Twelve Nations Sanction Israeli West Bank Settlement Trade

The question is not who will punish whom, but who is producing what, in the West Bank, on Tuesday, and who is not. The settlements produce wine, olive oil, dates, quarried stone, and increasingly agricultural technology sold onward into European markets. The Palestinian villages nearby, subject to what the announcement calls violence, produce far less than their land and labour would permit, because production requires security of tenure, and security of tenure is precisely what is contested on that ground. Twelve countries, among them Britain, Canada, and France, have now announced sanctions on trade with the settlements. This is not, as it will be reported, primarily a moral gesture. It is an intervention in a production chain, and it should be assessed as one.

A sanction on settlement trade does not remove demand for wine or olive oil. Demand for wine is not created by Israeli settlers; it is created by vineyards elsewhere producing wine, and by consumers producing income through their own labour with which to buy it. What the sanction does is sever one particular channel of supply from Western markets. The settler producer loses a customer. He does not, however, lose his land, his capital, or his labour force. He will sell elsewhere, at a discount, through intermediaries, or he will shift toward domestic Israeli consumption. The sanction changes the price the settlement producer receives; it does not annihilate his capacity to produce. This is the first thing the twelve governments have not reckoned with honestly, and the second is more serious.

Consider the actual obstacle to Palestinian production in these villages, which the sanction does nothing to remove. A farmer who cannot reach his olive grove because a road is closed, or whose trees are cut down, or whose access to markets in East Jerusalem or Amman depends on a checkpoint that may or may not open, is not short of demand for his olives. Europe would buy them gladly, at a better price than settlement oil commands, sanctions or none. He is short of the conditions under which production is possible at all: secure title, passable roads, predictable movement of goods. A sanction aimed at settlement exports treats the symptom, which is a trade flow the ministers in London and Ottawa find distasteful, while leaving untouched the disease, which is that one producer in this landscape enjoys state protection for his enterprise and another does not.

I do not say this to excuse the settlements or to minimise the villages’ suffering, which the stated aim of the sanction correctly identifies as real. I say it because a policy built on restricting trade mistakes the instrument for the cause. Imagine a merchant in Lyon, in my own day, forbidden to sell cloth to a rival guild across town because the guild had encroached on common pasture. The prohibition satisfies the aggrieved commoners’ sense of justice. It does not restore the pasture, and it does not make the commoners into weavers. The guild, meanwhile, finds another market for its cloth within the month.

What would actually shift the balance of production in the West Bank is not a boycott announced on a Tuesday but the removal of the specific obstacles that prevent Palestinian enterprise from operating at anything near its capacity: land access, credit, the ability to move a truck of produce from a village to a port without a permit expiring en route. Twelve governments capable of coordinating sanctions are equally capable of funding agricultural credit, guaranteeing export routes, underwriting the insurance that no private lender will extend to a grove that might be bulldozed next season. That is a policy that increases the total goods available for exchange. A trade sanction, by contrast, is a demand-side gesture dressed as a supply-side one: it withdraws one market from one seller and calls the withdrawal an act of production justice, when no new olive has been pressed, no new vine planted, and no new road built.

The settler will find another buyer. The villager still needs the road.