UK sanctions Israeli settlements in West Bank

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0:42You're listening to NewsHour, live from the BBC World Service in London, with me, Gary O'Donoghue. We begin in Britain with the UK government and its announcement that it's imposing sanctions linked to Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. The move follows Israel's decision to open the bidding for more than 1 ,000 new homes in the E1 area, a strategically sensitive tract of land east of Jerusalem that Britain and other allies say effectively cuts the West Bank in half. It accuses Israel more generally of expanding Jewish settlements in order to jeopardise any chance of a future two-state solution.

1:22The measures are designed to target individuals and businesses connected to settlement activity, but also more generally to send a message about growing concern in London over the pace of expansion. The British government is describing the move as part of a comprehensive reset of UK-Israel relations. And today, 11 other countries, including France and Canada, announced their intention to introduce similar restrictions. In the past hour or so, Britain's Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband addressing the House of Commons. He began by describing himself as a proud Jew before going on to explain the rationale behind the announcement.

2:03Today I announce that the official view of the British government is that the occupation is unlawful. Because of Israel's entrenchment of its control, its intention to extend permanent sovereignty and its expansionist agenda via illegal settlements. Madam Deputy Speaker, our position is not just an overdue statement of reality. The Government believes the unlawfulness of the occupation should be reflected in the economic relationships we choose to have with the occupied territories. I do not believe the British people want us supporting the occupation by accepting products from settlements in our shops and supermarkets.

2:42So I can announce today that we will introduce an import ban on goods from illegal settlements in the occupied territories. To do so, we will introduce a new comprehensive sanctions regime, working with my right honourable friend, the Business Secretary, with appropriate religious exemptions. And as part of this regime, we will go further. We will take action against specific companies and individuals who provide services, such as construction, infrastructure, financing or real estate, for settlement expansion. So to those who finance or facilitate illegal settlements, let me say this. you will face the full force of UK sanctions.

3:19The British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband there. Well, Israel has threatened retaliation. And the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, says repercussions for UK-US trade are a very real possibility. And I just don't think maybe the Brits are thinking through the implications of this policy they're about to enact. Are they willing to stop doing business with a number of US states in which they currently have commerce, because that's what's going to happen. Not to mention there will be many other Israeli-British partnerships that are going to be forbidden. I'm not sure what the end game here is.

3:55I don't understand what is the purpose of this. Have they thought through what the implications are for the people of Great Britain? That's the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, and we'll be hearing more from him later on in NewsHour. We asked the British Foreign Office for an interview, but no one was available to speak to us. Emily Thornberry is the Labour MP and chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee in Parliament. She supports the government's plans on this issue. Speaking before the announcement, she told my colleague Nick Robinson why the move was necessary. The far-right government of Israel has expressly said that they want to snuff out any chance of a Palestinian state.

4:39We recognize Palestine along with many other countries. We did it a year ago. And it isn't just enough just to recognize Palestine. You have to do everything that you can to protect the possibility of a Palestinian state. The Israelis are not going anywhere. The Palestinians are not going anywhere. The only way that they can live in peace is by having two states alongside one another. That is the way in which you get a safe and secure Israel and justice for Palestinians. but this far-right government is trying to get rid of it and we have to stand up to it. But the problem with the argument is this, isn't it?

5:14It suggests that anybody in Israel is going to listen. The truth is Benjamin Netanyahu will not just not listen, it may in fact fuel his campaign. He's running for re-election in a few weeks time and his allies will say, there we are, the world's against us. It's the old Millwall cry, everyone hates us, we don't care. It won't change a thing, will it? I don't think that's right. I think that And certainly there are some people who think in the way that Netanyahu does in Israel, but Israel is a democracy with many different views. And I think there are a large number of people in Israel who do not want their country to be a pariah state, do not want to be to be marginalized and who want to be mainstream and who don't believe that the way the government is going is right.

5:55And indeed, the government is behind in the polls. So I think to equate the, as I say, the extremism of Netanyahu with the whole of Israel is just not to do Israel a proper service at all. We just heard another possible risk, a risk to Britain's trading relationships with Israel as a whole, that we might lose trade, for example, pharmaceuticals made in Israel, or that America, either federally or at state level, may punish British companies for the fact that we're sanctioning their friends and allies in Israel. So we have a trade deal with Israel at the moment where we give preferential treatments to Israel, to goods coming from Israel proper, but not from the West Bank.

