The Guardian view on Britain’s new Middle East policy: an unlawful occupation must carry a price- Ed Miliband has delivered Britain’s toughest indictment of Israeli conduct in Palestinian lands - and rightly says this has economic consequences

Aqraba, West Bank:  A view of a new illegal Israeli outpost being built on Palestinian land south of Nablus Photograph: Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP/Getty Images ...The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

 

Opinion 

Palestine 

 Tue 8 Sep 2026

Rarely in recent years has the Commons felt like the cockpit of history. On Tuesday it did. The foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, placed Britain at the head of a 12-country coalition considering economic restrictions on Israel’s illegal settlements, with the UK, France and Canada committing to national trade bans.

The move comes after escalating numbers of attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinian villages in the West Bank. International opinion seemed to shift decisively after Israel gave the go-ahead for 1,200 homes in the E1 settlement that would cleave the West Bank into two – using illegal settlements to bury Palestinian statehood for good. Mr Miliband added that evidence of war crimes in Gaza was mounting, making the overdue case for Britain to recast its economic and military relationship with Israel.

Mr Miliband, who is Jewish and lost more than 60 relatives at the hands of the Nazis, declared himself to be a friend of Israel. But clearly he thinks friends should talk straight to each other. Mr Miliband has delivered perhaps the toughest official British indictment of Israeli conduct in recent history, declaring that “ethnic cleansing” is taking place in the West Bank and accusing members of Israel’s government of supporting forced displacement.

Probably the most consequential move by Mr Miliband is to formally declare the occupation of the Palestinian territories unlawful, in line with the international court of justice’s 2024 opinion. The import ban logically follows. But private acts will have to change too. British companies could soon have to ask whether they are profiting from – or helping to sustain – an illegal occupation.

To emphasise this point, the foreign secretary also promised to take action against those providing construction, infrastructure and financing services, because a goods-only ban would leave untouched the commercial activity sustaining unlawful settlements. He also committed to target extremist settlers and to refuse to license arms sales that “contribute to the occupation”. By simultaneously sanctioning Iran and Hezbollah, the UK is signalling that it recognises the threats Israel faces while opposing its illegal actions... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/08/the-guardian-view-on-britains-new-middle-east-policy-an-unlawful-occupation-must-carry-a-price

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Chris Hedges: "Starvation was always the plan, the preordained final chapter of the genocide. Israel methodically set out from the beginning of the genocide to destroy sources of food, bombing bakeries and blocking food shipments into Gaza, something it has accelerated since March, when it severed nearly all food supplies. It targeted the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) — on which most Palestinians depended on for food — for destruction, accusing its employees, without providing evidence, of being involved in the attacks of Oct. 7. This accusation was used to give funders such as the United States, which provided $422 million to the agency in 2023, the excuse to halt financial support. Israel then banned UNRWA."

Never Again (Certain Restrictions Apply) - by Mr. Fish

Chris Hedges

@ChrisLynnHedges

 The Gaza Rivera 

Israelis do not see the images of skeletal corpses of Palestinian children who they have starved to death as a curse. They do not see the slain families they gun down at food hubs — designed not to deliver aid but lure starving Palestinians into a massive concentration camp in the south of Gaza in preparation for deportation — as a war crime. Israelis do not look at the savage bombing and shelling that kill or wound dozens of Palestinian civilians, where an average of 28 children die daily, as anything extraordinary. They do not see the wasteland of Gaza, pulverized by bombs and methodically being torn down by bulldozers and excavators, leaving virtually the entire population of Gaza homeless, as barbaric. They do not see the destruction of water purification plants, decimation of hospitals and clinics, where doctors and medical staff are often unable to work because they are weak from malnutrition, as savage. They do not blink at the assassinations of doctors as well as journalists, 232 of whom have been murdered for trying to document the horror.

 

Israelis have blinded themselves morally and intellectually. They view the genocide through the lens of a bankrupt media and political class that tells them only what they want to hear and shows them only what they want to see. They are intoxicated by the power of their industrial weapons and license to kill with impunity. They are drunk on self-adulation and the fantasy that they are the vanguard of civilization. They believe that the extermination of a people, including children, condemned as human contaminants, makes the world, especially their world, a happier and safer place.

 

They are the heirs of Pol Pot, the killers that carried out the genocides in East Timor, Rwanda and Bosnia and, yes, the Nazis. Israel, like all genocidal states — no population since World War II has been dispossessed and starved with such speed and ruthlessness – has a final solution that would have earned the stamp of approval from Adolf Eichmann.

 

Starvation was always the plan, the preordained final chapter of the genocide. Israel methodically set out from the beginning of the genocide to destroy sources of food, bombing bakeries and blocking food shipments into Gaza, something it has accelerated since March, when it severed nearly all food supplies. It targeted the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) — on which most Palestinians depended on for food — for destruction, accusing its employees, without providing evidence, of being involved in the attacks of Oct. 7. This accusation was used to give funders such as the United States, which provided $422 million to the agency in 2023, the excuse to halt financial support. Israel then banned UNRWA.

