Britain’s sanctions against Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank have sparked public division among British rabbis, with many framing their reaction in terms of their own fears about threats against Jews in Britain.
Several rabbis expressed support for the sanctions and spoke about violence they had witnessed or personally experienced from extremist settlers in the West Bank. At the same time, the country’s chief rabbi, the spiritual leader of Britain’s Orthodox Jews, was among several prominent Jews who condemned the move.
Such conflicting statements — coming days before the holiest period in the Jewish calendar — are among the most public signs of the deep divisions among British Jews, who have faced a series of violent attacks in recent months.
“Nobody should ever suggest that they represent the single opinion of any group of Jews anywhere,” said Rabbi Jeremy Gordon, who published a letter on Wednesday supporting the sanctions and detailing his own experiences with settlers.
But while British Jews have varied opinions on both Israeli and British politics, he said, almost none support or condone the violence. “There are very, very few people who would associate themselves with the extreme far right in Israel,” he said.
The sanctions, jointly announced with Canada and France, ban trade in settlement goods, and a dozen countries in all supported them.
In response, Israel’s foreign minister said the sanctions were based on “outrageous lies,” ordered the British Consulate in Jerusalem closed and barred from Israel a dozen British lawmakers and others he deemed anti-Israeli and antisemitic.
The sanctions come at a tense time for Britain, Israel and the West Bank. International attention is focused on Israel’s tightening grip on the enclave and its expansion of settlements there. In recent weeks, settlers have repeatedly attacked Palestinians as the Israeli military has stood by.
Britain, a longtime ally of Israel, has condemned the West Bank settlements, which are considered illegal under international law. The sanctions represent a striking escalation of its criticism. They come after British Jews have faced a recent wave of antisemitic attacks.
In October, two Jews died in Manchester in an attack on their synagogue during Yom Kippur. In March, arsonists destroyed ambulances belonging to a Jewish volunteer service in London. In April, two men were stabbed in a Jewish area of London, in what British officials called a terrorist attack.
In July, the British government accused an arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps of almost certainly directing some of those attacks.
Many British Jews have wrestled with how to reconcile the attacks with outrage over Israel’s support of the settlements and its war in Gaza, in which tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed. The war was set off by the Hamas-led attacks in 2023, which killed about 1,200 people.
Some argue that any anti-Israel statements or actions by the British government can lead to violence against Jews.
“These measures will succeed only in bolstering the very extremism they seek to target,” Britain’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, said on social media on Tuesday.
He said Britain’s Jews were “more vulnerable than ever” and argued that the sanctions add to the danger they face.
“Gesture politics of this kind feeds into an increasingly hostile discourse about Israel, and the cumulative effect of such punitive policies is to further embolden those, at home and abroad, who use hatred as a weapon against Jews,” he added.
Some British Jews argue that Israel’s policies have made them less safe, as those angry with the Israeli government could misdirect their rage against Jews and Jewish sites in Britain.
“Part of the reason why this is happening — this isn’t to condone it — is because terrible things are being said by people who are condoning and inflaming the West Bank settlers who are violently attacking Palestinians in the West Bank,” said Rabbi Gordon.
He and several others couched their support for the sanctions in terms of their own experiences in the West Bank.
Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg, who leads the Masorti Jewish communities in Britain (which is similar to the conservative communities in the United States), said in a letter posted on social media on Wednesday that he had spent time this week in the Palestinian village of Umm al-Khair in the West Bank.
There, he said, he met a man whose brother had been killed by a settler 13 months ago. The settler violence “is a Chillul HaShem, a violation of God’s name of the worst order,” he wrote.
He described a village “under siege,” saying that he had met families who could not reach their livestock or access the toilet. The Israeli authorities defend the settlers, he said, not the villagers.
“It desecrates the millennia-old good name of the Jewish People,” he continued. “It prepares the way for more and yet more conflict, suffering and grief.”
Britain’s move drew criticism from the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who warned the sanctions could stoke tensions with Washington and, potentially, a U.S. response.
As in Britain, the settlements and Israel have proved intensively divisive among American Jews, and Mr. Huckabee, an evangelical Christian, has himself condemned settler violence.
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