6:34And the Israelis have signed up to that. And so they recognise there is a difference between the occupied territories and Israel proper. I mean, as I understand it, the government is going to change the way in which we trade with Israel. They continue to give preferential treatment to goods from Israel, but not from the West Bank. And indeed, it just simply will be a ban on all goods. But I also hope it goes further. You know, there are people who say it'll be virtually impossible to distinguish between goods from the West Bank and goods from Israel. Well, I think that this always happens as a problem, as rules of origin, as to, you know, does this tyre come from there?

7:07What percentage is? But I mean, that's a kind of established issue when it comes to international trade. And it will continue to be. Well, listen, we had a ban on goods coming in from Crimea when Crimea was occupied by the Russians and we continue to trade with Russia. We've been here before. We can do it. It is incumbent on all of us to make it perfectly clear that this far right government does not represent Israelis and certainly does not represent British Jews or Jews around the world. And it is really important that the two are disconnected. And we need to continue to kind of, you know, make that argument out there.

7:46But we have to challenge what this government is doing. I mean, Ben Gavir has recently set out a plan to forcibly expel Palestinians from Gaza. We need to make it clear that Netanyahu does not represent British Jews. Emily Thornberry, the chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee in Parliament in Britain, speaking to my colleague Nick Robinson. Well, Simcha Rothman is a member of the Knesset for the far-right Religious Zionist Party. I spoke to him a little earlier and asked for his reaction on the sanctions that were being put on goods from the occupied West Bank by the British government.

8:21I heard so many things not correct in what I just heard in the last few minutes that I really don't know where to start. We'll start with my question. Why don't you start with my question? But first I will start that I don't know why would you define me as far right. The view about Judea and Samaria and the view about the craziness of giving a Palestinian state to the people who showed what they're planning for the Jewish people and for the state of Israel, the objection to that is being supported by two-thirds of Israeli Knesset. I led a decision against the Palestinians. No, no, I'm referring because you said, and I listened, that this is the view of the far right or the view of the extremists in Israel to go against two-state solution, which is not two, not state, and definitely not a solution.

9:22So I have to correct your listeners to say that two-thirds of Israeli parliament, the Knesset, two-thirds, 80 members of Knesset. You made your point. I think people will also want to know what you think of the sanctions. I really don't. They will want to know what you think of the sanctions. What I'm saying is that Britain is not going against Netanyahu's government. They're not going against the far right in Israel. They are going against the state of Israel, the vast majority of the Jews in Israel, and the vast majority of the members of Knesset and the public in Israel. I mean, the British government specifically says that it does not equate the settlements with Israel itself.

10:05It specifically says that. So, again, it doesn't really matter what the British government say because apparently they don't know what they're talking about. Two-thirds of Israeli Knesset object to the idea of a Palestinian state. I led this decision, this resolution in the parliament in July 2024. Two thirds of Israeli Knesset want to apply Israeli law over Judea and Samaria. I led this resolution in the Knesset in July 2025. So the British government is going against the Israeli public, not against the Israeli government. Can I ask you another question? Yes, of course. How should Israel respond to these sanctions?

10:52That's not for me to decide. How would you prefer the government to respond? But I think that the nerve of the British government to go against what they called an occupation or illegal occupation of Judea and Samaria puts Britain in a very not so honored list. The list of Great Britain and Pakistan. Those are the only two countries in the world that recognize the illegal occupation of Judea and Samaria by the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan in the 50s. The only two countries. So apparently all the Muslims that came from Pakistan to Britain apparently conquered Britain because now Britain is actually fulfilling the views of the Pakistanian government.

11:43And it's a good question why Britain chose this honour to recognise Judea and Samaria, the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people, as an occupied territory. Can I also put this to you? There's a whole list of other countries that are planning similar restrictions, a whole list of them. does that not worry you that that perhaps shows Israel becoming more and more isolated if if not just Britain but a whole list of countries are thinking of doing this sort of thing sadly there are many many countries in the world that are being conquered by immigrants from Muslim countries and go against their own interests.

12:32We saw that in the war against Iran, when Israel was the only one who stood besides the United States and other countries, including the UK, caved under the pressure. Because apparently you are being conquered from within. and countries that are not being conquered from within support the free and democratic and Jewish state of history. Should the British ambassador be expelled? Again, it's not for me to decide. There definitely should be consequences. What's your view? Again, it's not for me to decide. There definitely should be consequences for a country that goes against morality, go against justice, It goes against history and goes against international law.

13:22There should be repercussions. And that was Simcha Rothman speaking to me a little earlier. You're listening to NewsHour from the BBC.

