 | Allister Heath Sunday Telegraph Editor | Will he, or won’t he? Sir Keir Starmer is stuck: as the king of vapid, gesture politics, he would doubtless love to unconditionally recognise the existence of a Palestinian state.
It’s the kind of feel-good, virtue-signalling but counter-productive and morally perverse move that would capture the mood of the times. It would give Hamas, a terror group, a boost, while asking nothing of it in return, not even to release its remaining hostages, let alone to disarm and recognise Israel’s right to exist.
Such appeasement might help claw back Labour defectors from Jeremy Corbyn’s party, but it would be a disgusting reward for Hamas’s October 7 pogrom, so shocking that Starmer can’t quite countenance pressing the button, at least not yet.
That apparently matters little to the morally inverted victim-blamers egging Starmer on. They are desperate to align the UK’s foreign policy with Emmanuel Macron’s inane decision to recognise a Palestinian state, and more generally to the majority European position.
The French president’s proclamation would achieve nothing: empty words don’t determine reality. As Donald Trump put it: “What [Macron] says doesn’t matter. It’s not going to change anything ... that statement doesn’t carry any weight.”
Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, and yet this didn’t prevent Hamas, an Iranian proxy, from wasting aid money building fortified tunnels and then invading Israel and butchering its civilians.
The fundamental problem is that the Palestinian elites don’t recognise Israel’s right to exist, and have opposed every land-for-peace deal since the 1930s (and even earlier). Their ideology is one of negationism: their principle aim is not the creation of a self-governing, prosperous Palestinian state. It is instead to oppose the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East, an ideology for which they are willing to sacrifice their people and use them as human shields. This rejectionism is not just directed at Israel: the Druze, the Kurds, the Yazidis and every other minority group will never be allowed to have their own states, and can thus be persecuted.
The humanitarian situation took a turn for the worse in Gaza recently, and, for once, this wasn’t the usual propaganda. The US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a vehicle set up to avoid Hamas being able to loot aid to fund its operations, is doing a far better job than its critics had predicted, despite Hamas’s endless sabotage.
But the UN’s separate operation allowed vast amounts of aid to pile up in Gaza, undistributed, helping trigger catastrophic shortages. Israel has asked the UAE and Jordan to resume air drops of aid. It should have probably done so earlier, but it is a travesty that Western powers are reflexively blaming Israel while turning a blind eye to the UN’s failures and Hamas’s nihilism.
So why hasn’t Starmer already recognised a Palestinian state? He doesn’t want to fall out with America. He loves the idea of forging a third way between the US and the EU.
But Trump rightly blames the collapse of the ceasefire talks entirely on Hamas. He has said that the terrorists “want to die” and they will have to be “hunted down”. The administration realises that Western attacks on Israel in recent days, a veritable campaign of demonisation, have encouraged Hamas to be even more unreasonable. The US is furious.
It is only thanks to Trump’s good sense that Starmer won’t be unconditionally recognising a Palestinian state any time soon.
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