100+ ex-diplomats urge UK and France to impose sanctions on Israel over Palestine

More than a hundred retired diplomats from Britain and France have broken with the careful language of their profession to make a stark accusation: Israel is systematically erasing Palestine, and their governments must act now with concrete penalties to stop it.

The letter, signed by 52 former French diplomats and 50 British former ambassadors, was addressed to Emmanuel Macron and Andy Burnham in late August. Many of the signatories spent careers in Middle Eastern posts—ambassadorships in Cairo, Tehran, Jerusalem, Damascus, Riyadh. They included Jeremy Greenstock and Emyr Jones Parry, both former UN envoys, and Edward Chaplin, who once directed Middle East policy at the Foreign Office. On the French side, Patrice Paoli had led the Middle East desk at the Quai d'Orsay; Stanislas de Laboulaye had served as consul general in Jerusalem. These were not fringe voices. They were the institutional memory of two nations' engagement with the region.

The letter arrived at a moment of escalating tension. Just two days earlier, Britain, France, and nine other countries had condemned Israel's announcement of construction tenders for 1,200 homes in the E1 settlement project, which would bisect the West Bank and, as the UK foreign secretary Ed Miliband put it, deal a destructive blow to any viable two-state solution. Miliband had summoned Israel's top diplomat in London. Israel's foreign minister, Gideon Sa'ar, responded by asserting that Jewish people had the same right to live throughout Israel as British people had to live throughout Britain.

But the retired diplomats went further than official statements. They dispensed with diplomatic hedging and named what they saw: ethnic cleansing. They wrote that Palestine was being erased before the world's eyes. In Gaza, they noted, two million Palestinians were confined to thirty percent of their already devastated land, without adequate food, medicine, or shelter. More than twelve hundred had been killed since the ceasefire began. In the West Bank and East Jerusalem, house demolitions and settler violence, often carried out with the connivance of the Israeli army and police, amounted to systematic erasure. The policy extended to Lebanon, where villages had been razed, and Syria. "This is a stain on the conscience of humanity," they wrote.

The diplomats framed their intervention as rooted in history. Britain and France had played central roles in shaping the modern Middle East; both had recognized Palestine as a state in 2025. That recognition, they argued, now carried a responsibility to act on the region's fundamental divide—ensuring equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians alike. They called for seven specific steps: upholding rulings from the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court; suspending trade agreements with Israel for human rights breaches; halting all arms transfers and military cooperation; guaranteeing unrestricted humanitarian access to Gaza; banning all trade with settlements; warning potential investors in E1 and other settlements that their interests in Britain and France would suffer; and making it illegal for British and French citizens to purchase property on Palestinian land.

The letter acknowledged Palestinian shortcomings—dysfunctional leadership, the need for democratic renewal ahead of November elections. But it placed the weight of responsibility elsewhere. "While our two governments can do much to help Palestine become a fully functioning democratic nation," the diplomats wrote, "the focus needs to be on Israel's determination to prevent that outcome."

The timing reflected a broader diplomatic fracture. Negotiations over Gaza's future had been largely handed to Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son-in-law, working with Israel. When Israel rejected the latest fifteen-point US peace plan, even the United Arab Emirates—Israel's closest Muslim ally—joined seven other Muslim nations in condemning the move as fundamentally undermining efforts toward lasting peace. Some diplomats had begun to wonder aloud whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, facing elections on October 27, was deliberately provoking international reprisals to strengthen his political position.

The letter represented an attempt to shift that calculus. The former diplomats hoped their collective voice—the weight of decades spent managing Middle Eastern affairs—would pressure Macron and Burnham to move from statements of concern to actual consequences. Whether it would move either leader remained uncertain. But the letter itself marked a rupture: the diplomatic establishment, usually bound by restraint and careful language, had decided the moment for restraint had passed.