Jerusalem, September 16 – Britain’s Labour government, which has spent two years establishing that it finds Benjamin Netanyahu somewhere between a policy problem and a moral contaminant, announced last week a package of sanctions on Jews living in the historical Jewish heartland, thereby solving the incumbent prime minister’s most urgent campaign difficulty: the absence of a foreign villain willing to work weekends.

Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband told Parliament that the Burnham government will ban commerce with those communities, will target firms servicing them, and that Israel had been insufficiently scandalized by what he called “ethnic cleansing.” France and Canada joined the trade measures; Spain and several other governments supplied the chorus.

Israel responded by closing Britain’s Jerusalem consulate, evicting British personnel from a Gaza mission, ending a British training program for Palestinian Authority forces, and barring a selection of British politicians who had already done the work of making themselves unwelcome.

Officials from Netanyahu’s Likud Party described the episode as the first competent piece of opposition research produced on the embattled Israeli premier’s behalf in months, and noted with noticeable pleasure that it had come from Whitehall rather than from anyone on the payroll.

The gift arrives with an election attached. Israelis vote October 27. Polls have had Likud slouching in the low twenties and the governing bloc often short of 61 seats, which in Israeli politics marks the difference between remaining prime minister and becoming a defendant with extra free time. Netanyahu’s remaining marketable skill is standing in front of a foreign denunciation and declining to apologize for Jewish geography. Britain, having diagnosed this skill as the problem, elected to demonstrate it on live television.

“This was never about Israeli domestic politics,” a British official said, in the tone of a man who has not looked at a calendar. “This is about international law.” Likud strategists said they look forward to running that quote over footage of the consulate lights going out.

A Netanyahu adviser, speaking while a junior staffer updated the “They Hate Us, Therefore We Exist” slide deck, said the campaign had struggled in vain to develop a message that ignored housing prices, court dates, or the general national desire to be governed by someone who does not remind voters of the October 7, 2023 debacle. “We workshopped ‘competence,’” the adviser said. “Then London sanctioned Ariel and called Jews an ethnic cleansing problem. Competence is a hard sell. Being shouted at by Ed Miliband is plug-and-play.”

Miliband, who presented the measures as the act of a proud British Jew unwavering in his support for Israel, appears not to have considered that the Israeli electorate contains a large bloc for whom “proud British Jew unwavering in his support for Israel” is a sentence that ends, in their experience, with a restriction on who may safely set foot in the Jordan Valley.

France’s characterized its participation as leadership; Jerusalem sees it as France being France, raising yet another white flag, this time once again to Islamic supremacism. Spain’s presence in the wider group of twelve confirmed that the bit had been fully workshopped.

Netanyahu has not yet thanked His Majesty’s Government on camera. Aides say the thank-you is implicit in the closure notice. The consulate had a job: represent Britain to Palestinians in a city Israel calls its capital. Britain has now been relieved of the inconvenience of pretending that arrangement was sustainable, and Netanyahu has been relieved of the inconvenience of explaining why anyone should still need him.

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