 

Over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and U.S. mercenaries in the chaotic scramble to get one of the few food packages distributed during the brief blocks of time, usually an hour, at the four aid sites set up by the Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, according to the U.N. Human Rights Office.

 

Once Gaza was turned into a moonscape after 21 months of saturation bombing, once Palestinians were forced to live in tents, under crude tarps or in the open air, once clean water, food and medical aid became nearly impossible to find, once civil society was obliterated, Israel began its grim campaign to starve the Palestinians out of...  READ MORE  https://x.com/ChrisLynnHedges/status/1949235422233768029

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‘Princess Bride’ Actor Wallace Shawn Compares Israeli Treatment of Gaza to Nazi Germany “Some of them might in 10 years wake up and say, ‘Why did I justify that?’”

‘Princess Bride’ Actor Wallace Shawn Compares Israeli Treatment of Gaza to Nazi Germany  “Some of them might in 10 years wake up and say, ‘Why did I justify that?’”

 February 4, 2025

Princess Bride and Clueless actor Wallace Shawn this week compared the Israeli treatment of Gaza to Nazi Germany.

Shawn, who is Jewish, said on the Katie Halper Show that Israel is “doing evil that is just as great as what the Nazis did.” His comments have sparked outrage from the Jewish community, but not surprise as he has been vocal in sharing his divisive views before.

Regarding the Nazi comparison, Shawn contended: “In some ways it’s worse, because they kind of boast about it. Hitler had the decency to try to keep it secret. For some reason, Hitler didn’t want people to know he was doing these things to the Jews. The Israelis are almost proud of it, and it’s demonically evil. And anybody who doesn’t recognize that it’s evil, I can’t, probably, communicate with that person. That might be temporary insanity.”... READ MORE  https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/wallace-shawn-israeli-treatment-gaza-nazi-1236127279/

"I fear we are forgetting lessons from that terrible history" Eva Ladipo... My family’s past, and Germany’s, weighs heavily upon me. And it’s why I feel so strongly about Gaza

"It is as if the war allows a long-suppressed view of the world to resurface in Germany, in which there are superior “western” cultures"

Illustration: Eleanor Shakespeare/The Guardian

I don’t usually talk about my great-uncle Walter. Gen Walter Warlimont, as my grandfather’s brother was formally known, was head of the national defence department in the high command of the Wehrmacht, the armed forces of Nazi Germany. Only two people were between him and the Führer in the chain of command. Walter worked so closely with Hitler that the failed assassination attempt in July 1944 injured his arm. The orders he signed during wartime – about who to shoot to kill, about how to treat prisoners – meant he had hundreds of thousands of lives on his conscience.

Not that Uncle Walter was the only one in the family who facilitated the Third Reich and the Holocaust. My paternal grandparents were very proud to have been among the very earliest members of Hitler’s party. My maternal grandfather – Walter’s brother – was the head of a factory in Vienna that made the guidance systems for the V2 rocket, a factory that was staffed by Russian and Ukrainian slave labourers.

I’ve never really felt a need to write about my family history before. But Walter’s life and crimes feel uncomfortably relevant right now. As I watch how the debate and discussion over the war in Gaza have played out in Germany, in the months since the horrific attacks of 7 October, I worry that even as we constantly invoke the Nazi past, we are forgetting some crucial lessons from our history.... READ MORE   https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/19/family-past-germany-gaza

 Eva Ladipo is a German journalist and novelist based in London

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"Never Again" ??? !!

 

"This meme is the rallying cry of Zionists "Never Again" which would be fine if they were fighting Nazis, but as a Palestinian I look at it differently. I see the barbed wire imprisoning the #Palestinians, who had absolutely nothing to do with the #Holocaust, and evolving into the US supplied Israeli jets that slaughter them behind the barb wire that was installed by those same hypocrites that shout "never again"...BTW the only escape these #Zionists made was from Brooklyn"

Mike Hanini Odetalla

 

& making matters worse are headlines that dismiss and ignore the very real plight and suffering of the native non-Jewish men, women, & children of historic Palestine...

"Mohammed Tamimi loved nature. He may have become an archaeologist or an engineer. Maybe he would one day have built a nice home in the hills of his beautiful village of Nabi Saleh." Husam Zomlot of Palestine (Ambassador, Head of Palestinian Mission to the UK, former Head of PLO Mission to the US, Strategic Affairs Advisor to President of Palestine)

 

 

 

2013 Zionist propagandists usurp a 1930s photo of Palestinian villagers from a Palestinian-American's facebook page, and they share it far and wide relabeled with the false caption "Palestinian Arabs attending a Nazi Rally in the 1930's"

Mike Hanini Odetalla

So I post this old 1930's era black and white photo of Palestinians representing area villages meeting in Jerusalem and participating in a vote by a show of hands...Obviously they had their hands "up" when the picture was taken...The Zionist pricks that routinely troll the internet took this photo and "shared" it with the caption "Palestinian Arabs attending a Nazi Rally in the 1930's"...Does this look like a "Nazi rally" to you? Notice the men in the back raising their canes high in the air.