{"id":6565,"date":"2026-07-14T19:15:36","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T17:15:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/?p=6565"},"modified":"2026-07-14T19:15:36","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T17:15:36","slug":"settlements-two-state-solution-sham","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/2026-07-14\/settlements-two-state-solution-sham\/","title":{"rendered":"The West won’t punish the settlements. Its two-state solution was always a sham"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"For decades, the EU has devised ever more convoluted ways to avoid penalising Israel’s illegal settlements, even as they devour a two-state solution it claims is the only path to regional peace<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

If I asked you to cut off your arm, would you do it?<\/p>\n

What if I pointed out that that your arm regularly punched a neighbour in the face so violently that it broke their nose and teeth, and left them unconscious? Would you cut your arm off then?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m guessing the answer to both questions is a firm, \u201cNo.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which is exactly why the European Union, Britain and the United States have precisely no intention of severing their support for Israel\u2019s illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, however violent the Jewish colonisers who live on stolen Palestinian land prove to be.<\/p>\n

For decades, settler militias \u2013 backed by Israeli soldiers \u2013 have beaten up Palestinians, shot them, poisoned their wells, chopped down their olive groves, torched their homes, all in an attempt to ethnically cleanse them from their historic homeland.<\/p>\n

The relentless expansion of these illegal settlements has left any hope of a two-state solution in tatters. The West Bank is now an archipelago of Palestinian villages and towns isolated from one another by marauding violent settlers, apartheid roads only for Jews, steel and concrete barriers, and army checkpoints.<\/p>\n

All of this has happened in full view of western states over many decades. The International Court of Justice, the world\u2019s highest court, ruled<\/a> back in 2004 \u2013 nearly a quarter of a century ago \u2013 that these Jewish settlements violated international law and needed to be dismantled.<\/p>\n

It reiterated that demand in a decision two years ago in which it identified Israel as an apartheid state<\/a> ruling over Palestinians. It warned<\/a> states to \u201ctake steps to prevent trade or investment relations that assists in the maintenance of the illegal situation created by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory\u201d.<\/p>\n

And yet the West has done nothing meaningful year after year as the settlements have stolen more land from Palestinians, made their lives there ever more miserable, and trashed any chance of the West\u2019s supposed ambition of two states living alongside each other.<\/p>\n

Remember this when Israel\u2019s apologists tell you to wait for the same court\u2019s definitive ruling \u2013 in a year or two, or maybe three \u2013 on what it deemed in early 2024 to be a \u201cplausible\u201d genocide<\/a> in Gaza, just three months into Israel\u2019s mass slaughter there.<\/p>\n

Not only will any such ruling be far too late to make any difference to the victims of the genocide, but the US, Britain and Europe will do precisely no more to punish Israel for this crime of crimes \u2013 one we can see for ourselves without an ICJ ruling \u2013 than they have done in punishing Israel for the settlements.<\/p>\n

Punching fist<\/h3>\n

Why? Because most western states no more wish to impose a penalty on Israel for its crimes than you would want to amputate a healthy arm.<\/p>\n

If they refuse to lift a finger to stop a live-streamed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, why on earth would anyone imagine they are ready to do anything to stop Israel\u2019s violent settlers ethnically cleansing the West Bank?<\/p>\n

The settlements are as deeply integrated into Israel as your arm is attached to your shoulder. And in turn, Israel is as much the punching fist of the imperial West\u2019s war machine as the City of London \u2013 and its former tax-haven colonies \u2013 are the beating heart of the imperial West\u2019s financial machine.<\/p>\n

Western elites cannot imagine a world without Israel as their military thug in the oil-rich Middle East any more than you can imagine life without your arm.<\/p>\n

That explains why no one really believed that EU foreign ministers, meeting once again this week to discuss banning settlement products \u2013 the bare minimum they have long been obligated to do under international law \u2013 would reach an agreement.<\/p>\n

More than 100 legal scholars had earlier written to the European Commission\u2019s top trade and foreign policy officials stressing the EU\u2019s \u201cinternational legal obligation\u201d.<\/p>\n

But as everyone predicted<\/a>, EU ministers kicked the can down the road \u2013 until at least October, when they agreed to more talks about talks.<\/p>\n

