tradition:

• belief in universal rights,

• commitment to international cooperation,

• understanding that law protects the weak,

• and recognition that Britain’s identity is tied to fairness and justice.

These are not new ideas. They run through Labour’s history - from the post-war settlement to fight the five giants of want, idleness, disease, squalor and ignorance to the Human Rights Act. But values are not tested in easy cases but they are tested where there is political cost. And that is where the current moment matters. Because the risk for Labour is not that it rejects international law. It is that it affirms it rhetorically while hesitating to apply it in practice. Lord Hermer is right to reject the idea that international law is obsolete, but the real danger is not that law disappears, it is that it becomes conditional. That it is invoked against adversaries, but allies are allowed impunity. That it is defended in speeches, but worked around in policy terms.

The major question the speech leaves open is the UK’s legal justification for the use of bases in the current campaign against Iran and the use of defensive air strikes. The UK role in collective defence is dealt with in the speech simply by saying: “no to an offensive war, yes to defending ourselves and our allies from wanton and indiscriminate Iranian retaliation”. The government frames its actions as limited, defensive support to allies, rooted in long-standing arrangements and the right of self-defence. [See a full discussion of this HERE: Use of UK airbases and wider implications of US and Israel operations in the Middle East.

Collective defence does not remove legal responsibility; it redistributes it. Where UK bases, intelligence, logistics or overflight permissions are used in support of operations whose legal basis is contested, the UK’s exposure does not disappear simply because it is not flying the missions itself. The distinction between defensive support and participation becomes increasingly difficult to sustain in practice, particularly where the threshold for lawful self-defence - immediacy, necessity, proportionality - is unclear or disputed - are all the strikes being launched from UK bases defensive? Are the missiles facilities destroyed the same ones that were used to launch a drone at Cyprus or missiles at Qatar? How can it be proved that the missions launched were purely missions against targets complicit in attacks on allies and therefore prevented more attacks? Taking a drone out before it hits Doha is one thing, bombing the supply line and the energy plant to that factory and to the community around it is quite another. In this sense, collective defence is not a shield but a test: it requires the UK not only to stand with its allies, but to ensure that the actions it supports remain within the boundaries of international law it claims to defend.

One image should now bury the fantasy that a British “Iron Dome” is the answer to UK or wider NATO air defence challenges from a potential Russian attack. [see my earlier substack on the dangerous myth of the UK Iron Dome] That image is the awful sight of Iranian missiles landing in Arad and Dimona on 22 March 2026 after Israeli air defences failed to intercept them. Four days earlier, Reuters reported that an Iranian cluster-warhead missile also evaded interception over the Tel Aviv area, scattering bomblets into civilian zones, killing two people and damaging a major rail station. In British political debate, “Iron Dome” has become a lazy shorthand for Israel’s entire layered architecture. But Iron Dome is the lowest tier, built primarily for short-range rockets, artillery and some drone threats. Iranian cruise missiles, longer-range rockets and ballistic missiles are also met by are also met by David’s Sling, Arrow II and Arrow III, inside a larger U.S.-dependent architecture.

Since 28 February 2026 Iran has fired more than 400 ballistic missiles at Israel and Israel has put the interception rate at about 92%; which implies roughly 30-plus missiles were not intercepted, although the IAF’s narrower damage summary speaks of only four major “destruction sites.” That gap is because Iran is using cluster-warhead missiles that disperse into multiple submunitions and can hit several locations at once. Eleven Iranian cluster missiles had penetrated Israeli air defences by 11th March. For drones, the IDF said by 7 March that it had intercepted more than 110 Iranian drones. On the Lebanon front there have been 865 attack waves against Israel since 2 March, with recent impacts in Ma’alot-Tarshiha, Kfar Vradim, Kiryat Shmona, Nahariya and Metula; separately, the IDF says Hezbollah has averaged about 150 rockets a day, implying roughly 3,000-plus rockets fired overall by 23 March. A successful long-range Hezbollah strike caused at least 16 injuries and some infrastructure damage even as the IDF intercepted dozens of Lebanese-launched drones. There is a significant news blackout on the numbers of locations of strikes on Israel, even so the range of weapons fired and the numbers that have been reported to have got through mean March 2026 has been a stress test of the Israeli-U.S. missile-defence stack, of which the dome forms one part, and a revealing one. Overall it makes the case again that has been rapidly embraced by many in the Gulf, it the Ukrainians who can teach us about anti-drone and anti-missile defence and not the Israelis.

