King Cnut is misremembered as a deluded fool who tried to subdue the sea. In fact, he was a wise and pious man who wished to demonstrate to his subjects the limitations of regal power. ‘You and the land on which my throne is standing are subject to me,’ Cnut admonished the tide. ‘No one has ever defied my royal commands and gone unpunished.’ When the waters began splashing at his feet, the monarch turned to the crowd and proclaimed: ‘Let all the world know that the power of kings is a vain and trifling thing.’ There was, Cnut said, only one true sovereign: ‘That King whose commands heaven, earth and sea obey, according to eternal laws’.
Keir Starmer is no Cnut. In recognising a state of Palestine, he attempts not merely to halt the tide but to summon a new tide, one which flows counter to history and human nature. A progressive king is capable of such feats because in progressivism the only providence is the right side of history and the only limits on power procedural. Government is idealism in action and with good intentions and passion anything can be achieved.
Men like Starmer flatter themselves that they can, with the flick of a remote pen, will a nation-state into being like modern heirs to Arthur Balfour. This reflects the common misconception that the Balfour Declaration created the State of Israel, when that communique merely expressed British favour for the Zionist project in Palestine/Eretz Yisrael. I made this point recently in the Jewish Chronicle, but the CliffsNotes version is this: Israel was (re)founded by the efforts of Jews, not the sympathies of the British Foreign Office.
Neither Starmer nor any other progressive king can recognise a Palestinian state because no such entity exists and there is no prospect of one in the near future. There are institutions that could be marshalled into a state – the Palestinian Authority, the security forces – but a state is more than buildings and bureaucrats and insignias. There needs to be a national story, a common purpose by which all are bound in shared destiny and future promise. Yet across Palestinian politics, in culture, among intellectuals and activists, on the streets and in the mosques, the dominant cause is anti-Zionism. Palestinian liberationism is a misnomer because, except for a narrow segment of liberal opinion, Palestinian society does not wish to be free from Israel, it wishes to be free of Israel.
A casual observer might think the Palestinians among the most nationalistic peoples in the world, willing not only to struggle for their nation but to die for it, but theirs is a counter-nationalism, a common identity forged in reaction to and rejection of another people’s identity. Arab Palestinian nationalism emerged as a distinct political movement just over a century ago as a backlash against Jewish Palestinian nationalism.
This sort of talk makes western policymakers uncomfortable. They seek refuge in a poll here or there suggesting Palestinian sympathy for a two-state solution, ignoring the fact that Palestinians invariably reaffirm support for Hamas and opposition to disarmament, endorse terrorism and deny the rapes and other atrocities of 7 October. This will confound westerners, but there is no contradiction. The ‘two-state solution’ is the current paradigm for advancing the Palestinian cause. It is proving more fruitful diplomatically than the previous strategy of openly threatening the destruction of Israel and its replacement with an Arab state. Two states today, one state tomorrow.
Starmer and those who think like him see only Palestinian suffering and Israeli aggression, desperate statelessness and brutal occupation. The answer surely must be a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. That lays the foundations for peace. That is what justice looks like. But Starmer doesn’t want a Palestinian state, he wants his notion of a Palestinian state, a liberal market economy with free elections and the rule of law, living in peace with its neighbours. But just as you can’t bomb western liberal democracy into the Middle East, you can’t press release it either. Progressives want a Palestinian state on their terms, a sort of Denmark south of Damascus, but such a state is not on offer.
The lessons the Palestinians and others will take are severe. That the West is so weak and decadent that it will reward mass murder with diplomatic prizes. That provoking Israel into war, a war that will inevitably cost a sizeable number of Palestinian lives, will quickly turn the West’s stomachs and thereafter their policies. That governments in Europe and the Anglosphere are compelled by mass immigration to treat foreign policy as a domestic issue.
Despair would be a natural response
There will be no Palestinian state anytime soon and no peace either, and because of this Britons should prepare to see their government’s stance towards Israel grow more hostile still. Every obstacle, delay, setback and flare-up will be blamed on Israel, its legitimate security concerns deemed illegitimate, the pursuit of its national interests branded obstructionist. Anything but prompt concession to every Palestinian demand will inspire fresh censures and sanctions. You will be gaslit into believing the one side of this conflict that has pleaded with the other to take land and cash and go build their state, only to be rebuffed time and again, has been the roadblock to peace all along.
Of course Israel will be to blame. The terrorist organisation that Palestinians democratically elected to lead them invaded a neighbouring country, slaughtered 1,200 people, systematically raped women, took babies hostage, and the Palestinians weren’t to blame for any of it. They’re hardly going to be to blame when Israel refuses to retreat to boundaries that practically invite another 7 October, only on a grander, bloodier scale. Britain is tentatively tip-toeing onto a trail long ago blazed by the likes of Ireland, Norway, and all those dismal little nations with barely a dozen Jews between them and a splenetic national fixation on the Jewish state. Only don’t suggest there might be some other motive behind their singular fixation. That’s Silencing Legitimate Critics of Israel, don’t you know?’
Most British Jews, regardless of their stance on the war or Netanyahu, will have been shaken by this decision. They already sense which way the wind is blowing. At a time when they are facing anti-Semitic attacks and insults on British streets, and when their schools and synagogues are having to tighten their already stringent security arrangements, their government is busy pandering to voters who don’t like Jews very much and are indifferent at best to them being butchered.
Despair would be a natural response, but British Jews should remember their Tanakh and the two words the Almighty often begins with when addressing His people: al tira. Fear not. Fear not earthly kings or their vain and trifling powers. They can no more sever the People of Israel from the Land of Israel than they can turn back the tide. There is a victorious right hand which yields to no king’s command.
Comments