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The U.K., France, and other European states are preparing to announce sanctions on Israel this week in an attempt to prevent companies from becoming involved in Israel’s E1 settlement project.
According to reports by The Guardian and Reuters, the U.K. in particular aims to prevent U.K. companies from becoming involved in the E1 settlement, which, if completed, will split the occupied Palestinian West Bank in half between north and south, making a contiguous Palestinian West Bank impossible.
Israel’s far right Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who oversees Israeli settlements in the West Bank, said that the E1 settlement is “Zionism at its best – building, settling and strengthening our sovereignty over the land of Israel.”
“This is how we effectively kill the Palestinian state,” Smotrich said, making Israel’s intentions for the settlement clear.
E1 – or East 1, as it is directly east of Jerusalem and occupied East Jerusalem – plans to link the illegal mega-settlement of Ma’ale Adumim with occupied East Jerusalem. This entails uprooting and displacing Bedouin villages in the area, and building some 3,400 planned settlement units. According to the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU), E1 is also “part of an Israeli plan to cement control over occupied Palestinian East Jerusalem by cutting it off from the West Bank” with settlements around the city’s eastern perimeter.
The E1 settlement project would make a two-state solution, which the U.K. and other European countries support, impossible.
But the two-state solution has been criticized by Palestinians as long dead, and as a mistaken approach that puts forward the farce of a peace process and continues to enable Israel’s crimes.
In 2024, amidst the genocide in Gaza, European states — including Ireland, Spain, Norway, Slovenia, France, and the U.K. — began recognizing the State of Palestine. But Palestinian political analysts have called this “symbolic” and “political theater.”
Writing in 2025, Palestinian analyst Yara Hawari said, “I would rather see states recognize the genocide than recognize a Palestinian state,” as recognizing the genocide carries clear obligations, whereas recognizing a Palestinian state “creates the appearance of action without the burden of meaningful consequences.”
In 2018, Palestinian political analyst Diana Buttu wrote that “The actual problem is that the two-state model ignores the root cause of why there is no peace: It is because of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian population; its conquest of Palestine; [and] its colonisation of Palestine….”
Last June, the U.K. imposed sanctions on Israel’s far right ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich for inciting violence in the occupied Palestinian West Bank. However, the U.K. government has not acknowledged that Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza, has dismissed South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice, and failed to act in a meaningful way based on “its duties under the Genocide Convention.”
The E1 settlement project was first proposed decades ago. In 1994, Israel’s then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin proposed E1 a year after he signed the Oslo Accords, which were ostensibly meant to initiate plans for a Palestinian state but effectively enabled more Israeli land grabs across the occupied West Bank. Plans for the development have been frozen in the decades since due to international pressure from European states and from the U.S.
Key to this was U.S. opposition. Former U.S. President Obama and even former President George W. Bush pressured Israel to stop advancing plans for E1 in 2012 and in 2005. But Trump has not discouraged Israel from expanding settlements, drawing the line instead at annexation of the occupied West Bank – even though building settlements takes steps on the ground assisting Israel in its path towards annexation. Meanwhile, the Israeli government has published tenders and building plans for the area ahead of construction of its project.
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