British advocates of Iron Dome are selling a system for procurement by the MOD not based on a coherent doctrine that it is fit for the purpose of UK Air Defence, they are selling an ideological brand. This does not mean that Iron Dome has not done its job in defending Israel against many of the threats Israel faces. According to the Congressional Research Service, Iron Dome has carried out more than 5,000 successful interceptions and achieved a reported success rate above 90 percent, in the ten years since its adoption. But that record is often stripped of context when it is used in British debate. A system designed for short-range threats is recast as one to provide general invulnerability. A layered, deeply subsidised architecture is repackaged as a plug-and-play model for the UK.

Westminster has been primed to buy the invulnerability story. In March 2025 writing in the Jewish Chronicle, Grant Shapps and Labour Friends of Israel in a pamphlet published in November 2024, argued for deeper defence cooperation with Israel and for a British “Iron Dome”, with the argument resting heavily on Israeli systems being “combat-tested”. But combat-tested does not automatically mean affordable, strategically appropriate or scalable for British needs. Sometimes it means something less flattering: battle exposure has revealed high burn rates, dependence on U.S. co-production, excessive cost to drone/missile kill ratio, and limited utility under saturation attacks of the terrible drone swarms so familiar in Kyiv.

The first of those limits is dependence. Iron Dome is not a sovereign capability floating above politics. The Congressional Research Service says the United States has provided more than $6 billion for Iron Dome batteries, interceptors, co-production and maintenance - which assuming 5,000 intercepts is $1.2m per interception. The same report shows that David’s Sling was co-developed with the United States and RTX, while Arrow has been co-developed and co-produced with U.S. partners for decades, with billions more in American funding. The shield that British lobbyists romanticise is therefore not simply “Israeli ingenuity”. It is a deeply subsidised, U.S.-entangled architecture whose resilience depends on American money, American industry and American resupply. How reliable is the US as an ally today?

The second limit is the economics of attrition. Early this month, the Guardian argued that the war could come down to who runs out of missiles or interceptors first, quoting analysts on the scarcity of advanced munitions and the slow pace at which they can be replaced. [if you have access, the Times has a detailed analysis HERE] Cluster munitions complicate interception. Missiles still got through. Civilians were still hit. A shield that performs impressively in percentage terms can still fail politically and strategically when even a handful of penetrations produce deaths, damaged infrastructure and public panic, there is growing discontent with this war in Israel because of this. March 2026 did not reveal an invulnerable dome, it revealed a steel colander.

The third limit is that Britain itself already knows better. The government’s 2025 Strategic Defence Review committed up to £1 billion for homeland air and missile defence, but it also stressed that the real lesson of Ukraine is speed, autonomy and procurement measured in months rather than years. It says drones now kill more people in Ukraine than traditional artillery. John Healey told the Guardian that eye-catching ideas such as a British “iron dome” , note the lack of definition, were likely to disappoint some in the defence community because they would probably be an overly expensive way to defend the UK. Even Whitehall has been warning against buying the brand instead of learning the lessons of Ukraine.

This is where Ukraine must come centre stage, not as a magic replacement for ballistic missile defence, but as the country that has actually learned how to fight the economics of drone war. Reuters reported on 17 March that Ukrainian STING interceptors have downed more than 3,000 Russian Shaheds since entering regular service in June 2025, that more than 10,000 units are rolling off the production line each month, and that they cost around $2,000 or less. Defence News, meanwhile, notes that a Patriot interceptor costs over $3 million and a NASAMS round slightly over $1 million. That is the real revolution a radically better cost to drone kill ratio. Having visited Ukraine many times since the full scale invasion I have seen the inside of some of these factories and watched them grow and develop. They are an astonishing testament to the power of innovation that is driven by a fight for your survival.

Defence News reports that one in every three Russian aerial targets destroyed over Ukraine is now brought down by interceptor drones rather than by missiles or guns, and that over Kyiv those drones accounted for more than 70 percent of Shahed downings in February 2026. Many of these interceptors were born in garages and built to supply individual units held together by duct tape and a prayer, before being taken to scale by incubators and an army of geeks, aerospace engineers, gamers and other techy nerds mobilised by the Armed Forces of Ukraine or working as civilians. That is exactly the kind of wartime adaptation Britain says it wants to emulate: devolved distributed systems, rapid iteration, low unit cost, fast operator training, rapid adaptation to changes in enemy technology and an acceptance that scale matters more than prestige. The future of air defence is not one iconic system wrapped in the mythology of invulnerability. It is a dense ecosystem of sensors, software, electronic warfare, cheap interceptors and constant adaptation.

