In West Bank, date farmers weigh impact of UK sanctions on Israeli settlers

Juicy brown and ripening yellow dates dangle down from the branches of each palm tree at Israeli settler farms in the Jordan Valley, in the occupied West Bank.

This year, as Israeli growers get ready for a good harvest, they are also preparing for the impact of new Western sanctions against settlements, which are illegal under international law.

The UK government has announced an import ban on settlement goods and said it planned to take action against companies and individuals who provide services for settlement expansion, as part of what it calls a "comprehensive reset" of policy towards Israel following similar moves by several other European countries.

Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden have also confirmed their intention to introduce national restrictions, or support European restrictions, on trade in goods with settlements.

Palestinians strongly back such a move, but Israel's foreign minister called it "hostile" and announced a series of counter measures, including the closure of the British consulate in East Jerusalem.

Israeli date farmer Avigdor Arbel, from the settlement of Mesua, calls such boycotts "really disgusting".

Arbel sells his produce mostly to Europe but also to the US and now, India. However, he says the sector is ready for any new UK ban on settler goods.

"As soon as we have a situation of pressure and boycotts, we always break out and look for other markets," he tells me. "So, I believe that if we get to a situation in which there's no place to sell my fruits in Europe, we'll find other markets."

West Bank settlements have expanded rapidly under the current Israeli government, whose ministers say they want "to bury the idea" of an independent Palestinian state - part of the long-standing international formula for peace in the region known as the two-state solution.

At the same time, settler violence against Palestinians has surged to what the UN says is "an all-time high".

With new settler outposts - which are also illegal under Israeli law - now dotting the barren hilltops of the Jordan Valley, there have been repeated attacks on local Palestinians, particularly Bedouin and herding communities.

In January, the last of some 600 villagers fled their homes in Ras Ein al-Ouja after intense harassment by hardline settlers, often backed by Israeli security forces. It was the largest single displacement of a Palestinian community in the past three years.

Further north, in March, Israeli settlers brutally beat and sexually assaulted a Palestinian shepherd during a night raid on Khirbet Humsa.

British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband told Parliament on Tuesday that a set of facts on the ground had been created "to make the two-state solution unviable," while "settler terrorism is rampant".

Quoting a former Israeli minister of health and retired brigadier general, Ephraim Sneh, he said the UK government "agrees that there is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in areas of the West Bank perpetrated by settler terrorists", to which the Israeli government had "turned a blind eye" or actually supported.

In a significant change of UK policy, he said the government now agreed with the 2024 International Court of Justice advisory opinion that Israel's continued occupation "is unlawful".

As a consequence, Miliband said this should be reflected "in the economic relationships we choose to have with the occupied territories".

"I do not believe that the British people want us supporting the occupation by accepting products from settlements in our shops and supermarkets."

Medjool dates are the main export crop from both Israeli settler farms and Palestinian farms in the Jordan Valley.

"These are rubbish," says Palestinian farmer Abdul Halim Abu Omar, dramatically reaching up and throwing away a handful of shrivelled, yellow dates from a tree in the grove where he works in al-Ouja, north of Jericho.

Around half of the date palms here have no fruit at all. "It's because we lack water," Abu Omar says. His is an extreme case: this year, the trees he cares for have received less than a third of the water they need to thrive.

Access to water has long been a pressing issue in the West Bank.

Interim peace agreements from the 1990s have left a water disparity between Israelis and Palestinians, and Israeli authorities typically prioritise water for settlers over Palestinians' needs.

Recently, in rural areas of the Jordan Valley, almost all of which is under Israeli security and civilian control, extremist settlers have also taken over several freshwater springs.

The Israeli Civil Administration told the BBC that it keeps "continuous contact" with the Palestinian Water Authority and assists in carrying out repairs to water infrastructure.

This harvest time, Abu Omar has few dates that are fit to show local Palestinian exporter Momen Sinokrot. His firm, Palestine Gardens, works with 55 date growers in the Jordan Valley to sell to several European countries, including the UK.

Sinokrot believes that if more states ban settlement trade this could curb settlement growth.

"Settlers are very active in the Jordan Valley... and they are not obeying any laws or rules or anything even from the Israeli army itself," he says.

"They are going to the fields of the growers, they are stealing from them, and they are controlling more and more land."

Israeli-state support for settlements, as well as their relatively easy access to global markets, means that Palestinian farmers struggle to compete. Palestinian businesses face greater restrictions and costs to export across Israeli-controlled borders.

Palestinians want the wide swathe of fertile land in the Jordan Valley - along the West Bank's border with Jordan - as part of their own hoped-for future state, along with the rest of the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

However, Avigdor Arbel, the settler date farmer, does not believe that his country will ever give up the Jordan Valley. He has lived there since the 1970s.

Within years of Israel's capture of the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East War, the Israeli government began encouraging its citizens to move to this area to counter what it saw as the security risk along the border.

More than 500,000 Israelis live in settlements in the West Bank, not including Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem, alongside three million Palestinians.

There are 340 settler outposts in the Palestinian territory along with 146 settlements, formally recognised by the Israeli government, according to the Israeli anti-settlement group Peace Now.

Current UK and EU laws require labels for settlement goods. Agricultural produce commonly exported includes mangoes, avocados, herbs and grapes.

There have been questions raised about how a ban on settlement goods would be enforced.

A recent report by the legal advocacy group Global Echo found that some settlement fruits and vegetables sold in Europe were inaccurately identified as coming from Israel - or mingled with produce from inside Israel's internationally-recognised borders.

However, the report's author, Jessica Stober, suggests that a UK ban on settler goods would greatly increase the financial costs associated with any such fraudulent practices. Instead of a seller being fined for misrepresenting their goods, the shipment would be returned.

"A ban is more self-enforcing because you have involved the private sector and it becomes commercially unviable for them to deal in settlement goods," Stober says.

"I would also say that a whole new set of measures become available to the UK government under a sanctions regime, under a ban, including civil and criminal penalties that make compliance much more likely."

Israel's Foreign Minister, Gideon Saar, responded quickly to the UK's announcement, branding the move "morally distorted" and constituting a "blatant interference in the affairs of a sovereign state and in its electoral process", referring to Israel's general election in late October.

He announced "a series of Israeli countermeasures", including the closure of the British consulate in Jerusalem and the removal of British representatives from the US-led International Gaza Support Center (IGSC) in Kiryat Gat, which is in charge of co-ordinating the shaky ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.

"The message to every government that harms us is clear: whoever acts against Israel, Israel will act against them, and they will lose their influence and relevance in the region," Saar warned.