Do Britain, France and Canada care about Palestinian jobs? Do Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands and Belgium care whether a Palestinian father can put food on his family’s table next month?
I ask because those governments just banned or are moving toward banning goods made in Judea and Samaria, the very places where thousands of Palestinians go to work every morning. Not one of those governments said a word about what happens to those workers next.
Over the coming days, there will be no shortage of statements. Governments will condemn. Organizations will condemn. Israel will be condemned from a dozen podiums in a dozen capitals. What I am not sure of is whether anyone will speak for the Palestinian worker who is about to lose his paycheck. So I will.
I want to give credit where it is due. Israeli President Isaac Herzog said that this ban will land hardest on Palestinians. That took leadership. It is the statement of a president who looks out for Arabs and Jews equally, naming the victims the people who enacted this policy have not bothered to consider. He was right to say it, and I applaud him for saying it.
Understand the scale of the ban: It applies to a relatively small number of businesses. Thousands of Palestinian jobs depend on those businesses. That is the trade being made here: a modest commercial inconvenience on one side, a household income on the other.
Those jobs pay several times what is available on the Palestinian side of the line, where there is often no work at all. Nobody in London, Paris or Ottawa has offered impacted Palestinian workers another job. There is no compensation fund, no transition plan, no replacement employer. There is a press conference.
If those governments genuinely cared about Palestinians, they would start somewhere else entirely. They would stop indulging Hamas, whose war has done more to destroy Palestinian livelihoods, homes and futures than every industrial park in Judea and Samaria combined. You cannot claim to be defending Palestinian welfare when your pressure falls exclusively on the people employing Palestinians and never on the people who use them as ammunition.
We have watched this movie before; in fact, we were in it. When Airbnb announced in November 2018 that it would delist roughly 200 homes in Judea and Samaria, the Orthodox Jewish Chamber of Commerce was among the voices that pushed back.
I said then that BDS is poison, that Airbnb was a symptom rather than the disease, and that the hate driving it had to be pulled up by the roots before it multiplied. Florida placed the company on its scrutinized companies list. Lawsuits followed. Within months, Airbnb reversed itself, the listings came back and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis lifted the sanctions.
A company learned that discrimination by geography carries a price. That lesson held for seven years. Three Western governments just decided to unlearn it.
Hatred will accept enormous self-inflicted damage so long as somebody else suffers more.
The other precedent is the Israeli company SodaStream. Roughly 500 Palestinians lost good jobs overnight when activists forced the company’s plant to close. The campaigners declared victory and went home. The workers gave interviews asking for their jobs back. Not one of the people celebrating wrote them a check.
Now look at what these governments have done to themselves.
British trade with Israel runs around six billion pounds a year, and Britain runs a surplus on it. That is what London put at risk today. The American exposure is larger still. Thirty-eight states have anti-boycott statutes on the books. Within a day, a Florida congressman noted that under a law he authored, any British company forced to comply with this ban could be barred from doing business with any state or local government in Florida, one of Britain’s biggest markets. Texas has provisions to follow. Between them, those two states represent an economy larger than the United Kingdom’s, and the United States as a whole is Britain’s largest trading partner. Tellingly, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee called the ban discrimination and signaled Washington could respond.
Canada’s position is even harder to explain. Ottawa is already in a tariff fight with Washington that is costing Canadian exporters real money. Canada has every reason to protect what American goodwill it has left. It signed on anyway.
Consider the moment they chose. The 2020 Abraham Accords have seen Israelis and Arabs sign commercial agreements, open trade routes and build the first real economic bridges the region has seen in generations. Arab governments are choosing commerce over grievance. Instead, the West has decided, at exactly this moment, to move in the opposite direction.
Nobody would have guessed that in 2026 the obstacle to Arab-Israeli commerce would be London, Paris and Ottawa, or that Western capitals would end up carrying water for the extremists the Arab world is walking away from.
Britain, in particular, should be careful about going down this road. This is the country of the York massacre of 1190 and the expulsion of Jews in 1290. This is the power that ruled Hebron in August 1929, when 67 Jews were slaughtered in their homes and study halls while a single British policeman stood between a mob and an ancient community. Britain’s response was to evacuate the survivors and end a Jewish presence that had lasted centuries. This is the country whose 1939 White Paper sealed the gates of the Land of Israel while European Jewry was being murdered and turned back the refugee ship Exodus in 1947.
The record is the record. A British government that now includes the address of a Jewish community on an import ban should consider the new chapter in history it is writing.
There is an old story about a man who is offered any wish he likes, on condition that his neighbor receives double. He thinks it over and asks to be blinded in one eye. That is the arithmetic of hatred: It will accept enormous self-inflicted damage so long as somebody else suffers more. In this case, the ban does not even deliver that. Britain and Canada have blinded themselves in both eyes, Israel has barely blinked, and the person bleeding is the Palestinian worker the countries claim to be helping.
If those governments want to use their economic weight on behalf of the Palestinians, the tools are sitting right there: fund joint ventures, open procurement to Palestinian manufacturers, guarantee trade finance for firms that hire people on both sides, build something that pays people.
Instead, they took a hammer to the one thing that was working and called it peace.