The EU has been delaying meaningful action on dealing with the settlements since at least 2004, when the ICJ ruled them illegal.<\/p>\n

A year after that ruling, the EU issued a Technical Agreement<\/a> that removed preferential trade tariffs of the kind Israeli goods enjoy from any items produced in the illegal settlements. Israel agreed only because there were so many loopholes and workarounds it had no practical effect whatsoever.<\/p>\n

It was another seven years \u2013 in 2012 \u2013 before the EU started to express concern about these loopholes, including the fact that Israel was routinely mislabelling settlement products as \u201cMade in Israel\u201d.<\/p>\n

Fast forward another three years and the EU finally got around to pretending to be closing the loopholes. In November 2015, 11 years after the ICJ ruling, the EU issued an \u201cinterpretative notice<\/a>\u201d requiring labels on settlement goods to state: “Product from the West Bank (Israeli settlement).”<\/p>\n

Again, Israel simply ignored the notice and continued mislabelling products, or blended them with products made in Israel, making it hard to determine the provenance.<\/p>\n

Pure pantomime<\/h3>\n

Remember, these lengthy, meaningless battles were not about banning settlement products or even imposing punitive tariffs. They were simply about labelling them correctly.<\/p>\n

To this day, the overwhelming majority of consumers across the EU have no idea, even if items are correctly labelled, which they almost never are, that they are buying products supporting Israel\u2019s violent campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their homeland.<\/p>\n

It was because of this utter farce that civil society organisations started to noisily accuse the EU of complicity in Israel\u2019s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and demand instead the outright banning of all settlement products.<\/p>\n

These critics have now been banging their heads against a brick wall for over a decade. They have still achieved nothing, as this week\u2019s EU meeting once again confirms.<\/p>\n

Even were they to win a victory a year or two hence on banning settlement products, Israel would still be able to use the same workarounds it has been for the past 22 years to avoid any meaningful impact. European consumers would still be directly subsidising the violence of Jewish settler militias and the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes.<\/p>\n

All of this has been pure theatre \u2013 or more accurately, pantomime \u2013 to suggest that some kind of administrative process is in hand, that legal avenues are being pursued, that Israel will one day pay a price for its decades-old programme of ethnically cleansing Palestinians.<\/p>\n

And yet nothing ever actually happens. The most the EU is prepared to do is throw a sop to its critics by imposing symbolic sanctions<\/a> on a couple of dozen of the most violent settlers \u2013 out of a total settler population of nearly 700,000.<\/p>\n

Those settlers did not end up in the West Bank and East Jerusalem by accident. Most were encouraged there by the Israeli state with offers of cheap housing, lower mortgage rates and higher funding of educational and other municipal services.<\/p>\n

Note too that this abject failure relates to Israel\u2019s explicit goal in expanding its settlements: to eviscerate the two-state solution the West says it craves as the only way to bring peace to the region.<\/p>\n

The fact is Europe, Britain and the US have no interest in the two-state solution. If they did, they would have used the ICJ ruling in 2004 as grounds to ban settlement products, give that ban real teeth, and threaten Israel with a loss of all preferential trade with the West until it abided by international law and removed all obstacles to Palestinian statehood, including the settlements.<\/p>\n

They did none of this because that was never their intention.<\/p>\n

Their only concern is keeping Israel \u2013 their pit bull in the Middle East \u2013 fed and watered.<\/p>\n

If Israel wants the settlements to continue expelling Palestinians off their lands until there are no Palestinians left on those lands, then the West is not going to naysay it.<\/p>\n

Just as if Israel wants to continue deliberately targeting Palestinian children in Gaza for death, as a United Nations inquiry recently determined<\/a>, then the West will turn a blind eye to that too.<\/p>\n

If Israel\u2019s soldiers and Jewish settler militias want to take a US Congressperson hostage<\/a> in the West Bank, as they briefly did to Democrat politician Ro Khanna last week, no western leader is going to make a fuss about it.<\/p>\n

Israel may be a rogue state but it is a rogue state made entirely in the western elite\u2019s image. The West\u2019s only real concern is in ensuring its own publics don\u2019t realise, as they watch a genocidal state disappear the Palestinians, that they are looking into the mirror.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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