The Foreign Office has restructured its West Bank settlement sanctions as a three-week facilitated listening process, renaming the sanctions list "the boundaries document". Asset freezes remain, but are now described as a pause held with care. No sanctioned party has booked a slot.
The booking form for Room 3B on the Foreign Office's first floor asks visitors for dietary requirements, preferred pronouns and "any territory you are currently holding." It was printed on Saturday morning. By lunchtime the department had confirmed that its West Bank settlement sanctions regime is being restructured as a facilitated restorative process.
Under the new arrangement, the list of sanctioned individuals and entities has been renamed the boundaries document. The asset freezes remain, but officials now describe them as "a pause, held with care."
Dr Fenella Achterberg-Nwosu, appointed as the department's head of restorative statecraft, said the shift was overdue.
"Sanctions, as historically practised, are a punitive framework," she said. "They tell a state what it has done. They do not invite it to notice how that lands."
The process has three stages. Stage one is naming the harm. Stage two is sitting with the harm. Stage three is the trade ban, which continues unchanged.
The bottle in Leeds
That ban, readers will recall, opened its account with a single bare bottle in a Leeds wholesaler's stockroom. The bottle has now been moved into supervised storage pending what the department calls a mediated conversation about its origins.
Officials stress the bottle is not in trouble. "It is not being punished," a spokesperson said. "It is being witnessed."
Three facilitators have been hired on fixed-term contracts. All three are trained in nonviolent communication and one has a background in workplace grievance mediation, which the department describes as "directly transferable to the Levant."
Two harms, one worksheet
The redesign follows a sharp public backlash. The chief rabbi warned that the government's approach could put the safety of British Jews at risk, and the foreign secretary rejected the suggestion that confronting Benjamin Netanyahu's government and fighting antisemitism pull in opposite directions.
Ministers have consistently said they can do both. The Foreign Office has now formalised that into a document with two columns.
"We are able to hold two harms at once," Achterberg-Nwosu said. "Column one is the settlements. Column two is antisemitism in Britain, which is real, rising and not a rhetorical device. The columns are the same width. That was a deliberate design choice."
Critics have called the worksheet an inadequate response to a serious warning. The department replied that the worksheet is not the response, but rather "the container for the response," and offered to walk anyone through it.
"The two-state solution is not dead. It is non-verbal. There is a difference, and the difference is where our work happens."
Take-up from the sanctioned parties has been limited. Feelings inventories were posted to everyone on the boundaries document. Three came back unopened and one was returned with the word "no" written across the front in marker pen.
Israel's foreign ministry has not booked a slot. Achterberg-Nwosu declined to characterise this as a refusal, describing the ministry instead as "not yet ready to be in the room, which is itself information."
Consequences, and the absence of them
Inside the department, some staff have asked what happens if stage two produces nothing. Guidance issued to the Middle East desk on Saturday confirms that stage four is further listening.
Marcus Delaine-Pryce, one of the three facilitators, said the question misunderstands the model. "People keep asking me where the leverage is," he said. "The leverage is the relationship. If the relationship is bad, the leverage is the acknowledgement that the relationship is bad."
A retired diplomat, speaking on condition that he not be described as bitter, said sanctions used to involve consequences that arrived whether or not the recipient felt ready to receive them.
Delaine-Pryce called that framing "very 1990s" and offered him a slot.
Palestinian civil society groups have asked whether anyone displaced by settlement expansion will be in Room 3B at any stage. The department said their perspectives are "deeply centred in the process" and confirmed that no invitations have gone out.
The next session is on Saturday. Three additional flip charts have been ordered, and the tissues are being funded from the existing conflict-prevention budget.
Achterberg-Nwosu accepts the work may take generations. She does not consider that a failure.
"Ceasefires end," she said. "Processes continue. We are building something that cannot collapse, because it was never load-bearing."
