The Path To Real Accountability

And now, in The New Yorker, Ruth Margalit writes:

An Israeli news article on Tuesday morning managed to roil even a war-weary and jaded public. Published in Haaretz, its headline read: “Netanyahu Received an Explicit Warning Days Before Oct. 7. He Didn’t Brief Israel’s Security Chiefs.”

The article, drawn from a new book by the journalists Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval, reveals that, a week and a half before Hamas led the October 7th attacks on Israel, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, the President of the United Arab Emirates, called Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, with a specific warning. During a forty-five-minute conversation, according to the report, bin Zayed cautioned that Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in Gaza, was “preparing a major event” in the near future. Sinwar was quoted in the article as telling an official from the rival Fatah faction that he was planning a “zilzal”—an “earthquake.”

Netanyahu seemed untroubled, a close adviser to the Emirati ruler told the journalists. He didn’t update the heads of Israel’s security establishment about the conversation. Instead, he assured bin Zayed that Israel was “prepared for any scenario.” If anything, he said, the “volatile” area was not Gaza but the West Bank. Bin Zayed was so startled that Netanyahu was making light of the situation that he expressed concerns to the C.I.A. director, William J. Burns.

When the article appeared, Netanyahu denied that such a conversation had ever taken place. But the U.A.E.’s foreign ministry appeared to confirm Eldar and Yuval’s reporting, saying in a statement reported by Haaretz that the two countries maintain “open and direct communication,” exchanging intelligence “when necessary.” Eldar told Israel’s Channel 12 that he and Yuval had based their story on talks with three independent sources and on “a recording and documents” of the conversation between Netanyahu and bin Zayed.

Newsbreaks in Haaretz, a liberal paper with strong investigative reporting, are often met with silence by much of the country, or brushed off as leftist propaganda by Netanyahu and his mouthpieces in the media. This story seemed to land differently. No event has shaped recent Israeli history more than the October 7th attacks and their aftermath. Netanyahu has refused to take responsibility or issue an apology for the failures in intelligence and policy that led to the worst attacks to ever take place on Israeli soil. But his government, for all of its equivocating, cannot deny that it was in power when they occurred. Ynet, a popular news site, echoed the Haaretz report on its home page on Tuesday—an unusual tribute to a rival newspaper; Channel 12 opened its evening-news edition with the story, calling it “jaw dropping.”

For Netanyahu, the timing of these revelations is especially damaging: they came seven weeks before an election that will mark the first time Israelis head to the polls since the October 7th attacks, Israel’s devastation of Gaza, and the Iran war. Naftali Bennett, a former Prime Minister and a political rival of Netanyahu’s, went on the radio and called the report “true.” He added that Netanyahu had “ignored” warnings not just from bin Zayed but also from Abbas Kamel, a former head of Egyptian intelligence (as another Israeli journalist had previously reported). Bennett did not specify how he learned of these warnings, but he is said to be on good terms with bin Zayed, and has met with him several times.

Hours later, every Jewish party leader in the opposition joined Bennett in issuing a rare joint statement. “The public has the right to know: what did Netanyahu know, when did he know, why did he not inform the security establishment and why did he not act to protect the citizens of Israel?” the statement read. “Netanyahu and his partners in the October 7 government are unfit to continue in office,” it concluded.

When I reached Eldar, hours after his article was published, he said that, so far, Netanyahu had just issued a denial, “without attacks from the poison machine”—a reference to the Prime Minister’s P.R. operation, which is known for ruthlessly antagonizing his critics. Yinon Magal, a popular host on Channel 14, a pro-Netanyahu television network, attempted to dismiss the report as nothing but a media “festival.” But, in a video posted online, Magal mentioned early on Tuesday that he had spoken to Netanyahu about it—a suggestion that there is panic behind the scenes.

