Australia declined to join 12 countries backing action on trade with illegal West Bank settlements, citing concerns about Palestinian livelihoods. The Palestinian Authority supports the restrictions – and Australia’s past approach to apartheid South Africa offers a pointed historical comparison.
The Australian Government’s refusal to acknowledge Israel’s West Bank apartheid regime is being accompanied by a similarly spineless decision not to apply a trade ban on the illegal West Bank settlements. And it now appears Australia was closely involved with the construction of the trade ban on West Bank goods, until a late change of mind, according to an ABC report.
The Australian Government says it is concerned that such a ban could inadvertently harm Palestinian businesses, workers and livelihoods. It is difficult to see what evidence underpins that concern. The Palestinian Authority (PA) has expressed strong support for the ban on multiple grounds. As set out by the PA, the ban would:
- Provide a significant means of delegitimising the illegal settlements.
- Help protect the two-state solution by inhibiting expansion of the illegal settlements and, in particular, the threatened E1 settlement.
- Represent forceful action isolating settlement enterprises and going beyond mere political statements.
- Translate international law into action which helps ensure regional and international stability and security for Palestinians.
But not aired in the cursory media coverage of Australia’s decision not to join the statement is the fact that West Bank Palestinians have long been in favour of a trade ban on the illegal West Bank settlements. In 2010 the PA imposed a ban on the import of West Bank settlement goods and on providing goods and services to the settlements. A 2015 survey showed almost 90 per cent support by West Bank Palestinians for a boycott of Israeli goods.
Surely, then, my colleagues at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) – and those of the 12 signatories – would have served up in their ministerial submissions the above menu of supporting facts. Added, one assumes, would be a recent 2024 UN report which underpins the economic logic of a trade ban. Because the PA ban has only partially been enforced, it notes that Israeli settlement goods sold to West Bank cities have had an economic advantage. That is, Palestinian goods faced substantially greater restrictions in movement through checkpoints and import bans, thus creating a captive market for settlement goods among Palestinians.
Also surely advised would be that the real damage to Palestinian workers has already been done through Israel’s post-7 October restrictions on their employment in Israel and West Bank settlements. Before 7 October 2023, around 172,000 West Bank Palestinians worked in Israel and the settlements. By the fourth quarter of 2025, that figure had fallen to around 51,000, of whom only about 14,000 held official work permits. Mentioned, too, could be that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have been shooting non-permitted Palestinians trying to enter the settlements.
And if DFAT dug yet deeper, it would also be revealed that most remaining Palestinian settlement workers would not be affected by a ban on settlement goods, given they work in non-tradeable areas such as construction, services and maintenance. Additionally, Palestinian workers are being progressively replaced by guest workers.
Claiming compassion on behalf of Palestinians is thus a nonsense.
A standard briefing from the department would have further underlined that the trade ban can only have real impact if we middle powers act collectively as a multilateral force. And a more courageous brief would have included a reminder of the basis on which we applied a trade ban on South Africa – once we were forced to stop playing rugby and cricket with them and dragged ourselves to admit the presence of apartheid. That is:
- Post-Billy McMahon, Whitlam joined other countries in a selective but still quite wide-ranging trade ban on the South African economy.
- Subsequently, Hawke openly admitted it would cause some harm to South Africa’s 24 million black population, but that its justification lay in its aim of bringing about the end of the far greater harm of apartheid.
- Bill Hayden justified the ban on the basis that black South Africans themselves supported the trade ban.
The parallels between South Africa and the West Bank are therefore uncomfortably close and a persuasive justification on moral grounds for the West Bank ban, the scope and effect of which is far less intrusive on those it is designed to support. Of course, in these parallels lie all the precedents needed to justify a trade ban on Israel itself. Clearly not included in the foreign minister’s brief was that such a step could be based on the incontrovertible evidence in public view of genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and other crimes against humanity. The problem is these words are not yet part of our government’s Israeli vocabulary. Unlike our admissions of South African apartheid, we are hiding behind the rulings of international courts.
Our bravery in supporting West Bank Palestinians thus resides only in sanctioning, to no effect, individual Israelis and, in particular, Minister for National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir and Minister for Finance Bezalel Smotrich. Even here logic defies its reach: the expansion of illegal settlements is a whole-of-government policy and explicitly supported by the unsanctioned Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Dr Webb is a former diplomat with postings in Indonesia, South Korea, Paris and New Zealand. In a former career as a journalist he was the economics writer for the Bulletin Magasine and Assistant Editor of Rydges Business Journal. He currently carries out research in the field of environmental economics at the Queensland University of Technology.