Ed Miliband’s House of Commons speech announcing them, full of expressions of support for the Israeli state and of support for an illusory “two state solution” in Palestine, was far short of a ringing call for justice in Palestine. Nevertheless, these steps – small as they are – are an important move in the right direction

Those on the left, and in the solidarity movement, who have denounced this speech and these measures as an attempt to rehabilitate Zionism and to whitewash Israeli crimes are missing the point, as can be seen by the furious Israeli response. It would be foolish to fail to recognise that this speech, and these actions, are a direct result of the massive protest movement that we have built over the past three years.

And when the state adopts, however half-heartedly, measures that we have demanded, it would be almost criminally irresponsible to attack them as hypocrites for not going further. Instead, we should welcome them and ensure that they are implemented fully and without qualification, while continuing to point out their limited nature and to demand further action.

One aspect of Miliband’s speech indicated a significant change in British policy. For the first time, a Foreign Secretary, speaking on behalf of the government, has recognised that the 1967 occupation itself, not only Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, is illegal. As a consequence, all trade with the settlements – both import of goods, and the provision of services including construction, insurance and financing – will be banned.

Activists will need to be very vigilant about this, particularly given Israel’s practice of disguising settlement produce as “Made in Israel”. But even without this deception, the settler economy is an intrinsic part of the Israeli economy, and these sanctions, whatever the intention, will inevitably impact on the Israeli economy within the Green Line as well as in the 1967-occupied territories.

Miliband also, pointedly, condemned “an expo advertising illegal settlement land”, and promised legislation that would ban such events in future. This was a reference to the “Great Israeli Real Estate Event” which took place in June at Edgware Synagogue, at which, despite untrue denials by organisers, properties in illegal settlements were offered for sale. Protestors were denounced as antisemitic for demonstrating outside a synagogue. Such illegal sales will now be explicitly banned in Britain.

Shame

But the importance of Miliband’s speech goes beyond the effect on Israel’s economy. The fact that a British Foreign Secretary, invoking the memory of his many family members slaughtered by the Nazis in the Holocaust, spoke in Parliament of his “deep sense of shame about what has unfolded in Palestine under the eyes of the international community” and condemned what he agreed was ethnic cleansing, helps to undermine the false allegation that support for Palestinian rights and opposition to Israel are axiomatically antisemitic.

It is true that Miliband still hedges about whether Israel is conducting genocide, that he does not denounce Zionism as a racist movement and ideology, and that he still clings to the forlorn hope of a “two state solution” when no such solution has ever been either viable, or acceptable to Israel. But it is nevertheless a considerable step forward from previous governments’ criminal complicity with and endorsement of Israel’s war crimes.

Our role as solidarity activists must now be to build on this small step, to ensure that it is implemented in full, and to continue to call for meaningful against the apartheid Israeli state, and for the full realisation of Palestinian rights including their right to return to their homeland. Despite all of their limitations, Miliband’s speech and his actions help rather than impede us in this task.