When I asked Shimon Riklin, another media personality who is close to Netanyahu, about the report on Tuesday afternoon, he at first feigned indifference, writing in a text message: “What story?” But, when I replied, he immediately unleashed a torrent of complaints and conspiracy theories. “The attempt to portray a situation in which the Prime Minister is the one who needs to convey a warning to the heads of the Army and the Shin Bet, which is precisely their job, is incredibly ridiculous,” he wrote. “There is no such thing as a direct warning from the head of another country. It simply did not happen. Full stop,” he added. “It’s a cynical and crude attempt to accuse Netanyahu of what the Army chiefs are guilty of when they didn’t wake him up.”

This is a long-standing argument from the Prime Minister’s surrogates in the media: the security establishment didn’t rouse Netanyahu in time to prevent the attacks. In fact, as records make clear, an intelligence message concerning unusual Hamas activity was transmitted to the Prime Minister’s office early that morning, roughly three hours before the attacks. A recent campaign video from Gadi Eisenkot, a former head of the military who is Netanyahu’s main challenger in the upcoming election, lampooned the idea that the Prime Minister hadn’t received an alert. “Bibi, wake up!” the video repeats, as an A.I.-generated video of a sleeping Netanyahu is overlaid with a list of the many warnings about Hamas’s growing capabilities that went unheeded in the years before October 7th.

As Haaretz readers saw in the article hard proof of Netanyahu’s disregard for warnings, Dahlia Schneidlin, an Israeli expert on public opinion, cautioned that Netanyahu’s supporters “will no doubt have the opposite reaction.” His base—roughly forty per cent of voters—will read about the warning from the U.A.E. and conclude that “Haaretz always wanted to take Netanyahu down and couldn’t until now, so it came out with something fantastical,” she said.

Riklin had said as much in his texts, arguing that “the Israeli public is not buying this used and false merchandise.” He predicted that “you will witness a right-wing victory in the upcoming elections.” Still, with polls in Israel so tight that every week a different outcome seems likely—from outright majority for the opposition to a stalemate that triggers another election—even a single percentage point could prove decisive.

In Schneidlin’s view, Tuesday’s news was an event “that we could in hindsight say tipped” the election in the opposition’s favor. Even if polls end up not moving much, a major story about the failings that led to the Hamas attacks appearing so close to an election has to be bad news for the government. As Schneidlin put it, “You don’t want the election to be about October 7th if you’re Netanyahu.”

Accordingly, Haaretz editorialises:

An investigation by journalists Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval, which will appear in Haaretz's Friday edition, exposes Benjamin Netanyahu's biggest lie. Since October 7, he has been arguing that no warnings of the impending disaster had come his way – warnings that, had they arrived, would have made it possible to prevent it.

The main importance of this investigation lies in the fact that it forces a significant broadening of the relevant time frame for examining the responsibility for the massacre. This contrasts with the relevant time frame the prime minister believes the public discourse should be dealing with.

In recent weeks, Netanyahu has made public his diaries from October 7. Eldar and Yuval's investigation makes it crystal clear why he did so.

For the last three years, Netanyahu has tried to restrict the scope of any investigation and the search for the guilty parties to the small hours of the night that preceded the massacre – the hours in which the security services did not wake him up – thereby absolving himself of any responsibility. However, Netanyahu's responsibility, even in the technical-tactical sense, didn't begin that night and didn't end on the accursed morning that followed it.

As the investigation shows, Netanyahu is also responsible for the terrible implications of his security policy because of his conduct during the weeks preceding the massacre. During that period, he received a precise warning from the president of the United Arab Emirates, who warned him that Hamas was planning a major move. Netanyahu knew and did nothing.

His responsibility goes back even further, to the warnings he received from the heads of Israel's security services months before October 7. Warnings that described enemy organizations' increased motivation to exploit the internal weakness caused by the judicial overhaul in Israel. In fact, Netanyahu's responsibility goes further still, to the years that preceded the massacre, in which he enabled Hamas to be financed to the tune of millions of dollars while stymieing any diplomatic moves and deepening the occupation that fueled the terror.