13:37Coming up in just over 10 minutes' time, Latvia's foreign minister tells us why she's banning book imports from neighbouring Russia. We ban imports. We don't ban books. If people want to read books, they're most welcome to read books. If they want to read papers, it's all available. This is the freest democracy that is there. Look at our other headlines. Britain, France and 10 other countries are banning goods produced in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. They say Israel's expansion in Palestinian territories undermining the search for a two-state solution. And another headline. Yemen's Houthis say they've been retaliatory strikes after Saudi Arabia.

14:20They fired Saudi Arabia drones and missiles, which hit some of their oil facilities. That's our latest headlines.

14:38You're listening to the BBC World Service. This is NewsHour with me, Gary O'Donoghue. Now, before sunrise today, Tuesday, there was a pretty daring art theft on the French Riviera. It's left police hunting for two suspects who broke into the Renoir Museum at Kanye-sur-Mer and made off with several works of art, costed, according to the local mayor, around$10 million. The alarm was triggered within minutes and police raced to the scene and CCTV captured two thieves fleeing. The heist was once raised fresh questions, of course, about museum security.

15:23Hugh Schofield joins us from Paris, even. As you say, Cain-sur-Mer, a town, or really a suburb of Nice almost now, but the place where Renoir, the Impressions artist, spent the last years of his life, a house on the hill which was converted much later in the 60s to a museum and houses a lot of his family memorabilia, furniture and so on, but also a number of his paintings because he'd lived there a fair amount of time and painted extensively there as well. There were, I think, 10 or 11 of his pictures on the wall, nudes, portraits and so on, and this was clearly the target for this pair of thieves who broke in at six o 'clock in the morning.

16:02It looks like they knew when there was going to be a change of shift in the security personnel. they broke in through the garden and smashed a window, got in the alarms very quickly went off but they had time to cut through the cables that protected pictures and took four with them put them in bags but they were stopped but they were in such a hurry that they dropped two on the way out so they've got a way of two but they're all recognisable pictures well known pictures documented of course and any chance of them being sold on is absolutely non-existent. I mean, these are well-known Renoir. They will not have any market value because they are unsellable except in an official way.

16:46Museums have had a bit of a bad run recently, haven't they? This is not the first of this kind in France or Italy and a few other places recently. Indeed, indeed. I mean, famously we talk about the Louvre heist of a year ago, but in a way that was anomalous. I mean, that's a world-famous gallery which should have had massive protection. and is going to get it. Far more troubling in a way is the vast network of small museums, which there are across France and, indeed, as you say, Italy and other parts of Europe, where there are nothing like the same level of value and quantity of works, but still stuff which is genuinely interesting.

17:24But the security at these places is very, very poor. And it's suddenly, clearly, a light has gone on in the minds of people who run these criminal gangs, that this is an opportunity. And they are clearly turning their attention and spending money paying people to break into these smaller provincial regional galleries and make off with stuff, sometimes stuff which can be converted into money, gold, diamonds, jewels and so on, but often it can also be works like this, which leaves one scratching one's head, because what can you do with a Renoir? Not very much. Do they tend to catch these people or not really?

18:02I mean, some of these things are ordered, aren't they? It was stolen to order. Indeed. The Louvre, they've caught the people, but the people aren't talking. And so they don't know really what happened to the material. They've lost the, these are the crown jewels of French empresses and queens and so on in the 19th century. They haven't got that back, even though they've found the perpetrators. often it's gangs who are acting under command from high ups in drug drugs organizations and so on they may easily be foreigners who disappear across borders and so on a lot is made of how inadequate the security is but here the security did work i mean the alarms went off straight away within five minutes of police were there so they're hot on the tail of these people and certainly there's a sort of hope that in this case at least they will catch them and that was our Paris correspondent Hugh Schofield.

18:54Now, the Jamaican government says it has formally handed over a petition to King Charles over slavery reparations. Jamaica's culture minister, Olivia Grange, said it could pave the way for a settlement for the hundreds of years of the most horrific abuse of African ancestors, which they endured. The petition will ask the king, who serves as Jamaica's head of state, to refer three questions of legality over the slave trade to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. That's the highest court of appeal. It's based in Britain, but for the Caribbean nation. The minister is also due to meet with officials from the British Museum to discuss the return of colonial era artefacts.

19:42Earlier, I spoke to Olivia Grange and I asked her what she thought would happen next. We're asking whether enslaving Africans as chattel was lawful on the English law, did it breach international law to enslave Africans as chattel in Jamaica, and whether the UK is liable and owe a remedy to the people of Jamaica. And I'm assuming you're hoping that the answer to those all three questions is yes. Well, we await the answers and then we will make a determination based on the guidance from our lawyers what the next steps will be. What would success look like for you? I do not want to speculate, Gary.

