This weekend brought yet another surge in the endless surge of Israeli violence in the Palestinian territories. But as the EU and UK get increasingly vocal over settler attacks in the West Bank, it’s well past the time that action, rather than words, was needed.

Economic measures, we’re told, are on the table, with EU and British leaders meeting to discuss the issue this week. But don’t get your hopes up. The media and our governments have been very busy distinguishing settlers – groups of random stochastic terrorists – from the one entity they’ve yet to succeed in confronting: the state of Israel itself.

The question is: will they manage it this time, before the West Bank goes up in flames?

There was an article in the New York Times this weekend: “These Generals Fought For Israel,” it was titled, “Now They See ‘Jewish Terrorism’ As The Threat”.

That phrase in the headline – “Jewish Terrorism” – was used by not one, but over 200 Israelis. All of significant distinction, and many connected to various Israeli state apparatus, they’ve signed a letter that uses the phrase to describe settler violence while condemning the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the occupied West Bank.

“The signatories included two former prime ministers, more than three dozen retired army and air force generals,” the New York Times reported, before going on, “The former heads of the nation’s foreign and domestic intelligence services, as well as rabbis, a Nobel laureate and one of Israel’s most revered novelists”.

The article comes in the context of the most violent year on record for settler attacks in the West Bank. In the nine months of 2026 so far, 76 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by settlers or Israeli forces, 18 of them children. Around 3,600 Palestinians have been displaced by nearly 1,500 settler attacks across the territory. And this terrorism, according to Human Rights Watch, is armed, funded and protected by the Israeli state.

The European Union and UK are currently contemplating trade bans on goods from illegal settlements, a tool that’s been on the table but never picked up countless times before. Last month, foreign secretary Ed Miliband summoned Israel’s most senior diplomat in Britain over the country’s inviting firms to bid for contracts to build 1,200 Israeli homes in the so-called E1 zone. That’s a crescent shaped patch of the West Bank that, once fully occupied (over 3,200 homes have been approved by Israel’s government), will cut the north of the Palestinian territory from the south: another hefty nail in the coffin of a contiguous Palestinian state.

In response, Miliband promised a “comprehensive set of measures” to protect the Palestinian state, which was formally recognised by the UK last year. But an article in the Times soon afterwards reported practical difficulties with the plan to target goods and services from settlements. How, it pondered, do you distinguish products coming from the occupied West Bank from those produced in Israel?

The simple answer is: you don’t.

On Monday, the Financial Times published an editorial from its board. Called “Israel’s de facto annexation of the West Bank”, it also argued for targeted sanctions against illegal settlements. The great and the good, it seems, are gathering around a solution they have every reason to believe will be either impossible to enact or ineffective.

The issue is, of course, right there in the FT’s title. The violent annexation of the West Bank by Israel is hardly ‘de facto’ – it’s Israeli government policy. It’s not random settlers inviting construction firms to begin building on Palestinian land, but Tel Aviv. It’s also Tel Aviv that’s approved over 12,000 new homes in the occupied West Bank this year, providing $431m to support 34 new settlements. And the individualised focus on so-called “Jewish terrorism” by the New York Times obscures the fact that what’s happening across the Palestinian territories is, as we’ve seen all too clearly time and again, Israeli state terrorism.

Just this weekend, the Israeli military stood by once more as some 60 settlers stormed the Palestinian village of Qusra, before firing tear gas into the home of a Palestinian family the settlers were trying to force out. This morning, reports emerged of the military pulling down homes in Nablus and Ramallah. And Haaretz has today suggested that, for the country’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, all out war in the West Bank would be just the tonic his declining polls need ahead of October’s Knesset elections.

Western governments were deadly slow to respond (when they even bothered) to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. Their reluctance to constrain the country’s barbarity has made them historically complicit in that monumental crime. This week, EU ministers – joined by Miliband – will meet in Ireland to discuss what action to take to halt West Bank settlers’ invasion of Palestine. What’s the point of holding court, though, if they won’t even name Israel, the perpetrator of the crime?

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