Stephen M. Flatow is an attorney and the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is author of A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror (now available in an expanded paperback edition on Amazon.com) and is the chair of the Religious Zionists of America-Mizrachi. An oleh chadash, he divides his time between Jerusalem and New Jersey.
British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband began his announcement of sanctions against Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria in an unusual way.
He talked about being Jewish.
Miliband described himself in the House of Commons as “a proud British Jew." He spoke movingly of his grandmother, who found refuge in Israel after the Nazis murdered her husband-Miliband’s grandfather-and 60 other members of their family. He recalled visiting her in Tel Aviv and picking oranges on the kibbutz where his cousins lived.
It was a powerful story. And it makes what followed all the more difficult to understand.
Having explained why the Jewish people needed a homeland, Miliband announced a British policy designed to economically isolate Jews living in part of that homeland’s historic heartland.
Britain will ban imports from Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria. It plans sanctions against companies and individuals providing construction, infrastructure, financing and real-estate services for settlement expansion. Britain will even prohibit the advertising of properties there and refuse export licenses for goods that it determines materially contribute to the “occupation."
Miliband insists this is not BDS. In fact, he told Parliament that he “wholeheartedly" opposes BDS.
Perhaps someone in Whitehall can explain the distinction to me.
When the British government tells its citizens that products made by Jews on one side of a particular line may not be imported, that British businesses may be sanctioned for helping Jews build homes there, and that British Jews cannot even advertise property there, the semantic distinction between this policy and a boycott becomes awfully thin.
Then Prime Minister Andy Burnham made the government’s thinking even clearer.
Defending the measures, Burnham declared that Britain must “stand for something" and added: “We will always stand with the underdog."
That may work as a slogan. It is a dangerous basis for Middle East diplomacy.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a football match in which Britain gets to choose which side looks like the underdog and cheer accordingly. It is a century-old national conflict involving competing claims, repeated wars, terrorism, security, refugees, Jerusalem, borders and competing visions of national self-determination.
Peace requires resolving those issues. It does not require Britain to pick a favored side and punish the other.
Indeed, the agreements actually signed by Israel and the Palestinian Arabs precisely recognized that.
The Oslo framework explicitly left Jerusalem, settlements, borders, refugees and security arrangements for permanent-status negotiations. Oslo II went further, stating that nothing in the agreement should “prejudice or preempt" the result of those negotiations.
Yet Britain now says that, before Israelis and Palestinian Arabs have reached such an agreement, London will impose economic penalties based upon Britain’s preferred answer to one of those unresolved questions.
How does that encourage negotiations?
Why should Palestinian Arab leaders make difficult compromises across a negotiating table if foreign governments are increasingly willing to give them desired outcomes through boycotts and sanctions instead?
And there is another inconvenient problem with Britain’s policy: Palestinian Arabs work in the very communities Britain wants to economically isolate.
According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics-not an Israeli government agency-about 17,600 Palestinian Arabs were employed in Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria during the second quarter of 2026. Another approximately 35,000 'West Bank' Palestinian Arabs worked elsewhere in Israel.
Those 17,600 workers are not statistics. They are people supporting families.
Boycotting the businesses that employ them may make activists in London feel virtuous, but it will be considerably less satisfying to a Palestinian Arab worker whose employer loses customers and eventually eliminates his job.
If Britain genuinely wants Israelis and Palestinian Arabs eventually to live beside one another in peace, wouldn't encouraging economic interaction be more useful than tearing it apart?
None of this means ignoring any violence proven to have been committed by Jews against innocent Palestinian Arabs. Those who commit crimes should be arrested, prosecuted and punished.
But individual wrongdoing does not justify imposing economic punishment on entire communities.
That is especially important for Religious Zionists to say clearly.
We support the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria. We do so not because we deny the existence or aspirations of Palestinian Arabs but because Judea and Samaria are inseparable from Jewish history and Jewish identity.
Hebron is where Abraham purchased the Cave of the Patriarchs. Shiloh was the home of the Tabernacle before Jerusalem. Beit El appears throughout the biblical account of the Jewish people.
Jews did not discover Judea in June 1967.
One may argue about borders. One may negotiate political arrangements. One may disagree vigorously with decisions made by an Israeli government.
But the notion that Jewish presence in Judea is somehow alien to the land requires the erasure of several thousand years of Jewish history.
Which brings me back to Ed Miliband.
I do not question his Jewish identity or the sincerity of his gratitude toward Israel. His family story is moving precisely because it is our story too: persecution, survival, refuge and return.
That is why I wish he had followed his own story one step further.
Israel did not simply provide his grandmother with somewhere safe to live. The Jewish homeland exists because the Jewish people never stopped belonging to this land.
That history did not begin in Tel Aviv.
It began in places called Judea.
Britain can boycott their products. It can sanction their businesses. It can prevent British Jews from advertising homes there.
But it cannot boycott Jewish history.
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