The United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Norway have joined together to show their firm rejection of Israel’s plans to continue advancing the construction of a colony in the West Bank, called E1, which will split this Palestinian territory in two and make the creation of a future Palestinian state impossible.
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“The Israeli government’s decision to publish construction tenders for the E1 settlement project is unacceptable. The E1 agreement will undermine the prospect of a two-state solution by opening a gap in the West Bank and damaging the territorial contiguity of the Palestinian Territories,” says a joint statement published in recent hours, also signed by Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
The countries signing the statement also recall that “international law clearly establishes that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal.” The decision, they add, “is even more concerning at a time of severe instability in the West Bank, with unprecedented levels of violence by settlers against the civilian population and serious restrictions on the Palestinian economy.”
The tender for 1,234 houses approved by Israel this week is not just another tender in any Israeli settlement, like those that have filled the occupied West Bank territory with cranes and bulldozers for months due to the expansionist frenzy of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, but the first in the so-called E1, a controversial Jewish colony project dating back to the 1990s that no government had approved (precisely due to pressure from European foreign ministries) until Netanyahu did so in August 2025.
That is precisely where its importance lies. E1, which covers about 12 square kilometers near Jerusalem, is key because it would separate the West Bank from the city, in whose eastern part the Palestinians aspire to establish the capital of their eventual state. The Finance Minister himself, Bezalel Smotrich, has made clear the importance of building there to “end the idea of a Palestinian state.”
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Spain joined the criticism this Friday. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement on the matter, and its head, José Manuel Albares, added a message on the social network X in which he “firmly condemns the Israeli government’s decision to advance settlements in occupied territory” and urges it to reverse it and to “advance the implementation of the two-state solution,” which Netanyahu rejects, as have all the Jewish parties in the national Parliament, which total 110 of the 120 seats.
The Israeli government has already reacted to this joint statement, especially against London, which summoned the Israeli chargé d’affaires. Ed Miliband, the British Foreign Secretary, issued a statement that particularly stung Netanyahu’s government, as it is one of the European countries that most supported Israel, including militarily, after Hamas’s attack in October 2023. Miliband, who called the tender “unacceptable and destructive,” made it clear to his Israeli counterpart, Gideon Saar, that he must “immediately stop the E1 plan, withdraw the tender, and halt all settlement expansion.”
Saar responded harshly. He compares Jewish settlements in the West Bank (illegal under international law) to London. “The Jewish people have the right to live throughout the Land of Israel, just as the British have the right to live in London and throughout the United Kingdom,” he asserts, before attacking London for “lecturing the Jewish people on where they can live in their historic and tiny homeland” while “still controlling colonial territories thousands of miles from their shores.”
Smotrich, far-right and with unprecedented power over civil affairs in the West Bank, resorted to the past in his response, insisting that the British Mandate in Palestine — which formally lasted from 1922 until the creation of Israel in 1948 — “is over.” “I refuse to be impressed or intimidated by threats of sanctions. We do not accept impositions from foreign countries. We are doing what is good and right for the State of Israel,” Smotrich declared, precisely at the event reestablishing Kadim, one of the West Bank settlements evacuated in 2005 by Ariel Sharon’s government.
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