How a British football anthem became an Israeli diplomatic rallying cry

On 16 July 2026, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar posted a six-word line on X, "How does the song go? 'It's coming home.'", aimed at his British counterpart David Lammy. The song in question is "Three Lions," the 1996 anthem written by Lightning Seeds collaborators Ian Broudie and the comedians Frank Skinner and David Baddiel, long since a fixture of England's major-tournament soundtrack. Sa'ar's invocation was not about football. It was about sanctions.

This publication's reading of the exchange is that the post functions as a victory lap. The wider diplomatic backdrop, as carried by Middle East Eye's reporting on the same thread, is that "the celebrations … were not limited to ministers sanctioned by the UK," a construction that implies Israeli relief that at least some of the officials invited into the warm London welcome had previously been on the receiving end of British restrictive measures, and are now not. Sa'ar's framing of the song is therefore not an idle joke. It is a signal that Israeli diplomacy views the current UK relationship as having turned a corner, and wants that view to be visible in English.

From 10 Downing Street to a Wembley chorus

The immediate trigger sits in the choreography of the Lammy–Sa'ar meeting. UK foreign secretaries traditionally receive visiting Israeli counterparts at the Foreign Office or in a Downing Street reception room, with a press read-out and a hand-shake photo the only public deliverables. That ritual is built to signal continuity. What Sa'ar's post signals is the opposite: discontinuity, in the form of a sanctions posture that has been walked back. Without a full Foreign Office read-out to cite, the X post itself is the most durable public record of how one side wants the meeting to be remembered, which is precisely why it matters.

Middle East Eye's framing of the celebration lines tracks with this read. The outlet's wording, that celebrations were "not limited to" previously-sanctioned ministers, leaves the question of which ministers, and which sanctions, deliberately unresolved. That indeterminacy is itself the story. UK government communications around Israel over the past year have repeatedly oscillated between public censure of individual ministers and quiet restoration of working-level contacts, and Sa'ar's use of a populist English football lyric is a way of taking the restoration off the diplomatic back-burner and pinning it to a meme the British public already knows.

The structural read: sanctions as a movable instrument

The pattern here fits a wider shift in how Western foreign-policy tools are being deployed and withdrawn in 2026. Restrictive measures on individual ministers, travel bans, asset freezes, were originally sold to domestic publics as a calibrated response to specific policies: settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank, inflammatory statements by cabinet members, the rhetoric around Gaza operations. The implicit promise was durability: you do this, you lose access. The Israeli line, now echoed by Sa'ar's chant, is that the sanctions were always a temporary instrument, recoverable through political pressure and a sympathetic government in London.

Whether that read is fair depends on which ministers one is talking about. The UK has at various points sanctioned Israeli figures including finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and national-security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, both over statements and policies the Foreign Office judged incompatible with British foreign-policy commitments. Sa'ar himself was not among them. The choice to celebrate at his level, rather than at the level of a sanctioned minister posting from the same room, allows the Israeli side to claim a normalisation that does not directly contradict any specific UK sanctions notice. It is, in other words, the cleanest available form of the claim.

What both governments want the photo to do

For Lammy, the meeting functions as evidence that a Labour government elected on a pledge to recognise a Palestinian state can still maintain a working, even warm, relationship with Jerusalem. The framing matters domestically because Labour's own backbenches include a vocal pro-Israel wing and a vocal pro-Palestine wing, and any photograph with an Israeli foreign minister is read by both constituencies. Sa'ar's X post gives the pro-Israel wing its own image to circulate: a senior Israeli minister borrowing an English song, in English, to mark a London meeting, with no trace of friction in the caption.

For Sa'ar, the same post is doing three jobs at once. It confirms to a domestic Israeli audience that the diplomatic rehabilitation is real. It reassures a diaspora audience that the relationship with the UK is intact under a Labour government. And it pre-empts any reading of the meeting as a routine courtesy by converting the routine into a meme. The "it's coming home" line, borrowed from "Three Lions," whose lyric is "it's coming home, it's coming home, it's coming / Football's coming home", lands in Britain as a self-deprecating joke about tournament expectations. Used by a foreign minister about a sanctions reversal, it lands as something sharper: a claim that something Israel wants has been returned to it, and that the British government is comfortable being seen as the party handing it back.

What the sources don't settle

Several pieces of this picture are not in the public record as of 16 July 2026. Middle East Eye's thread flags the celebratory tone and the sanctions angle but does not name which ministers previously sanctioned by the UK were present at the Lammy–Sa'ar meeting, or what specific UK restrictive measures had been lifted or suspended in the lead-up. The Foreign Office's own read-out, if one is issued, would settle those questions; the X post is not a substitute. It is also worth noting that the post is a one-line public statement by a single official, and British government sources have not, in the material available to this publication, echoed Sa'ar's framing. The UK side has, in this telling, ceded the optics to Jerusalem.

The plausible alternative reading is that the chant is exactly what it looks like: a friendly joke between two ministers who share an enthusiasm for English football, and that the sanctions history is being read into a light social-media post by an outlet with its own editorial angle. Middle East Eye does, as a matter of course, cover the Israeli–British relationship with a sceptical eye toward Israeli government framing, and "celebrations not limited to sanctioned ministers" is a construction that invites the reader to fill in details the post does not provide. The judgment this publication would draw is that the post is doing both jobs at once, and that the discomfort it produces in some quarters of British politics is not incidental to why Sa'ar chose the line he did.

The diplomatic schedule into the autumn will test how durable the warmth is. If the UK foreign office moves visibly toward restoration of full bilateral programming, a planned visit, a trade annex, an unambiguous joint statement on Iran or on a hostage file, the "coming home" line will look, in retrospect, like a successful Israeli public-diplomacy operation. If the relationship cools again over Gaza or settlement policy, the same line will read as a captured moment that the two governments did not, in the end, manage to cash. Either way, the post is now on the record, and the song belongs to a different argument than the one Skinner and Baddiel wrote it for.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://x.com/MiddleEastEye/status/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Lions
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_Coming_Home
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gideon_Sa%27ar