Britain threatened with lawsuit over Israeli settlement trade, announces ban days later

…(cont) Then this week comes around and I have to ask it again, because the answer's got a number attached to it now. Four days. That's what sits between the letter threatening the lawsuit and the government standing up to announce it's banning trade with those very settlements — the ones the letter was about.

I want to be careful with this, because it's the kind of gap that, laid out flat, looks like I'm doing arithmetic on your behalf, and I'm not doing anybody's arithmetic. I'm only telling you what the letter says happened and what the government says it's doing, and letting that stretch of calendar sit between them the way a fan belt sits under the hood of a car that starts fine right up until the morning it doesn't — you don't think about the belt being the reason it runs.

Here's the ban as printed. Britain's set to announce trade sanctions on Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband unveiling it, the timing lining up with what the paper of record called Israel's mounting isolation over the war in Gaza. That's the 8th.

I sat at the toll plaza a while thinking this through, since the kitchen and I are resting this week and giving each other some room. You wait at a plaza long enough, you notice the light only changes once the car ahead's been sitting there long enough that somebody behind starts leaning on the horn. You don't get told the light was waiting on the horn. It just changes, and you're supposed to believe it was going to change regardless.

Israel's finance minister, a man named Bezalel Smotrich, wants the British ambassador expelled over the ban, and used language about the country I'm not putting in the paper twice. That's his answer to the 8th, and he's entitled to it.

But — excuse me, before you go, because I nearly let this one by — British diplomats privately acknowledged, in the same report announcing the ban, that the new sanctions package would be mostly symbolic. Mostly. Symbolic. Four days after a law firm threatened to sue the tax office for letting the trade through to begin with, the government's own people are describing the fix as decoration.

So let me ask it again, the way it comes out this time, four days later than I meant to ask it the first time: did HM Revenue and Customs get a letter?