It was moving to watch Keir Starmer announce this week, from a corridor in Downing Street, that his government has decided to recognise a state of Palestine. Starmer took this bold action at the same time as his French, Canadian and Australian counterparts. But as with Emmanuel Macron, Mark Carney and someone called Anthony Albanese, he seemed to be labouring under a number of misunderstandings.
The first was that it makes any difference. Starmer and his counterparts overseas appear to be under the misapprehension that the creation of states still lies in their hands. I had thought that the present generation of leftists looked down on imperialist western powers making their colonialist interventions in foreign regions. But apparently not if the ‘state’ in question is called ‘Palestine’.
The second reason the announcement was so unimportant is that not one of the prerequisites for Palestinian statehood exists. There is no coherent Palestinian leadership. Nor is there any contiguous Palestinian territory. There is now vague insistence on elections, but the last time the Palestinians had an election they voted in Hamas.
There is no agreement on what relations between ‘Palestine’ and its closest neighbour would be. And there is not even any agreement on ‘Palestine’s’ capital. Who will oversee education in this new state? Will it be another wonderful UN organisation, which allows jihadists to indoctrinate another generation of Palestinians into the idea that their highest purpose in life is to eradicate the Jews? Will there be an airport, or an army?
Perhaps Starmer, David Lammy and Yvette Cooper have a clear plan – or ‘roadmap’ – to answer all of these questions, also explaining their precise population swap proposals for areas A, B and C of Judea and Samaria. And I am assuming that after our government has worked out whose territory is whose and let the locals know that they are ready to send British troops to sort it out, there will be an enormous amount of good feeling in the region, on all sides, towards the arrival of these British protectors.
So what exactly is the point of recognising something that does not exist and will not be agreed on? Hamas responded to the announcements by thanking Starmer and his counterparts. In their eyes, statehood recognition is a reward for the massacres they carried out on 7 October 2023 and the two years of war that have followed. It is a terrific lesson to have taught the terrorists in Gaza, as elsewhere, that all you have to do if you want to gain a state you repeatedly rejected is to break into villages and murder and rape your way through them, taking hostages along the way. It rather amazes me that, given the success of Hamas’s actions, people with a much greater cause for statehood – such as the Kurds – do not decide to go a-raping and a-burning in neighbouring villages too. But perhaps that is a point for another day.
What exactly is the point of recognising something that does not exist and will not be agreed on?
In the meantime, it took the US secretary of state Marco Rubio to make the point that none of our politicians would: the principal reason these governments have behaved as they have has nothing to do with international affairs. Previous governments have tried for more than a century to persuade the Palestinians to accept a state which lives beside its Jewish neighbour. Every iteration of Palestinian leadership since then and right up to this moment is in agreement that a state of Palestine must consist of all the neighbourhood – including Israel – and that this Palestinian state must be entirely clear of Jews.
So, no, none of this has anything to do with a negotiating breakthrough. It has to do– as Rubio said – with domestic political pressure in each western country. As well as pointing out that these ‘recognitions’ have helped derail negotiations with Hamas for their surrender of the remaining 48 hostages, Rubio observed that Britain and co only recognised a state of Palestine because our country’s immigration policies mean we have been ‘flooded with foreigners who have become politically active and are insisting their government do these sorts of things’.
That is not language that any British politician would like to use. It would lead to tortured debates on the sofas of the BBC if they did. Yet Rubio is right. In the past two years I have spent time in each of the countries that just recognised Palestinian statehood and in each of them the same pattern can be observed. From Canada to Australia, the UK to France, each of these four countries has seen repeated disturbances by Muslim immigrants demanding a ‘free Palestine’.
Of course it isn’t just immigrants. It is also the strange lost souls who have decided that their life’s purpose can best be found by dyeing their hair blue, wearing some Palestinian terrorist-chic headscarf and insisting that no one will be free until ‘Palestine’ is free.
If you think that the intimidation by these curious mobs doesn’t have an effect, cast your mind back to how a Palestinian protest altered the course of parliamentary procedures in Westminster early last year. As the then prime minister Rishi Sunak said at the time, there is a ‘growing consensus that mob rule is replacing democratic rule’ – an observation that was no sooner made than it was ignored. Or look at Italy, where Giorgia Meloni’s government failed to join in this week’s statehood stampede. In response, a mob marched through the centre of Milan in their regulation keffiyehs and smashed up whatever buildings they could find.
There may be a day when a Palestinian state could exist. But the conditions for that state to exist do not currently exist. Starmer and the others have done nothing to help peace in the Middle East. But I suppose they have managed to put off facing up to our own problems for another day, and kept a degree of peace at home – for now.
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