Western restrictions on goods from Israeli settlements may look like a dispute over trade. Beneath them lies a far older and more combustible question: who may exercise sovereignty in the biblical heartland, and what responsibilities follow from that claim?
The pressure has been building like a volcano. For decades, governments have tried to contain the Israeli–Palestinian conflict through interim arrangements, diplomatic formulas and deliberately unresolved questions. Now the ground is shifting again, and Jerusalem stands near the centre of the tremor.
On 8 September, the foreign ministers of 12 Western nations issued a joint statement declaring their intention to introduce, support or consider restrictions on trade in goods from Israeli settlements. Britain went further, announcing an import ban on settlement goods and action against companies and individuals providing services for settlement expansion. France and Canada also signalled national measures.
The governments described their action as obedience to international law and a defence of the two-state solution. They pointed especially to the E1 settlement project east of Jerusalem, settlement expansion and violence against Palestinians. Israel responded with fury. It announced the closure of the British consulate in Jerusalem, removed British personnel from Gaza ceasefire support arrangements, ended British security training for Palestinian Authority forces and barred a group of British figures from entering the country.
What looks at first like a quarrel over product labels and import rules is therefore something much larger. It is a contest over the legal status of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the legitimacy of Jewish residence there, the future of Palestinian self-government and, ultimately, sovereignty over the land.
From trade restrictions to sovereignty
The 12-nation statement says settlements are “illegal under international law” and warns that expansion is undermining a viable Palestinian state. That position is not new. United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, adopted in 2016, declared that Israeli settlements in territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, have “no legal validity” and called on states to distinguish in their dealings between Israel and the territories captured in 1967.
The more immediate legal foundation is the International Court of Justice’s July 2024 advisory opinion. By a majority, the Court concluded that Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful and that other states must neither recognise the resulting situation as lawful nor render aid or assistance in maintaining it. The opinion was advisory rather than a binding judgment between Israel and another state, but it has given governments a powerful legal and political basis for measures aimed at settlement commerce.
That distinction matters. The ICJ did not settle every historical claim to the land by judicial decree, nor did every judge reason in the same way. Israel rejects the Court’s central conclusions and argues that the opinion discounts Jewish historical and legal claims, the disputed status of the territory before 1967, binding agreements that reserved final status for negotiation, and Israel’s security needs.
Yet the international position has hardened. For most governments, the question is no longer whether settlements should be criticised. It is whether ordinary trade with them helps sustain an unlawful situation. Israel, by contrast, hears in that language something more threatening: an attempt to declare Jews illegitimate in places bound up with their history, Scriptures and national memory.
A land with more than one history
Any honest account must hold together truths that political slogans pull apart. The Jewish connection to Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria is ancient, deep and abundantly documented. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; the kingdoms of Israel and Judah; the Temple; exile and return; centuries of prayer directed towards Jerusalem: these are not modern inventions. Jews did not discover Jerusalem in 1967.
Nor can Palestinian Arabs be reduced to an obstacle in somebody else’s story. Generations have lived, worked, worshipped and buried their dead in the same land. They possess human dignity, legitimate interests and a right to justice. Violence against Palestinian civilians, dispossession without lawful cause and failures to investigate wrongdoing cannot be excused by appealing to Jewish history or Israel’s genuine security peril.
The modern legal dispute emerged from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, Britain’s unsuccessful administration of competing national aspirations, the United Nations partition proposal of 1947, the establishment of Israel and the wars that followed. The Mandate recognised the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and charged Britain with facilitating a Jewish national home, while also requiring protection of the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish communities already there.
In 1948, Arab armies rejected partition and invaded the newly declared State of Israel. Jordan subsequently controlled the West Bank and East Jerusalem until the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel captured those territories. Israel later applied its law and administration to East Jerusalem and declared the united city its capital, a claim not recognised by most of the international community. In the rest of the West Bank, Israel established military administration while permitting and encouraging Israeli civilian communities.
The Oslo Accords of the 1990s created Palestinian self-government in parts of the territory but deferred borders, settlements, security, refugees and Jerusalem to permanent-status negotiations. Those negotiations never produced a comprehensive agreement. The supposedly temporary arrangement hardened into a confusing and increasingly unstable reality.
Israel’s long ambiguity is reaching its limit
For years, Israel managed the dispute without resolving the sovereignty question. Its governments variously invoked security, historical rights, negotiated compromise and the hope of land for peace. Israeli society itself remained divided. Some regarded Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria as a biblical and national duty; others feared that permanent control over millions of Palestinians would corrode Israel’s security, democracy and moral standing.
