Recognised in London, Ignored in Hebron

On Friday, two Israeli soldiers were killed near Hebron. Israel's answer was not a manhunt but a campaign of a lockdown of the entire West Bank, a military operation to last several days, house-to-house searches and the demolition of buildings. Netanyahu, fighting for his political survival in the upcoming election, went further. He said that he and his defence minister were weighing an operation in the territory on a scale not seen since 1967. His finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, demanded an offensive "exactly like in Gaza." His national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, called for dismantling the Palestinian Authority, a body no one has linked to the attack.

Deaths of soldiers are a grim and predictable feature of any military occupation. What is revealing is the scale of the response, and how familiar its script has become. This is not an aberration born of one bloody morning. It is the latest chapter in a pattern and also a reply.

Months ago, Britain did what it had refused to do for decades. It recognised the State of Palestine, alongside Canada and Australia, with France and others following at the United Nations. The decision was not a sudden gesture. In July 2025, Keir Starmer had set out plain conditions. It was to end the appalling situation in Gaza, agree a ceasefire, rule out annexation of the West Bank and commit to a genuine peace process. Israel met none of them. Recognition was therefore a verdict. The country that issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917 formally conceded that its ally's conduct had made the old policy, endlessly waiting for negotiations Israel had no intention of concluding, morally untenable.

Israel has treated that verdict as background noise. Settlements have continued to expand. Settler gangs have spent this very month attacking Palestinian olive harvesters. The January 2025 offensive on the refugee camps of the northern West Bank, which the United Nations says forcibly displaced thousands, is now the declared model for Hebron. Since October 2023, Israeli forces and settlers have killed more than 1,100 Palestinians in the West Bank. Recognition was meant to protect the possibility of a Palestinian state in exactly this territory. Israel's response is to promise to turn it into the next Gaza.

A reliable partner keeps its commitments and respects the rules its friends claim to defend. Israel does neither. In July 2024, the International Court of Justice declared the occupation unlawful and said it must end as rapidly as possible, with settlement activity halted and settlers withdrawn. Israel answered with more settlements. Its closest European allies set conditions; they were ignored. Ceasefires are signed and then hollowed out. The areas Oslo placed under Palestinian administration are raided at will. A government that openly vows there will never be a Palestinian state west of the Jordan, even as more than 150 UN members recognise one, is not a partner in any peace process. It is the obstacle to one.

Words that were once taboo in Western capitals are now mainstream legal findings. B'Tselem, Israel's own leading human rights organisation, along with Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have concluded that Israel's system of control over Palestinians amounts to apartheid. The International Court of Justice (ICJ)'s 2024 opinion found that Israel's laws and measures in the occupied territory breach the international prohibition on racial segregation and apartheid. The reality on the ground is not complicated. In the same hills around Hebron, settlers live under Israeli civil law while Palestinians face military courts, permits, checkpoints and bulldozers.

On Gaza, a United Nations Commission of Inquiry concluded in September 2025 that Israel has committed genocide. Amnesty International reached the same conclusion a year earlier, and the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defence minister. So, when a sitting minister asks for the West Bank to be treated "exactly like" Gaza, the world should take him at his word. What was done in Gaza has been examined, documented and given a legal name.

This is where the problem stops being only Israel's. For decades, Washington, London, Berlin and others have supplied Israel with weapons, shielded it with Security Council vetoes and granted it a presumption of good faith no other state enjoys. That support was justified as solidarity with a democracy under threat. But support without conditions is not friendship. It is complicity paid in instalments. Every export licence approved, every veto cast, every reflexive recital of Israel's "right to defend itself" after yet another massacre has transferred a big part of the moral weight onto the shoulders of the backers. They now carry the baggage of a colonial project they armed, funded and excused.

Last year's recognition was a belated admission that this approach had failed. Yet recognition without consequences tells Israel that Western red lines are drawn in chalk. Britain sanctioned Smotrich and Ben-Gvir in 2025; both still shape military policy, and both spent this weekend demanding escalation. A partial suspension of a handful of arms licences has not stopped a single demolition.

If London, Ottawa, Canberra and Paris mean what recognition implies, the next steps are obvious. A full arms embargo, suspension of preferential trade arrangements, a ban on settlement goods, and unambiguous support for the International Criminal Court (ICC) and ICJ, including enforcement of arrest warrants. Anything less turns recognition into a diplomatic alibi; a way of saying the right words but doing the wrong things like keeping the supply lines open.

The two soldiers killed near Hebron will be mourned by their families, as every death in this conflict deserves to be. But the response now under way, the collective punishment of some three million people to win an election, is a choice. Israel's friends have told it, in the formal language of statehood and law, what it is doing. It has chosen not to listen.

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The writer is a political and international affairs analyst and Research Fellow at Bangladesh Neeti Gobeshona Kendra.