There is something almost touching about Britain’s latest performance, together with its comrades in Jew-hatred.
A nation that spent centuries drawing borders, conquering territories, partitioning peoples, crushing rebellions and administering an empire on which the sun supposedly never set has at last discovered the intoxicating thrill of moral purity. Having misplaced most of its empire and nearly all of its confidence, it has settled on a new and undemanding vocation: lecturing Jews about where they may live.
Joined by Canada, France, Norway, Australia and New Zealand, the United Kingdom has announced sanctions against Israeli organizations and activists whose primary offense is opposition to a Palestinian state.
Opposition to a Palestinian state.
Not terrorism. Not murder. Not hijacking airliners. Not paying salaries to the families of suicide bombers. Not celebrating massacres with trays of sweets handed out in the street. Not teaching children that Jews are the descendants of apes and pigs.
No. The offense is arriving at the same conclusion that millions of Israelis reached after Oct. 7. A conclusion forged not in theory, but in yet another bloody Arab paroxysm of anti-Jew terror.
And if you want to see just how unserious this exercise is, look at who actually made the list.
One of the sanctioned organizations is Regavim, an Israeli-based movement that acts to prevent the illegal seizure of state land, and to protect the rule of law and clean government in matters pertaining to land use. Regavim does not burn fields. It does not raid villages. It has never been accused, by anyone, of a single act of violence against a single Palestinian.
What Regavim does is file petitions with the Supreme Court of Israel. It researches land law, documents illegal construction and asks Israeli judges to enforce Israeli rulings. Its weapon is the legal brief. Its battlefield is a courtroom in Jerusalem.
That is the crime. Turning to a court.
Sit with that, because the rest of the world is being asked not to. In the inverted and perverted moral universe of Whitehall, a citizen who appeals to the High Court of Justice now belongs on the same register as men who run torture cells.
And lest the equivalence remain merely implied, the European Union removed all doubt: It sanctioned Regavim and Hamas in the same breath, on the same list, in the same week. The organization that files lawsuits and the organization that livestreamed the slaughter of Jewish families, placed side by side, as though a careful reader could not tell them apart.
One almost admires the audacity. It takes a special kind of warped moral training to look at a people who answer grievance by hiring lawyers and conclude that they are the menace in the room.
This is the heart of the thing. If another Oct. 7 erupts from a Palestinian state overlooking Israel’s population centers, no British minister will be dragged from his bed and butchered. No French woman will be raped while her family is forced to watch—just before they are murdered. No Canadian child will be hunted in their safe room. No Australian family will bury its dead.
Those consequences are reserved, as ever, for Jews. The prescriptions are written in the halls of power populated by the self-appointed enlightened class. The bill comes due in Israel.
This vacuous political British class retains its remarkable gift for learning absolutely nothing from experience. For decades, uber-self-assured Western governments smugly informed Israelis that concessions would moderate Palestinian politics. Instead, Palestinian politics grew steadily more radical, more violent and more openly eliminationist.
It takes a special kind of warped moral training to look at a people who answer grievance by hiring lawyers and conclude that they are the menace in the room.
Then came Oct. 7, 2023—a day so grotesque that it should have shattered every surviving illusion about their two-state delusions. Instead, a good many Western leaders studied the largest and ugliest massacre of Jews—on Shabbat, nonetheless—since the Holocaust and concluded that the lesson was that Israel required more pressure.
The intellectual achievement is genuinely impressive. Only a certain kind of foreign-policy expert can witness a catastrophe caused by underestimating genocidal intentions and decide that the real problem was excessive Jewish skepticism.
So Britain, et al, now sanctions Jews whose principal crime is refusing to share London’s faith.
Faith that a Palestinian state would be peaceful. Faith that Palestinian political culture will, this time, transform itself. Faith that solemn guarantees and signatures will somehow overcome generations of rejectionism and indoctrination of children into death-worship. Faith, in the end, that reality will eventually apologize for failing to conform to diplomatic theory.
If you doubt that obsession, rather than principle, is doing the work here, consult the numbers. Between 2015 and 2024—a decade in which war and terror killed something on the order of 2.5 million human beings—the U.N. General Assembly passed 173 resolutions condemning Israel and roughly 80 condemning every other country on earth combined. Not Syria. Not North Korea. Not the regimes that actually run the prison camps these sanctions were supposedly built to confront.
A planet does not generate that distribution of outrage by accident. It generates it by an ancient fixation.
And the “settler violence” that supposedly justifies all of it?
Regavim itself, the very organization Britain just blacklisted, examined some 8,500 incidents the United Nations had filed under the “settler” heading and found that almost all were nothing of the sort: hikers accused of trespass, Jews visiting the Temple Mount, Jews defending themselves after being attacked. Strip out the misclassification, and the actual cases shrank to roughly a tenth of the original disingenuous pile. The reward for documenting that inconvenient arithmetic was a seat on a sanctions list beside Hamas.
The irony is not subtle.
For generations, Britain insisted that Jewish national aspirations were destabilizing. It limited Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel while European Jewry was being annihilated. It armed and trained Arab armies that tried to strangle the Jewish state at birth. It spent decades piously warning Jews about the dangers of defending themselves too well. And now, it has found a more genteel method of opposing Jews in Judea and Samaria: not removing them by force, but isolating, stigmatizing and bankrupting them by decree.
The underlying assumption never changes. Jews may live in the Jewish homeland, but only where others permit. Jews may defend themselves, but only as others approve. Jews may survive, but only on terms others set. Follow that logic to its destination and the unspoken remedy is a Judea and Samaria with fewer Jews in it, and finally none.
There is a word for a land scrubbed clean of its Jews. The Germans handed it to us. The men drafting these lists in London, Paris and Ottawa should say it aloud before they publish the next one.
So here is my confession.
I live in a house in northern Samaria, the ancient heart of our Jewish homeland. I oppose a Palestinian state and will do everything I can to prevent that delusion from being thrust into our hearts. After Oct. 7, any sane Jew does.
Not because I hate Arabs. Not because I reject peace. Not because I dream of ruling over another people. I oppose it because I watched Oct. 7. I oppose it because I believed Hamas when it told me—over decades, in writing and by screaming it aloud—exactly what it intends. I oppose it because a century of evidence suggests that wishful thinking is not an adult security doctrine.
If that places me on the same moral plane as a movement whose great atrocity is filing briefs with the Israeli Supreme Court, then I am in excellent company, and the supercilious sanction squad may add my name to the list.
Sanction another organization. Blacklist another activist. Issue another sermon from the upholstered safety of your ahistorical and morally perverse thought bubbles about the risks Jews ought to be required to take with their own lives.
You will not frighten Israelis into forgetting what they saw. You will not shame Jews into unlearning their own history. And you will not persuade a people that buried its ravaged dead on Oct. 7 that wisdom now lies in trusting the judgment of those who were perennially wrong about nearly everything that led to it.
To loosely paraphrase Clint Eastwood in the 1971 movie “Dirty Harry”: “I know what you’re thinking. Was that the fifth sanction or the sixth? In all the excitement, I’ve honestly lost count. But being as I’m standing on the most historically just patch of ground in the world—the one homeland my people were promised, exiled from and came home to. And seeing as how the Creator Himself promised to curse those who curse us—and being as the plain truth about Oct. 7 will blow every excuse you’ve got clean off—you’ve got to ask yourself one question, England: Do you feel lucky? Well, do you, punks?!”
So go ahead. Make my day.
