Gary Willig is a veteran member of the Arutz Sheva news staff.

British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband announced that the British government considers the Israeli “occupation" of Judea and Samaria to be “illegal" and, together with a dozen other countries, announced the imposition of sweeping sanctions against Jews who live in their historic homeland. These measures do not target the Israeli government, but the civilians who dare to live where the UK has decided Jews should not be allowed to live.

The declaration that any Israeli or Jewish presence over the “green line" is automatically illegal is both morally and legally incorrect. Under the terms of the San Remo Conference and the legally binding League of Nations mandate, all of the land in question was set aside to be part of the Jewish National Home. Moreover, Israel liberated Judea and Samaria from an actual illegal occupier, Jordan, after Jordan had attacked Israel, and there is nothing in international law that bars any country from holding land seized in such an obviously defensive war.

Nor is there any law that states that the land which Jordan ethnically cleansed of Jews in 1948 must forever be ethnically cleansed of Jews. UN Security Council Resolution 242 was specifically written to ensure that Israel could legally hold on to some of the territory it had won in the Six Day War, even though this resolution was not legally necessary.

Though it is not surprising that one of the only two nations which recognized the illegal Jordanian occupation as legal would go out of its way to declare Jews living in Judea as illegal, in violation of all legal norms and precedent. The UK has been attempting to control where and how many Jews can live in the Holy Land for a century, ever since it first began to renege on its legal obligations under the League of Nations mandate by restricting the flow of Jewish refugees who were returning home.

Whatever one's view on the settlements, they are populated by hundreds of thousands of human beings. Declaring a baby illegal just because he is born in the same house his grandfather built does nothing to advance the human rights of anyone.

Every attempt to erase Jewish rights, including the right to live, in Judea and Samaria, sets back the cause of peace by years. The conflict is based on the idea that the Jews do not have rights and must remain Dhimmis forever, eternally reduced to second-class status at the best of times. Every international declaration that the Jews don’t have rights boosts this campaign to restore the Jim Crow degradation of Jews through mass murder.

If Jews do not have the right to live, then ipso facto, Palestinian Arabs have the right to kill them, and it is not murder to do so.

If Jews do not have the right to their holy or archaeological sites such as the Cave of the Patriarchs or Joshua’s Altar, than ipso facto, Palestinian Arabs have the right to destroy those sites.

Declaring all Israeli and Jewish presence over the “green line" illegal extends to Jerusalem as well. It means that, despite Miliband's protestations, it is illegal for Jews to live in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, giving the Jordanian ethnic cleansing of the ancient Jewish community the British stamp of approval. It makes it illegal for Jews to pray at the Western Wall, where they have prayed for millennia.

All Ed Miliband has accomplished is to lend support to those who seek to erase the right of Jews to live anywhere. Once it is illegal for Jews to live in Judea and Jerusalem, it is not much of a stretch to say that it is illegal for Jews to live in Tel Aviv and Haifa. After all, to the typical anti-Zionist, all Jews are “settlers" no matter where they live, and the mandate applied to Gush Etzion no less than it did to Tel Aviv. Should the attempt to ethnically cleanse Judea and Samaria of Jews once again succeed - an ethnic cleansing the British government seems to support enthusiastically - then the next step will be to attempt to ethnically cleanse of all of Israel. This is exactly what happened after Gaza was ethnically cleansed of Jews in 2005 - Hamas attempted to ethnically cleanse all of southern Israel on October 7. And the nukhba terrorists called the Israeli Gaza Envelope communities "settlements" and their victims "settlers."

And once the precedent of it being illegal for Jews to live is established, that precedent will be applied by “anti-Zionists" to Jews around the world. If Jews can be barred from living in Jerusalem and praying at the Western Wall, then the obvious next step is making it illegal for Jews to live in London or New York or to pray in synagogues. Many are already trying to create this reality by targeting Jews at their synagogues and their schools in the British capital, the same people Miliband is pandering to. When Jews merely living where someone doesn’t want them is justification for sanctions, boycotts, and murder, it is a short jump to violence against Jews in the “enlightened" West.

Mahmoud Abbas has less reason to make peace now than he did yesterday. He has just seen over a dozen governments endorse his intransigence, his pay for slay program, and his laws imposing the death penalty for selling property to Jews. Why should he moderate, why should he acknowledge that Jews have any rights whatsoever, when his extremism, genocidal hatred, and demand for ethnic cleansing meets with such international approval?

If peace - real peace, not ethnic cleansing of Jews followed by a repeat of October 7 - is the goal, then the British government and its co-conspirators need to start acknowledging Jewish rights instead of destroying them. They should insist that Jews be allowed to live in Abbas' dream Palestinian State instead of endorsing the demand that the state be completely Judenrein. They should demand the end of pay for slay, the repeal of the racist law imposing execution for selling land to Jews, and the acknowledgement of the rights of Jews. Only when the other side starts acknowledging and treating Jews as human beings with rights can there be any hope of peace.