Sep 09, 2026
The governments of Canada, France and the United Kingdom said Tuesday they will ban goods and some services from illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. They join several other U.S. allies, including Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway and Spain, who’ve already taken steps to ban imports from settlements. U.K. Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband announced the sanctions in a speech to the House of Commons Tuesday, where he accused Israel of carrying out “ethnic cleansing” in the occupied West Bank.
Ed Miliband: “Ethnic cleansing is defined by the U.N. as a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove, by violent and terror-inspiring means, the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas. The British government agrees that there is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in areas of the West Bank, perpetrated by settler terrorists, and all too often the Israeli government has turned a blind eye to this.”
Miliband also tightened restrictions on U.K. arms exports to Israel; however, the limited embargo does not exclude the transfer of F-35 fighter jet parts. Israel responded by closing the British Consulate in East Jerusalem. Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared the Oslo Accords “null and void” and demanded the expulsion of the British ambassador. Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports British diplomats privately told...
In a 2017 piece in The New York Times, voting expert Ari Berman wrote, “The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed tactics that prevented blacks, Hispanics and other minority groups from voting. But fo...