00:00The UK and other allies have announced a major move to ban goods from illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied
00:06West Bank.
00:07Now, what is the significance of this move and could it have any meaningful impact?
00:12Dr. H. A. Hellyer, Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, or RUSI, weighs in.
00:19From the outset, these sanctions are not on illegal settlements in the West Bank.
00:25They're on all settlements in the West Bank because all the settlements in the West Bank are illegal.
00:32So I think it's important to point that out because there's also something of a tendency in a lot of
00:40the discourse around this, in the UK at least,
00:43that there are quote-unquote good settlements and bad settlements, good settlers and bad settlers.
00:49I'm sure the individual settlers might be nice people, but their very presence in the occupied territories is illegal under
01:00international law.
01:01That's not an opinion.
01:03That's the International Court of Justice very explicit advisory on this.
01:09So that's number one.
01:11Number two, is it symbolic or is it representative of a much more human rights-based approach?
01:20I don't think it's either or.
01:22I think it's incredibly symbolic.
01:25I think it's long overdue.
01:27And I think that it flows, frankly, from the bare minimum of what the UK government, but also governments worldwide,
01:39ought to be doing with regards to the settlements in the West Bank.
01:45Now, does this mean that it portends much more of a reset for the relationship between the United Kingdom and
01:55the State of Israel and the State of Palestine?
01:59That remains to be seen.
02:01Aliyah also said the timing of the move had less to do with the UK or Israeli elections
02:06and more to do with the illegal E1 settlement plan, as well as the limited window for Parliament to act
02:12before recessed.
02:13But will the move actually help shift Israel's policy?
02:17If anybody thinks that any single step is going to force the Israelis to change course, I think that's quite
02:25dubious.
02:26I think that the major reason behind Israeli policy having proceeded the way that it has,
02:35not just in the past three years, but much further back than that,
02:38is because they correctly assess that the United States will underpin and underwrite, frankly, their decisions
02:49and protect them from political fallout at the UN,
02:55will continue to provide aid in a different array of sectors,
02:59and secondarily, certain countries in Europe as well, particularly Germany.
03:06But there are others as well, but I mean, particularly Germany in that regard.
03:10This does not affect that.
03:12In a direct sense, in an immediate sense,
03:16the sanctions will not cause a major policy shift in Washington, D.C. or in Berlin.
03:23And those are the countries that I think matter the most in terms of Israeli policy.
03:29But I think that there's two things to be said here.
03:33One, the countries that have issued this call about sanctions, they're under legal obligations.
03:42So whether or not they have immediate effect, frankly, on one level is irrelevant.
03:49They have legal obligations and they ought to uphold them.
03:52There are many cases where we sanction countries...
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