Reuters has reported that Kyiv and local producers say the U.S. and its allies are seeking Ukrainian help in the Middle East, and that Gulf clients have already shown interest in Wild Hornets’ interceptors. On 2 March, Keir Starmer said Ukrainian experts would help Gulf partners shoot down Iranian drones. Ukrainian drones are being built in the UK. The National, reporting from the Gulf, described another Ukraine-tested interceptor, Blaze, as costing roughly $20,000 to $30,000 per unit, with a range of about 25 kilometres, speeds up to 300kph and operator training measured in three or four days. That is what a serious response to mass drone war looks like: cheap enough to use, quick enough to field, and simple enough to scale. Read the Kate Mckenna substack if you want to know more.

There is an important qualification. Ukraine’s low-cost interceptors are not a full substitute for upper-tier ballistic missile defence. They do not make Arrow or similar systems obsolete, and they do not eliminate the need for high-end interceptors against faster, higher, more complex threats. But that is precisely the point. The lesson is not “replace Arrow with a quadcopter”. The lesson is that modern air defence has to be layered intelligently, with the cheap drone layer handled by equally cheap, adaptable counters, so that scarce premium interceptors are reserved for threats that actually require them and it all has to be integrated across NATO and have its own supply lines that are not US or Chinese dependent. That is what Gulf states are now learning under fire. It is also what Britain should learn before it writes procurement policy around propaganda and brand.

The selling of the Israeli systems in Britain has never been purely technical. It is pushing a worldview in which Israel functions as the frontier state of the West, its weapons acquire moral as well as mechanical prestige, and buying them becomes a declaration of alignment as much as a defence choice. That is why the sales pitch survives so much contradictory evidence. But the Third Gulf War is making the evidence impossible to ignore. Israel’s shield is real, sophisticated and, thankfully for the civilians it protects, still formidable. It is also expensive, heavily subsidised, dependent on others, good for some levels of threat but not the ones the UK will face and penetrable. Ukraine’s model is rougher, cheaper and far more relevant to the age of mass drones and missiles.

Briefing: You can download this briefing here:

Bpp Briefing On Uk Bases 20 March

196KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Full text is here:

1. Summary

The Government’s position is that it authorised US use of UK bases only for a “specific and limited defensive” purpose, that such use is subject to joint UK–US decision under longstanding arrangements, and that the UK has not joined an offensive campaign against Iran or been drawn into a wider war. On 20 March, that position came under sharper pressure when Iran’s foreign minister warned that allowing US use of British bases would be treated as “participation in aggression”, while Downing Street repeated that the UK role was limited, defensive and lawful. These exchanges do not resolve the central legal issue. The question is whether the underlying US action can properly be justified as self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter. If the strikes are better understood as anticipatory or preventive force, rather than a response to an armed attack or an imminent one, the legal basis is much weaker. In that event, the UK is not insulated simply because it is not carrying out the principal strikes itself: under international law, responsibility may also arise through facilitation, including basing, logistical, intelligence or operational support. The key issue for Parliament is therefore not only direct participation, but whether the Government’s narrow “defensive” framing is sufficient to meet the legal threshold.

A related set of legal questions arises in respect of Israel’s ongoing military operations in Lebanon and its continued occupation of Syrian territory, including the Golan Heights and buffer zones. The UK’s stated position is one of non-recognition of territorial acquisition by force and support for withdrawal in line with international law and UN resolutions. However, as with the Iran context, legal exposure may arise where UK policy, cooperation or support risks being seen as assisting or normalising situations regarded as unlawful, particularly where military operations extend beyond clear self-defence or where occupation becomes prolonged or consolidated. In the Occupied Territory of the State of Palestine, the legal position is now clearer still. The International Court of Justice has held that Israel’s continued presence is unlawful, and the UN General Assembly has affirmed the obligation on third states not to recognise or assist in maintaining that situation. This places the UK under a heightened duty to ensure that its policies—including arms exports, trade, intelligence sharing and diplomatic support—do not contribute, directly or indirectly, to the maintenance of an unlawful occupation or to serious breaches of international law. Taken together, these theatres point to a common issue: the extent to which UK actions, even where framed as limited or defensive, may engage responsibility through facilitation or failure to meet obligations of non-assistance.

2. The governing international law

The starting point is Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, which prohibits the use of force against another state except in narrow circumstances. The recognised exceptions are UN Security Council authorisation, or self-defence under Article 51. There is no accepted standalone legal doctrine permitting force for regime change, strategic coercion, or generalised pre-emption. The legal question is therefore whether the relevant strikes can properly be brought within self-defence.

