Senior British diplomats and intelligence officials warned their government of the consequences of imposing sanctions on Israel, according to a report in British weekly current affairs magazine "The Spectator". The UK is leading a group of eleven European countries plus Canada in imposing sanctions on Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria.
The report states that the message was not necessarily to forego sanctions, but simply to wait. An election will take place in Israel on October 27, and any British measures are liable to have an impact, even if unintentionally, on Israeli politics.
Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Gideon Sa’ar said the same thing. According to the report, his British counterpart Ed Miliband contacted Sa’ar on August 11 to inform him that sanctions were on the way. According to a diplomatic source who spoke to "The Spectator", Sa’ar asked Miliband to wait until after the election. The Israeli embassy in London conveyed a similar message to the Foreign Office: If a different government might be formed in Israel within a few weeks, why not wait and see?
Last week, when UK prime minister Andy Burnham explained his government’s decision to Parliament, he said, "We gave the most careful consideration to… all of the risks. The Foreign Secretary and I took close advice from the security services and, of course, officials in the Foreign Office and in our embassies." Burnham said that the decision to act stemmed from the fear of the complete collapse of the two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian dispute, which he said was "dying before our eyes." Miliband went even further, and spoke of "ethnic cleansing".
The stance that Sa’ar expressed to Miliband was not just the Israeli stance. Simon Walters, the UK ambassador to Israel and formerly the director of national security for the Middle East and Africa at the Foreign Office, explicitly warned against hasty action. According to the report, Jonathan Powell, the UK prime minister’s security adviser, who was one of the most influential figures in British foreign policy under previous prime minister Keir Starmer, found himself on the losing side in the first major foreign policy issue to arise under Burnham.
The fear from their point of view is that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reached the final straight of the election campaign in a difficult position, and any confrontation with a foreign government could provide exactly what every politician needs in such a situation: an external enemy.
Three separate sources told "The Spectator" that this point was made clear to the UK government. A senior security source said that Miliband wanted to see Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich, and Itamar Ben Gvir out of power, but was warned that sanctions were liable to achieve the opposite result. He and Burnham decided to proceed with the sanctions announcement nevertheless.
Warnings from intelligence services
The package of sanctions proposed is broad: a ban on imports of products of Jewish settlements beyond the Green Line; stricter control of defense exports; possible sanctions on people and companies that maintain commercial activity in Judea and Samaria; forbidding advertising in the UK of properties in the settlements; and sanctions on five people allegedly involved in incitement or violence against Palestinians.
"The Spectator" comments that in British political circles there is a widespread assessment that local politics played a part in the story. Labour MPs were afraid of losing votes to the vocally anti-Israel Green Party in a by-election in the seat of Holborn and St. Pancras in London on October 8, following Keir Starmer’s resignation from Parliament.
According to the report, MI6, the UK’s foreign intelligence service, did not unambiguously tell the government "Don’t do it", but it did warn that a possible outcome of sanctions was damage to cooperation with Israel. A source close to British intelligence services described frustration within the organization and said that the consequences were laid before the decision makers before the announcement.
The sources who spoke with the magazine were clear on this point. If Israel has information about an Islamist attack about to take place in Britain, the information will be passed on. The problem lies elsewhere. Relationships between intelligence services do not just consist of warnings about a terrorist on the way to carrying out an attack. A large part of their value lies in the continuous flow of information, names, connections, movements of funds, telephone calls, and so on. When relationships are harmed, it is generally this kind of intelligence that starts to dry up.
British intelligence sources say that it will be hard to replace Israel’s capabilities in the Middle East. They say that the intelligence services of the Arab countries are not of the same standard, and that there is a further complication, which is that the Gulf states themselves often benefit from Israeli intelligence forwarded to them indirectly via the British. A Labour Party source who had spoken to senior people in Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia told "The Spectator" that none of them thought that the move would boost British influence in the region.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on September 18, 2026.
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