In other developments, new British government directives are aiming to prevent public bodies, universities and student unions from boycotting Israeli products. As reported by Israel Hayom on Monday, the new bill seeks to prevent any public body from imposing a boycott on a World Trade Organization member, which Israel has been since 1995. The regulation will essentially outlaw boycotting Israeli products — a threat often made against goods produced in Judea and Samaria — and allow the British government to take legal action against organizations that impose such boycotts. Under the plan, all publicly funded institutions would be barred from excluding goods produced by their idea of “unethical companies,” such as companies involved in arms trading, fossil fuels, tobacco products, or companies based in Judea and Samaria.

This is a very interesting development, because the UK already labels products from Judea and Samaria. In 2009, the British Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs issued a new, voluntary guidance, which said that labels should give “more precise information” about the origin of Israeli goods, like “Israeli settlement produce” or “Palestinian produce.” Until then, food from Judea and Samaria had been simply labeled “Produce of the West Bank.” At the time, the British Foreign Office denied this was a boycott, stating that “this is emphatically not about calling for a boycott of Israel. We believe that would do nothing to advance the peace process. We oppose any such boycott of Israel. We believe consumers should be able to choose for themselves what produce they buy.”

Well, with the new bill, British policy seems to have become less categorical, perhaps through the realization that Britain needs Israel (trade between the two countries reached nearly $7 billion in 2014) and perhaps also throught the very late realization that British policies — or lack thereof — have stoked anti-Semitism in Britain, which has become a European center for the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. British universities are hotbeds of anti-Semitism and recently The Algemeiner reported that the co-chairman of the Oxford University Labour Club, Alex Chalmers, had announced he was resigning over both rampant anti-Semitism and the group’s endorsement of Israel Apartheid Week on campus.

“Whether it be members of the Executive throwing around the term ‘Zio’ (a term for Jews usually confined to websites run by the Ku Klux Klan) with casual abandon, senior members of the club expressing their ‘solidarity’ with Hamas and explicitly defending their tactics of indiscriminately murdering civilians, or a former co-chair claiming that ‘most accusations of anti-Semitism are just the Zionists crying wolf,’ a large proportion of both OULC and the student Left in Oxford more generally have some kind of problem with Jews,” he wrote. The 12th annual Israel Apartheid Week is scheduled to kick off across UK campuses on Feb. 22.

The bill is a very welcome, albeit belated, initiative, which one might hope will be copied by other European nations, which are realizing that boycotting Israel is wrong — and bad for business.

Judith Bergman is a writer and political analyst living in Israel. This article was originally published by Israel Hayom.

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