3. Why anticipatory self-defence matters

A recent Law Gazette article is important because it restates the orthodox position on anticipatory self-defence. It notes that Article 51 preserves the right of self-defence only “if an armed attack occurs”, and that the International Court of Justice in Nicaragua v United States treated only the gravest forms of force as capable of triggering that right. Where force is used before an attack has occurred, states sometimes rely on the older Caroline test, under which the necessity for self-defence must be: “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.” If that threshold is not met, the legal basis for the strikes is substantially weakened. The key point is this: If the underlying action is not lawful self-defence, then UK support for it becomes legally more difficult to defend.

4. UK responsibility through facilitation

The UK does not need to be flying the principal strike missions in order to face legal exposure. Involvement may arise through:

• intelligence sharing

• logistical support

• overflight permissions

• refuelling

• cyber or signals intelligence assistance

• diplomatic cover

• basing arrangements

International law includes a doctrine of responsibility for aid or assistance in another state’s wrongful act. That principle is directly relevant where the UK provides material support to operations whose own legal basis may be contested.

5. The significance of UK bases.

The Commons Library briefing confirms that:

• the US Visiting Force is present in the UK at the invitation of the UK Government

• the legal basis is the NATO SOFA and Visiting Forces Act 1952

• use of UK bases for military operations is subject to a joint UK-US decision

This means the Government cannot readily present the use of UK bases as a matter outside its control. There is also an increasing risk that, where UK territory or facilities are used in support of military operations, the UK will be treated by Iran and others as more than a neutral actor for the purposes of retaliation, including cyber operations, proxy activity, or attacks on UK-linked assets abroad.

6. International humanitarian law

International humanitarian law operates separately from the law on the resort to force and governs the conduct of parties to a conflict once that conflict has begun. If UK-linked bases are being targeted, there is an argument that the UK is already within an international armed conflict with Iran, meaning IHL would apply. Military installations used in support of operations may become military objectives, meaning they may be lawfully targeted under certain circumstances.

7. Neutrality and escalation

The more UK territory, infrastructure and forces are integrated into operations against Iran, the harder it becomes to sustain neutrality. Potential risks include:

• cyber activity

• proxy action

• threats to shipping and energy assets

• further attacks on UK-linked military infrastructure

8. Key questions for MPs

On legal basis

• What is the Government’s full legal basis for permitting the use of UK bases?

• Does the Government consider the action reactive, collective, or anticipatory self-defence?

• What evidence of imminence was relied upon?

On UK involvement

• What categories of support has the UK provided?

• Have UK personnel contributed to targeting or intelligence?

On parliamentary accountability

• Has Parliament been given sufficient information?

• When does defensive support become participation?

On civilian harm and IHL

• What assessments have been made of civilian harm?

• What safeguards ensure compliance with IHL?

State Responsibility and Non-Assistance Across Theatres (March 2026)

9. Responsibility for aiding or assisting internationally wrongful acts

The legal issues raised by UK facilitation of US operations against Iran sit within a wider framework of state responsibility under international law. Under the Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts (ARSIWA), particularly Articles 16 and 41, a state may incur responsibility where it aids or assists another state in committing an internationally wrongful act, or fails to comply with duties of non-recognition and non-assistance in relation to serious breaches of peremptory norms.

10. The clearest case: Occupied Territory of the State of Palestine (OPT)

The legal position is now most clearly defined in relation to Palestine. In July 2024, the International Court of Justice held that Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful. The UN General Assembly subsequently reaffirmed the obligation of third states not to recognise or assist in maintaining that situation. As of March 2026, Gaza remains in severe humanitarian crisis; the West Bank and East Jerusalem are experiencing record settlement expansion and displacement; and Israeli military activity continues across Lebanon, Syria and Iran. For the UK, this creates a set of continuous legal tests regarding whether arms exports, intelligence sharing, basing, trade and diplomatic support are compatible with duties of non-assistance.

12. Implications for UK policy

• Non-recognition and non-assistance are now central tests.

• The UK must ensure it does not recognise unlawful situations or provide material support that sustains them.

• Arms, intelligence and basing create cumulative exposure. Even indirect support may engage legal responsibility.

• Settlement trade remains a gap in policy alignment. Current UK policy discourages but does not prohibit such activity.

• Existing UK measures are significant but partial and do not resolve broader cooperation issues.

• Domestic consequences are already material, including risks to UK personnel, energy prices and regional stability.

13. Key questions for ministers

• Has the Government updated its legal assessment following the ICJ’s July 2024 opinion?

• What safeguards ensure UK support is not used to maintain unlawful occupation or serious breaches?

• Will the UK prohibit settlement-related trade and investment?

• What steps is the UK taking regarding Lebanon and Syria?

  
  
  

Competing approaches to interpreting the Convention

The submissions reveal two broad interpretive tendencies.

