Last Tuesday, Britain’s Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband stood in Parliament and announced a ban on goods from Israeli settlements in the West Bank. In response, the Israeli government immediately announced that the British consulate in East Jerusalem, operating since the 19th century, would be closed.
Nobody in London asked the roughly 18,000 Palestinians whose wages come from those settlements what they thought.
I was 8 years old when the Jordanian government moved my family out of the Old City of Jerusalem and into the Shuafat refugee camp. I learned early that those who claim to act on behalf of Palestinians rarely ask us what we need.
Growing up in Shuafat, the men who left before dawn for Israeli construction sites were the men whose children ate. A paycheck is rent, school fees, and a wedding for your child. Sixty years later, the arithmetic has not changed.
According to the Palestinian Authority’s own statistics bureau, a Palestinian working locally in the West Bank earns about 134 shekels a day. One working in Israel or a settlement earns about 263.
Miliband says the measures target settlements, “not Israel.” His colleague Pat McFadden insisted the ban was specifically targeted at the expansion of these settlements. They are right about one thing: it will barely touch Israel.
Settlement goods entering Britain were worth about $51.3 million last year, less than 1% of bilateral trade. In 2015, after years of BDS pressure, SodaStream closed its West Bank plant and moved inside Israel. About 500 Palestinians lost jobs that paid roughly $1,500 a month; those who found work afterward earned about $12 a day. Omar Barghouti, the cofounder of BDS, claimed the closure as a victory and blamed the job losses on Israel. That is the pattern: activists win, Palestinians lose, and Israel gets the blame.
This move is an extension of the antisemitic Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement. BDS is a campaign against the existence of a Jewish state. Its cofounder, Omar Barghouti, has written that “a Jewish state in Palestine in any shape or form” must be “opposed categorically.” Germany’s parliament concluded in 2019 that the movement’s methods are antisemitic and their “Don’t Buy” stickers recall the Nazi slogan “Don’t Buy from Jews!”
Settlement boycotts are the movement’s entry point, chosen because Western governments find them respectable, and every Palestinian working in those factories is treated as acceptable collateral damage. The economics are not complicated.
Before Oct. 7, 2023, about 40,000 Palestinians worked in settlements and West Bank industrial zones, and another 100,000 worked inside Israel. Hamas’s massacre cost most of them their permits overnight, and those jobs have only begun to return. Britain looked at a Palestinian workforce still crawling out of the hole Hamas had dug for it and decided to push them back in.
Mahmoud Abbas’s office called the sanctions “an important practical step.” This is the same Palestinian Authority that banned settlement goods in 2010 and prohibited its own citizens from working in settlements while failing, as Al-Monitor put it, “to create viable alternatives.” It is the same authority that, according to the U.S. State Department, paid more than $200 million to convicted terrorists and their families in 2025 after claiming to have ended the program. Abbas has money for the men who kill Jews but not those who wish to live peacefully with their neighbors.
The PA and Hamas both prefer it this way. A Palestinian with an independent salary from an Israeli employer does not need the PA’s patronage, United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees’s rations, or Hamas’s promise of glory. They need the border open and the factory running. I have spent my life documenting abuses against Palestinians, and I have criticized the Israeli government when deserved. I am not asking Britain to love the settlements. I am asking Britain to stop pretending that impoverishing Palestinians is helping us.
JEWS DON’T CAUSE ANTISEMITISM. ANTISEMITES DO
My message to Miliband is this: Come to the industrial zone at Barkan or Mishor Adumim without the Palestinian Authority’s minders. Stand at the gate at 5 a.m. and ask the men and women walking in whether they want Britain to close the place down for their own good. If you cannot look those workers in the eye, you have no business voting them out of a job from Westminster.
My people do not need another government speaking for us. We need governments that will finally listen.
Bassem Eid is a Palestinian human rights activist living in the West Bank.