Lord Cameron has revealed that he tried as Foreign Secretary to sanction two far-right members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government for encouraging violent extremism against Palestinians.
July’s general election got in the way, the Conservative former PM said, as he encouraged Labour ministers to come back to the sanctions discussion rather than imposing a wider arms embargo on Israel.
Action was planned against Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir as a way of putting “pressure on Netanyahu” to act within international law, Lord Cameron told the Today programme on BBC Radio 4.
“Before we left office I was working up sanctions on these two ministers, ministers Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, who, when you look at what they say, they have said things like encouraging people to stop aid convoys going into Gaza, they have encouraged extreme settlers in the West Bank with the appalling things they have been carrying out,” he said.
“So, actually saying to Netanyahu, ‘yes, we support your right to self-defence, no, we are not going to end the sale of arms, but actually when ministers in your government who are extremists and behave in this way, we are prepared to use our sanctions regime to say this is not good enough and has to stop’.”
Both ministers believe in Jewish supremacy over what they see as a historic “Greater Israel” encompassing all of the occupied Palestinian territories and stretching much further beyond the country’s current boundaries.
They have used racist rhetoric to demonise Palestinians and encouraged Jewish settlers on the West Bank to take the law into their own hands - while also opposing rights for women and gay people.
Lord Cameron said he was advised that it would have been “too much of a political act” to sanction the ministers during the election campaign.
But he urged Sir Keir Starmer's Government to “look again at this sanctions issue” rather than go down the “wrong path” of curbing arms exports to Israel.
David Lammy, Lord Cameron’s successor as Foreign Secretary, last month restricted the exports after a legal finding that UK-made weapons could be used by Israel in violation of international humanitarian law. But he stopped short of a blanket ban.