One group of states advances a contextual and cumulative approach to genocide. in support of South Africa’s intrepretation. Interventions by states such as the Netherlands, Iceland, and Namibia emphasise that genocidal intent may be inferred from patterns of conduct over time rather than requiring direct or explicit evidence and they echo the arguments made in the Gaza Tribunal. These submissions highlight large-scale destruction of civilian infrastructure, restrictions on humanitarian access, conditions of life incompatible with survival, forced displacement, and the particular vulnerability of children. They also stress the legal significance of incitement and the failure to prevent or punish it, as well as the obligations of third states under the duty to prevent genocide.

A second group adopts a more restrictive interpretation in support of what we assume is in the Israel submission/memorial not yet published. Submissions by Hungary and Fiji emphasise the need to maintain a high threshold for establishing genocidal intent, warning against conflating genocide with violations of international humanitarian law. These interventions argue for a more stringent evidentiary approach, drawing on analogies to criminal law standards, and express caution regarding reliance on certain categories of evidence, including reports by international organisations and non-governmental actors.

Taken together, these positions reflect an underlying divergence on the proper methodology for determining intent: whether it should be inferred from a broader pattern of conduct or confined to a narrower set of evidentiary indicators.

The role of the United States submission

The United States intervention is particularly notable in this context. It focuses on preserving a restrictive interpretation of genocidal intent as developed in prior ICJ jurisprudence, particularly in the Bosnia and Croatia cases.

The U.S. submission emphasises that intent to destroy a protected group must be established as the only reasonable inference from the evidence. It underscores that knowledge of the consequences of military operations is not equivalent to intent, and that civilian harm in armed conflict, especially in close quarter urban environments, does not, in itself, demonstrate genocidal intent. The submission also highlights the relevance of measures taken to mitigate civilian harm and the operational context, including by military units and the conduct of non-state actors. In doing so, the U.S. intervention seeks to reinforce a doctrinal framework that places a high evidentiary burden on claims of genocide. Compared with other submissions, it gives less emphasis to cumulative conditions such as deprivation, displacement, or humanitarian access as independent indicators of intent to narrow the range as far as possible of what constitutes genocide under the convention.

South Africa’s response to Israel’s March 12 submission

Israel’s written response, filed on 12 March 2026, is not yet public. As a result, any assessment of South Africa’s response must rely on its official public statement rather than a detailed legal analysis. In its 15 March statement, the South African Presidency adopted a measured and procedural approach. It indicated that the government would first study Israel’s submission before deciding whether to seek leave from the Court to file a further written response or proceed directly to oral proceedings.

This response reflects a cautious litigation strategy. By avoiding substantive comment in advance of reviewing the full Israeli filing, South Africa preserves flexibility in determining its next procedural step. It also avoids pre-empting arguments that may require detailed engagement at a later stage. At the same time, the statement situates the case within the ongoing humanitarian conditions in Gaza, referring to the continued severity of the situation and to the ICJ’s prior provisional measures orders.

Germany and the broader legal context

A further development relevant to the broader legal landscape is the decision by Germany not to intervene in the case South African case on the side of Israel. Germany’s Foreign Office confirmed that it will not intervene in support of Israel in the ICJ genocide case, despite a previous government commitment to do so. The reason given is that Germany is now itself a party to separate proceedings at the ICJ, brought by Nicaragua, and is prioritising its own legal defence. While declining to restate earlier claims that the genocide allegations are “absurd,” the government did not withdraw that position, instead saying the matter should be determined by the Court and refusing further comment. The Nicaragua case against Germany raises questions about third-state responsibility, including obligations to prevent genocide and avoid complicity. The ICJ declined to order provisional measures against Germany in April 2024 but has not dismissed the case.

UK vulnerability to a case against it

Taken together, these developments matter beyond the case against Israel itself. The Nicaragua proceedings against Germany have shown that legal scrutiny can extend to third states alleged to have failed to prevent genocide or to have continued forms of support in the face of a serious and well-documented risk. The Court’s refusal to order provisional measures against Germany did not remove that possibility; it left the wider legal question alive. For the United Kingdom, the implication is not that equivalent proceedings are imminent, but that the space for such arguments now clearly exists. Where a state has diplomatic weight, military ties, intelligence relationships, export controls, or the capacity to condition assistance, its exposure is no longer only political. It may also become legal. The more the ICJ’s merits phase turns toward cumulative patterns of destruction, deprivation, displacement and aid obstruction, the sharper that question may become for governments, including the UK, that continue to navigate support, facilitation and restraint in relation to Israel’s conduct.