Netanyahu's responsibility also extends forward, from the time he was updated on the morning of the massacre and wasn't able to stop it, to the management of a failed war that has been going on for three years. Netanyahu is responsible for all these failures, before and after the massacre. He was awake when they occurred. Of course, ahead of an election, he prefers that people talk only about failures that took place while he was sleeping.

The investigation drives home how essential it is to establish an independent commission of inquiry that will examine all these failures. Senior defense officials are also responsible for failing to deal with warnings that had been received, but they have already paid for their failures. In contrast to them, Netanyahu has said that there is no need for him to resign, since the public will decide his fate in an election. It is now clear how essential it is that the election leads to his replacement, and that a state commission of inquiry will immediately be set up in its wake.

While Paul Knaggs writes:

There is a precise, sickening rhythm to the way the British diplomatic state manages its conscience. First comes the long, deliberate period of curated inaction, during which the atrocities on the ground are allowed to harden into permanent realities. Then, when the moral horror becomes too loud to ignore, ministers step to the despatch box to unveil a carefully calibrated package of sanctions. Words hitherto strictly forbidden in polite parliamentary discourse are suddenly deployed with calculated drama.

When Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband rose in the House of Commons to announce trade restrictions on illegal Israeli settlements and formally acknowledge that Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are facing a campaign of ethnic cleansing, the political establishment expected a collective sigh of relief. Britain, we were told, was finally taking a stand. Yet behind the high-minded denunciation lies a quieter, more devastating truth: without a total overhaul of how Whitehall enforces international law, these new sanctions are little more than moral theatre, a performative gesture designed to soothe domestic outrage while leaving the mechanical architecture of occupation entirely intact.

The Illusion of Action 

For decades, the standard British line on the West Bank was a study in practised neutrality. While successive governments paid lip service to the two-state solution, Israeli settlement expansion continued unabated, transforming the geography of a prospective Palestinian state into an archipelago of isolated enclaves surrounded by militarised infrastructure, bypass roads and armed outposts. Tuesday’s policy marks an explicit rhetorical break. Britain will ban imports of goods from the settlements and restrict services including financing, construction, infrastructure, real estate and advertising for them. It has adopted, for the first time, the International Court of Justice’s position that Israel’s occupation is unlawful in its entirety, not merely the settlements sitting on top of it.

On paper, these are significant shifts. In practice, Miliband told MPs the comprehensive sanctions regime that will actually define and police the ban is expected to take six to nine months to draft into law. What happened this week was a declaration of intent, backed by one immediate step that Whitehall already knows how to take: further designations against a handful of extremist settlers under the existing Global Human Rights Sanctions Regulations, the same statute that has produced every incremental sanction since February 2024 without once touching the trade relationship itself.

Naming an atrocity is not the same as preventing it. Calling a campaign of displacement ethnic cleansing while leaving open the vast supply chains, financial corridors and corporate networks that sustain it is an exercise in political self-absolution. Consider the structural loophole at the heart of the trade ban. Settlement agricultural companies routinely export produce through Israeli parent corporations, blending raw materials before export or labelling goods simply “Product of Israel.” Without rigorous supply chain tracing, an origin verification scheme and punitive penalties for fraud, His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs is not currently equipped to stop settlement produce entering British markets under false paperwork. Reporters covering Tuesday’s statement noted that the government itself has offered no detail yet on how it intends to make that distinction.

Jerusalem Answers Back

Israel did not wait for the dust to settle. Within hours of Miliband’s statement, Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Saar stood before cameras in Jerusalem, first in Hebrew and then in English, and announced that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had personally signed off on a package of retaliatory measures against Britain.

The response was concrete rather than merely rhetorical. Israel will close the British Consulate General in Jerusalem, the office that has represented UK political, commercial and security interests across Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza for decades. It will remove British representatives from the International Gaza Support Center in Kiryat Gat, effectively excluding London from the American led coordination structure overseeing Gaza’s reconstruction. It will end British training of Palestinian Authority security forces in the West Bank, delivered until now through what is known as the British Support Team in Ramallah. 

