Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November/December 2026, pp. 28-30
Three Views: Ed Miliband, UK’s Settlement Trade Decision—What Does It Mean?
By Ida Audeh
Over the weekend, [Sept. 28] Israeli settlers attacked Bilal Kayed, a 75-year-old Palestinian man, while he was working on his land during the annual olive harvest in Sebastia, a village northwest of Nablus. The settlers beat him with clubs and then poured boiling water on his body. Is there any other country in history, aside from the pre-bellum American South and apartheid South Africa, where this kind of racist terrorism was a fact of daily life?
—Jeffrey St. Clair, Counterpunch, Sept. 28, 2026
IT HAS BECOME a well-understood requirement of anyone expressing an opinion about Israel, especially if it is even remotely critical of the state, that he or she must first demonstrate obeisance. This usually takes the form of parading, if not their own Jewish faith, then the Jewishness of relatives in the family tree. It is as though Jewishness confers a certain authority that entitles one to have an opinion not only about Israel but about South Asia generally and Palestinians in particular. Even a powerful figure like Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband felt the need to establish his (Jewish) credential, opening his Sept. 8 speech critical of Israeli settlements with an excursion into his family history—the beloved grandmother who found a refuge in Israel after the Holocaust, his own vacations spent in orange orchards in kibbutzim. Clearly, he is saying, he is not hostile to Israel.
This framing of his personal connection to the Jewish state is misleading because of what it omits. His intention is clearly meant to reassure listeners that his critical remarks are made from a place of caring, not bigotry. But what his listeners might not know is that where Israel is concerned, Jewishness confers colonial privilege. All Jews wherever they are can materially benefit from the ethnic cleansing of Palestine if they choose to claim Israeli citizenship (which will automatically be granted). Whether they choose it or not, they are actual or latent beneficiaries of a bizarre colonial regime that crosses borders to identify privilege by religious identification.
Miliband’s grandmother was the beneficiary of that system. Palestinians were made refugees so that she and others like her who survived European savagery could rebuild their lives comfortably.
That Miliband feels the need to profess his faith as a preamble to criticizing Israel illustrates how thoroughly we have all been brainwashed into thinking that this is normal behavior.
And what is Miliband announcing that requires such careful packaging? For the past three years he has watched Israel commit a genocide in Gaza, a pogrom in the West Bank, and the erasure of villages in southern Lebanon through controlled demolitions. In fact, he lists these crimes in some detail; he understands exactly the purpose behind the construction of the E1 settlement project, recently in the news, which prompted his announcement. But the conclusion he draws from the evidence is not that Israel must be stopped and defanged, but that it needs an off ramp. Who better to offer it than the foreign secretary of the colonial power that created it and to whom it entrusted dominance of the region?
THE TWO-STATE (NON)SOLUTION
Miliband’s advocacy of a “two-state solution” is little more than an attempt by stewards of empire to do some damage control. The entire Arab world (with the exceptions of the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco) regard the existence of Israel as a real and present danger, for the reasons Miliband himself enumerated. It has bombed all its neighbors and assassinated leaders, journalists, scientists, negotiators in the middle of negotiations and the entire Yemeni cabinet. The delight with which Israel has spilled Arab blood has made analysts like former weapons inspector Scott Ritter and Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson (Colin Powell’s former chief of staff) express doubts about its long-term viability. In one of his few truthful statements in recent memory, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has said that Israel is waging an existential battle against Hamas, Iran and “regional proxies,” which it must win if it is to remain in the region. Soon after the genocide began in October 2023, many Israelis concluded that Israel has no future and they jumped ship.
And here comes Miliband to reassure Israel that there is in fact a path forward: all it has to do is accept the creation of a rump Palestinian state. That done, the Palestinian file can be deep-sixed. If Israel continues to ravage the Palestinian bantustan, as it certainly will, the world will treat them like two states in dispute, rather than wildly unbalanced protagonists (one of which has nuclear weapons) in a colonial stranglehold.
For the people of the region, the existence of Israel means that no one, particularly Arab children, will be safe. A Palestinian state, even if it is viable, will remain a target of periodic bouts of Israeli rage. Created to be a Western colonial outpost that can dominate non-Western peoples, and expansionist by nature, Israel would remain a regional threat to Arabs even if Palestinians were nowhere to be seen.
THE GOVERNMENT OF ISRAEL VS. THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL
“Our argument is not with the people of Israel,” Miliband said, but rather with the conduct of its government. Surely he knows that Israel is one of those rare countries (unlike the United States, for example) whose government represents the electorate pretty well. The current government is not an aberration; since the late 1990s the Israeli people have elected Netanyahu in five legislative council elections and one direct election for prime minister. They support the genocide in Gaza and don’t seem too perturbed by the pogroms in the West Bank. Netanyahu addressed the U.N. General Assembly to brag about the terrorist pager attack in Lebanon and lie about genocide, and he is not even the worst miscreant in the current Israeli Knesset. It is past time to acknowledge the obvious: the terrorist Israeli government was elected by a lawless and supremacist Israeli population.
Miliband lists the many vile Israeli policies that choke Palestinian life. Yet his response to this record is to announce a boycott of settlement products. He is the foreign secretary of the United Kingdom, not the leader of a student campus movement; if he is genuinely appalled by the policies of Israel, surely he can do more than that. His call to suspend arms licenses is ambiguous but clearly falls short of an arms embargo, which is the most obvious and logical response to a genocide in progress. The issue is hardly complicated. The underwhelming UK response to Israel’s policies make clear that Miliband is not taking a principled position but rather doing damage control.
From Miliband’s full-throated expression of love for the Israel that has given him many pleasant childhood memories, it is clear that a call for an unimplementable two-state solution is not meant to be taken seriously. It is meant to give Israel a way out of the predicament created by its never-satisfied lust for living space, water and a Palestinian-free terrain and dysfunctional neighboring states it can maul at will. Because the UK does not commit to any course of action that shows resolve to force change that is in any way commensurate with its crimes, it would probably be satisfied with a loose “process” and vague Israeli promises to enact marginal change (like lifting some checkpoints for a little while) at some future unspecified date. Even the ban on settlement products is likely to be dropped quietly when the Israelis demand it.
The people of the region are fighting to end the colonial order imposed on it by Western powers in the first half of the 20th century. Miliband’s speech represents empire’s attempt to prolong the status quo just a little bit longer.
Ida Audeh is senior editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs magazine.
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