Palestine weekly: Settlement sanctions spark diplomatic crisis

This past week, a flurry of Western countries announced forthcoming sanctions on Israel – limited, for now, to its illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. Israel’s response was swift and aggressive: on September 9, it gave the United Kingdom 30 days to close its consulate in occupied East Jerusalem.

As Israel hardened its international defiance, such diplomatic moves did little to slow the dispossession of Palestinian land and identity in Jerusalem and the West Bank, as well as the ongoing killings and deterioration of basic conditions in Gaza.

Such efforts can be difficult to grasp as a single, coordinated process. But a newly released B’Tselem report attempts to do exactly that, describing the overarching colonial system as being driven by aspirations of “elimination” – “the sustained undermining of the conditions that allow Palestinians to exist as an independent collective with land, institutions, language, culture, social ties, leadership, shared memory and history and a social and political horizon”.

Twelve countries , including the UK, France and Canada, announced on September 8 that they would introduce, support, or consider restrictions on Israeli settlement goods, with Britain’s Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband telling parliament that the government could no longer “stand by” in the face of what he called “ethnic cleansing of Palestinians… perpetrated by settler terrorists”.

Israel retaliated within 24 hours, ordering the UK consulate’s closure , ending British training of Palestinian Authority security forces, removing British staff from the Gaza coordination centre in Kiryat Gat and barring 12 British public figures – including 11 members of parliament.

Israel’s aggressive targeting of perceived detractors turned within as well, as Israeli Culture Minister Miki Zohar said he would move to revoke the citizenship of filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. That is after their documentary “NAZA”, which highlights Israel’s use of AI targeting systems in Gaza, won a Special Jury Prize at Venice and received a 25-minute standing ovation. Zohar called the film “vile” and accused its makers of “treason”.

Visiting Ireland this week, US President Trump insisted “there’s very little happening right now in Gaza”. Every day this week told a different story: attacks on Palestinians added to the Strip’s ever-increasing death toll and its already widespread destruction, as humanitarian conditions worsened unabated.

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said on September 12 that if European countries took in 20,000 to 30,000 Gaza residents each, “this entire issue would be over”. With no such mass ‘emigration’ materialising yet, airstrikes on Gaza continued on a daily basis.