And it will bar entry to twelve British nationals Saar accused of antisemitic and anti-Israel activity or of denying Israel’s right to exist, a list reported by Israeli media to include figures such as Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana, Diane Abbott and John McDonnell, alongside Green politicians including Hannah Spencer, the newly elected MP for Gorton and Denton, though the full and final roster has not yet been officially confirmed by either government.

Saar did not stop at policy. He accused Miliband of lying outright, described the Labour government as hostile and claimed it was working systematically against Israel’s interests. He rejected Miliband’s claim that new construction at E1 had been approved, insisting no such decision had been taken, and reached for a piece of imperial history to make his point, arguing it was absurd for the government behind the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which had recognised the Jewish claim to the land, to now be sanctioning Israel over it.

The politics cut in both directions. Saar accused the Labour government of interfering in Israel’s own general election, due at the end of October, and of timing its announcement for maximum insult, three days before Rosh Hashanah and three weeks before Labour’s own conference in Liverpool. Britain, he warned, was not the only country that would face consequences, promising the same treatment at Israel’s discretion for any other government that followed London’s lead. He then left the podium and took no questions.

There is a symmetry here worth sitting with. A government accused of dressing up an electoral calculation as a moral stand was answered, within hours, by another government doing precisely the same thing in reverse. Both sides have an audience to please and an election to fight. Neither has yet been asked, under questioning, how a shuttered consulate or a travel ban on backbench MPs does anything to protect a single Palestinian family in the West Bank, which was supposed to be what any of this was about.

The Ghost of Gorton

Statecraft rarely announces its own timing by accident, and this one did not. To understand why Ed Miliband chose this week, and not last year or next, you have to look past Jerusalem and back at Camden and Manchester, because the sanctions were unveiled seven days after Keir Starmer resigned the parliamentary seat he had held for eleven years, and one month before the fight to replace him.

Starmer’s Labour paid a heavy price for its handling of Gaza long before this week. In October 2023 he told LBC that Israel had the “right” to cut off power and water from Gaza, a remark the party later insisted had been misread but which never stopped being quoted back at Labour canvassers on doorsteps in Bradford, Blackburn and east London. A month later, 56 Labour MPs defied him to back a ceasefire amendment, costing him ten frontbenchers in a single night. By the 2024 general election, Labour had lost five normally safe seats to independent candidates standing explicitly on Gaza, including Jeremy Corbyn’s return to Parliament, while the Green Party’s representation quadrupled. Analysis of council wards with the largest Muslim populations found Labour’s support had fallen by an average of twenty five points. Labour has lost 300,000 of the 550,000 members it held during the Corbyn era, according to analysis published by openDemocracy in April 2026.

Corbyn and the suspended MP Zarah Sultana went on to found Your Party with four of those pro-Gaza independents at a founding conference in Liverpool last November, though the project has since shrunk from roughly eight hundred thousand online sign ups to a reported fifty six thousand paying members amid infighting. The more durable beneficiary was never Your Party. It was the Green Party, now led by Zack Polanski, which took its first ever parliamentary by-election off the back of a Muslim vote swing in Gorton, sending the newly elected Hannah Spencer to Westminster, and which fed directly into the collapse that finished Starmer: in the local elections that triggered his fall in May, Labour lost more votes to the Greens than to Reform. Spencer is now one of the twelve people barred from Israel under Saar’s countermeasures, a small detail that captures the whole story rather neatly.

Andy Burnham did not become Labour leader by accident of geography alone. Ali Milani, chair of the Labour Muslim Network and a man reported to have been close to Burnham for years, organised promotional videos during Burnham’s own by-election campaign in Makerfield, having warned as early as 2024 that Labour’s relationship with Muslim voters would not survive its Gaza stance unchanged. Which brings us back to this week, and to Holborn and St Pancras, the seat Starmer vacated on the first of September. Polanski is standing there himself, in a contest polling models already show as competitive in what has been a Labour stronghold since 1983, with the by-election due on the eighth of October, exactly one month after Miliband’s statement.

