Sanctioning settlements is a defence of Israel, not an attack

A week before UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband announced new trade restrictions and sanctions targeting Israeli settlements, I heard firsthand details of the problem those measures seek to address.

Human rights activist Eid Hathaleen described the demolition of Khirbet al-Tabban, a Palestinian village in the West Bank, to a New Israel Fund event.

 “They destroyed completely the source of life in this area and yet the bulldozers keep going,” he said. “Settlers do their side of violence, and the military does their side of demolishing Palestinians and displacing them from their homes.”

For decades, Israeli human rights organisations, many of them New Israel Fund grantees, have fought settler violence and expansion from the inside. They have petitioned Israel’s Supreme Court, documented settler violence, and physically stood between violent settlers and Palestinian families.

These years of work were met with some success, but successes have been fewer since the swearing-in of the current Israeli government in 2022, and fewer still since October 7. The violence and expansion have proceeded at a speed without precedent. In the first half of 2026 alone, West Bank settler terror attacks rose 63 per cent from the year before (previously the highest year on record), and since October 7, more than 1,110 Palestinians have been killed.

The Israeli public watches in horror. According to an April 2026 survey by the Lauder School, 65 per cent of Israelis agree that settler violence constitutes a serious problem amounting to Jewish terrorism.