The attacks of 7 October 2023 profoundly changed that debate. For many Israelis, the prospect of a Palestinian state near the country’s population centres no longer looks like a path to peace but an intolerable security risk. That fear is not imaginary. Hamas demonstrated what genocidal ideology, patient preparation and breached borders can produce.
But fear, however well grounded, cannot by itself answer every question of law, governance or justice. Israel must confront terrorism and protect its citizens. It must also distinguish terrorists from civilians, restrain lawless violence by Israelis and administer justice without partiality. Biblical responsibility never means that might makes right.
The present Israeli government has spoken more openly about Jewish claims. Responding to Britain, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar declared: “The Jewish people have the right to live throughout the land of Israel.” He appealed to the Balfour Declaration, the Mandate and the historical record. His statement did not by itself resolve the legal controversy, but it exposed the issue that decades of diplomatic language have concealed: Israel cannot indefinitely encourage Jewish life in the territories while leaving their final political status in suspense.
Nor will sanctions make that underlying question disappear. They may impose economic and diplomatic costs. They may deter some companies. They may also deepen Israeli conviction that friendly nations have accepted a one-sided account of the conflict. As pressure increases, the road from trade restrictions to broader diplomatic and strategic confrontation becomes easier to imagine, even though military conflict is not an inevitable consequence.
Why Jerusalem remains the centre
The dispute is commonly described as a fight over the “West Bank”, a modern geographic label derived from Jordanian rule. Israelis who say “Judea and Samaria” are not merely choosing different vocabulary; they are invoking the biblical and historical identity of the land. Palestinians who speak of occupied territory are likewise making a claim about dispossession, self-determination and the boundaries of a future state.
Jerusalem concentrates all these meanings. It is Israel’s capital and the spiritual centre of Jewish memory. It is also home to Palestinian communities and holy to Christians and Muslims. The Old City contains the Western Wall and Temple Mount or Haram al-Sharif, along with places bound to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Here law, history, worship and national longing occupy the same few streets.
That is why E1 carries significance beyond the number of houses proposed. Governments supporting a two-state solution fear that Israeli building there would sever East Jerusalem from the West Bank and further fragment Palestinian territory. Supporters of the project see a strategic corridor beside Israel’s capital and reject the premise that Jews should be forbidden to build there. The argument is geographical, but it is never merely geographical.
A Christian response of truth, mercy and hope
How, then, should Christians respond? We should begin with humility. Faithful Christians disagree about how the Old Testament land promises relate to the modern State of Israel and the fulfilment of God’s purposes in Christ. No government policy should be baptised as infallible, and no modern state stands beyond moral scrutiny.
The conviction advanced here is that God’s covenant purposes for the Jewish people have not been erased, and that their return to the land should not be treated as a historical accident or a colonial fiction. The Jewish attachment to the land deserves recognition, and Christian nations should examine whether their policies repeat older habits of denying Jews the rights readily granted to others.
But a biblical claim brings biblical duties. Scripture repeatedly joins possession of the land with justice, mercy and care for the stranger. Israel’s leaders bear responsibility to protect life, punish wrongdoing impartially and seek the good of all who live under their authority. Palestinian leaders likewise bear responsibility to reject terrorism, antisemitism and the indoctrination of children into hatred. Western governments should resist both romanticising Palestinian politics and treating Palestinian suffering as expendable.
The church’s calling is not to manufacture a diplomatic formula and declare it sacred. Governments must make prudential judgments about borders, security and civil administration. The church must do something both simpler and harder: speak truth with love, refuse antisemitism, defend innocent life, strengthen Jewish and Arab believers, and pray for rulers whose decisions carry terrible weight.
We should pray for Israel’s leaders to answer hostility with courage and clarity while still seeking friendship and peace. We should pray for Palestinians trapped between failed leadership, militant ideology, military control and the daily burdens of conflict. We should pray for Arab Christians to be peacemakers with the mind of Christ, and for Jewish people to encounter the mercy of the Messiah.
Above all, we pray as Jesus taught us: that the Father’s name would be hallowed, his kingdom would come and his will would be done on earth as it is in heaven. The battle over Jerusalem will not be resolved by slogans, selective history or economic pressure alone. Christians must look steadily at the facts, speak with conviction and charity, and pray for the peace of the city whose name has become a promise and a wound.