20:28We want to await these answers. To us, the fundamental thing is to make the determination based on these answers. the way forward. You know, the king is the king of Jamaica, just as he is the king of the United Kingdom. We felt strongly, based on guidance from our attorneys, that these are important questions to determine what next. You'll know that the government here, the British government, as recently as yesterday, has rejected any calls for reparations, says that it's not going to happen. Well, we are not going to be distracted by any comment that was made. We are focused on getting answers to these questions.

21:19And we have not come out and say that we are asking for monetary compensation or anything like that. because one of the questions has to do with whether there is a legal obligation on the part of the UK to provide a reparatory remedy to the people of Jamaica. That question is to be answered. Minister, you're also in Britain to talk to the British Museum. What are you looking for from that institution? You know, the Tainos were the original inhabitants of Jamaica. You know, we speak of reparations. We also speak of repatriation of our artifacts. The centerpiece of Jamaica's restitution claim is a group of wooden carvings held by the British Museum.

22:17alongside a wider, loosely documented body of Jamaican origin objects acquired during the colonial period. There are three artifacts in particular. The Birdman figure, it's a carved wooden spirit figure. And the boy, Niel, the rain god, a carved wooden zemi figure. And a canopied zemi representing a spirit because the Taienas were very spiritual people. And all three were taken from Carpenter's Mountain in 1792. They have spiritual importance, and they are considered among the finest surviving examples of Taiena wood carving in the world. We are interested in having those repatriated, And we have made an effort over the years.

23:18But we really would want to get the original artefacts. And that was Olivia Grange, Jamaica's Culture Minister, speaking to me a little earlier. You're listening to NewsHour.

23:58We'll be right back. You know it. And fans ready to add John Deere certified pre-owned equipment and more options to their lineup can shop at machinefinder.com. Booyah! Get more with BBC Podcasts wherever you listen. Be the first to listen to your favourite shows like Evil Genius, Good Bad Billionaire and You're Dead to Me with a subscription to BBC Podcasts Premium on Apple Podcasts. You can also enjoy a range of our podcasts ad-free with an Amazon Music subscription. Welcome back to NewsHour with me, Gary O'Donoghue. Latvia, one of the former Soviet states bordering Russia but now in the European Union and NATO, has long warned about what it perceives as Moscow's malign influence, often seeing Russia as an outright threat to the Baltic states.

24:48Today, the Latvian government took its next step in trying to thwart that danger by banning the import of books and newspapers from Russia and its close ally Belarus. Rus Binyabraza is Latvia's foreign minister. NewsHour's Tim Franks asked her why the government introduced the ban. Why would someone need to import books from Russia or Belarus, the two authoritarian regimes, or papers, newspapers for that? If there is a need to buy anything like that, there is sufficient stuff here locally or elsewhere in the EU. So that's the main thinking, because you can also have propaganda, You can have other security sensitive issues.

25:31So there's actually security aspects to all of that. Okay, but just to be clear, it's a blanket ban on all this material coming in. Is it all Russian books? Because I'm just wondering, I mean, you say, why is there a need to get any books from Russia? But I mean, you can imagine, obviously, Russia has a glorious civilization. You can be appalled by what the present government is up to. But I mean, if there were a sort of fantastic new edition of a Tolstoy novel or Pushkin poetry, would that… They can be published elsewhere. They don't have to be important for Russia. Okay, but I'm just trying to be clear about this then.

26:07Is this an economic embargo or are you concerned about propaganda? Because hence my question about Pushkin or Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or whatever. Well, it's on the basis on specific customs codes. So those come, the books from Russia, the books from Belarus. So it's not about authors or something. So it's just in the current conditions, you know, in the fifth year of the war Russia is waging in Ukraine, that is pretty straightforward. But you will also be aware that, look, you know, there is a counter argument here, which is that a quarter of your country see themselves as ethnic Russians. You obviously very proudly see yourself, call yourself a democracy, which indeed you are.

26:48that there's something that feels a little sort of unfree and anti-democratic about when you get into at least the optics of banning books. No, we ban imports. We don't ban books. I'm sorry, there is a big difference. As for the Russians here, we don't divide Latvian citizens in some type of groups. They are all Latvian nationals. As for the Russian citizens, there is below 40 ,000 of those living in Latvia. And those are some who have been living here for a long time and some who have received shelter from us after the start of the war. As for languages and discussions and, you know, what people use in private life, I can speak Russian myself.