Over the last few days, multiple countries have singled out the government of Israel for reproach over its failure to control the actions of settlers on the West Bank, where they have repeatedly attacked Palestinians to drive them from the land. And in a rare rebuke, US Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, recently called those responsible for such violence “terrorists".
The attacks come against the backdrop of the rapid expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank since December 2022, when Benjamin Netanyahu became prime minister for the third time. Together, these factors have increasingly jeopardised any prospect of the already tenuous “two-state solution.”
It is not surprising, then, given the circumstances, that there might be an international response to the Israeli government, especially given the September 2025 recognition of the state of Palestine by several major countries. And so, it has followed that some of the same entities involved in that decision, including Canada, France and the United Kingdom, have introduced several measures against Israeli settlers, including a ban on goods produced by illegal West Bank settlements.
The Israeli government has, in turn, condemned the moves; however, the bulk of its ire has been directed at the UK. This has left observers wondering why, given their close relationship. However, British criticism of Israel is hardly new. To understand the intricacies, we need to dive into the complicated history between the countries.
The story begins in 1917, the second-to-last year of World War I. In December, British forces seized Jerusalem from the Ottoman Empire, effectively replacing one colonial control over Palestine with another. The UK and France carved up spheres of influence in the Levant, with the former taking control of modern-day Jordan and Israel/Palestine, and the latter Lebanon and Syria. From 1920 to 1948, the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea was called Mandatory Palestine.
From Balfour to Stern
The month before the British capture of Jerusalem, then-British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour announced London’s support for a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine in what became known as the Balfour Declaration. At the time, the Jewish population of Palestine was minuscule in relation to Palestinian Arabs.
Inevitably, Britain would find itself caught between two opposing sides in a battle for control of Palestine. Tensions grew in the 1930s with expanding Jewish immigration, both legal and illegal, from Europe because of hostilities associated with the rise of fascism and wider anti-Semitism. From 1936, Palestinians began to revolt in response to the growing demographic changes.
In 1939, escalation reached a crescendo and the British government responded by restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine and curtailing their ability to acquire land. Zionist organisations, which saw the new policy as a reversal of the Balfour Declaration's promise, responded with fury. It also came at a time of even greater repression of Jews in Germany and elsewhere. In 1945, the newly elected Labour government reiterated the policy of restricting Jewish immigration, although illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine continued as displaced persons left Europe.
Some Zionist groups responded with violence. In 1944, Irgun—a group that had terrorised Palestinians since 1931—began turning its guns on the British. A year prior, Irgun leader Menachem Begin (who would later become Israeli prime minister in 1977) spearheaded efforts to undermine British control in Mandatory Palestine. Most famously, Irgun bombed the centre of British administrative rule in Palestine, Jerusalem’s King David Hotel in 1946, killing 91 people in the attack.
Another Zionist terrorist group, Lehi, which the British called the Stern Gang after its founding leader, Avraham Stern, emerged out of Irgun in 1940. It vowed to use violence to expel the British from Palestine and to create a Jewish state. To this end, it carried out several attacks during the war. Most famously, two members of Lehi travelled to Cairo and killed Lord Moyne, a senior British official in the region. Moyne was a close friend of Winston Churchill.
The assassination enraged the UK prime minister, who privately described the killing as “an odious act of ingratitude.” Lehi also later mailed a series of letter bombs to leading British politicians in London, including Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary in the 1945 Labour government. One of the Stern Gang's later leaders was Yitzhak Shamir, who would also go on to become prime minister of Israel.
Eventually, Mandatory Palestine became ungovernable, and Britain sought a solution from the United Nations to a situation it could no longer control. This came in the form of a UN-proposed division of Palestine into two states— one Jewish and one Palestinian. Instead, conflict broke out between Palestinians and Jews, and after a failed military intervention by several Arab states in support of Palestinians, Israel declared itself a (Jewish) state in 1948.
The United States granted de facto (practical) recognition on 14 May 1948, just 11 minutes after Israel declared independence and gave it formal de jure (legal) recognition on 31 January 1949. The Soviet Union granted full de jure recognition three days later, on 17 May 1948. However, it took Britain another two years to recognise Israel, which happened in April 1950.
Chequered history
Despite their chequered history, Israel and the United Kingdom found themselves on the same side of a conflict in 1956. The issue was the Suez Canal and Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser taking control of it. In a coordinated campaign with Britain and France, Israel attacked Egypt, with its two European allies using that as a pretext to intervene and seize the canal. The resulting Suez Crisis was a humiliating diplomatic disaster for the United Kingdom and evidence of its decline as a world power.
Although the recent government of Andy Burnham’s targeting of Israel over settlers has been framed by some as being driven by a left-wing political agenda, both Conservative and Labour administrations have had their past issues with Israel since its creation. Part of this reality emerged from Britain’s historic colonial roots in the region, including not just in Palestine but among other Arab countries.
Because of this history, London frequently tried to play the role of “honest broker” in disputes between Israel and its Arab neighbours. In the 1973 War, the Conservative government of Edward Heath blocked arms shipments to both sides of the conflict and refused to allow American military planes carrying emergency weapons shipments to Israel to use British bases for refuelling.
But it was not just about events in the Middle East. In June 1982, members of the Abu Nidal Organisation, a Palestinian terrorist group aligned with the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein, seriously wounded the Israeli ambassador to the UK outside the Dorchester Hotel in London. That failed assassination attempt was used three days later as a pretext by the Israeli government of Menachem Begin to invade Lebanon to remove the Palestine Liberation Organisation, even though the PLO had not been involved in the violence in London.