Even Labour’s own backbenchers noticed the arithmetic. Graham Stringer, the veteran Manchester MP, told GB News the sanctions could be “a cynical ploy” to claw back Muslim votes lost to the Greens in Gorton, and warned that principle abandoned for tactics cannot be un-abandoned when circumstances change. Commentators hostile to the policy reached the identical conclusion from the opposite direction, arguing in Spiked that Burnham “cannot afford to relax” with the Greens contesting his predecessor’s old seat.

None of this proves the sanctions are insincere, and it would be its own kind of dishonesty to pretend the moral case against ethnic cleansing evaporates because a government also has an electoral incentive to make it. Some Labour figures raised the opposite worry in good faith, fearing the move could hand Benjamin Netanyahu a boost ahead of Israel’s October election or, as backbencher Peter Prinsley warned Miliband directly, increase the threat to British Jews. Both concerns deserve to be taken seriously rather than waved away by either side of this argument. But a policy timed to the week a Green Party leader announces his candidacy for the foreign secretary’s own party leader’s old seat is not a policy whose sincerity can be assumed. It has to be earned in the drafting, not asserted in the chamber.

The Financial Corridors Left Unchecked

The limitations become starker when looking beyond tangible goods to the service and financial sectors. The settlement enterprise is not merely a collection of farms and hilltop outposts. It is a multi billion pound infrastructure project underwritten by global finance, commercial banks, technology providers and real estate networks. While ministers targeted construction firms and a named list of direct services, major banking operations, telecommunications and institutional investment remain largely untouched, dismissed by officials as matters of enforcement complexity.

Campaigners have already mapped what a serious version of this policy would need. Amnesty International wants the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation handling the money side and the newer Office for Trade Sanctions Implementation, first tested against Russia, handling everything else, both backed by HMRC, Defra, the Financial Conduct Authority and the Pensions Regulator, with the same strict liability penalties already used since 2022 to catch firms quietly still trading with Moscow. None of that architecture is theoretical. It exists, it has been tested, and it currently sits unused against Jerusalem.

By focusing heavily on individual violent settlers while leaving corporate finance operational, the government treats settlement expansion as a problem of rogue actors rather than what it actually is: a deliberate state project. Sanctioning a handful of extremist outposts while allowing British financial institutions to maintain ties with Israeli banks that issue mortgages, finance infrastructure and provide municipal funding for those same settlements creates an absurdity. It punishes the hand holding the wire cutter while protecting the bank that financed the fence.

The Path to Real Accountability

If the British government genuinely intends to comply with its obligations under international law, it must move beyond partial restrictions, and it needs to do four concrete things rather than one performative one. It must first make certificate of origin audits mandatory rather than aspirational, requiring HMRC to demand comprehensive supply chain tracing for every import from the region, using State of Palestine certification for legitimate Palestinian exports and rejecting anything that cannot prove its origin lies outside occupied territory, in the same way Britain already separates Ukrainian goods from goods that pass through Russian occupied territory. It must then extend sanctions properly into financial services, technology platforms and the corporate entities that fund, insure or otherwise operate the settlement economy, rather than exempting them as too complicated to touch. It must ban the promotion, marketing and sale of settlement properties inside the United Kingdom outright, shutting down the real estate expos and the online listings that trade quietly in occupied land. And it must close every remaining gap in arms and dual use export licensing to any entity that materially sustains the occupation’s infrastructure, not merely the narrower category the government has so far named.

Beyond Statements

Government policy should be judged not by the moral intensity of its press releases but by the physical reality it creates on the ground. Declaring that ethnic cleansing is taking place in the West Bank while leaving open the legal and economic channels that sustain it is an empty posture, whatever the private calculations behind its timing. If Britain is to break with decades of quiet complicity, it must treat the settlement economy not as a diplomatic embarrassment to be managed but as an illegal enterprise to be shut down. Anything less is administrative paperwork laid over an ongoing tragedy, however useful that paperwork proves to be on the doorstep in Holborn. When state sanctioned displacement is met with only partial sanctions, the state has not opposed the crime. It has simply negotiated the price of its own complicity.