Opinion: Starmer right to reject demands to recognise Palestinian state
How will Starmer respond to these challenges? I hesitate to say this, but it seems to me that our normally accident-prone Prime Minister has hitherto acted in a surprisingly sensible way as far as Gaza is concerned. He was right on Saturday to say that Britain will work with Jordan to drop aid into Gaza by air, ignoring the reservations of the United Nations and many aid agencies, which say that lorries can deliver much more food than air drops. Surely aid must be sent by whatever means possible, and for as long as too little aid is being distributed in Gaza it makes sense to drop some of it by air even if this involves some danger.
Starmer was also right to offer to evacuate children from Gaza who need urgent medical attention, and could get it in Britain. Let's hope this happens. The PM is wise, too, to resist calls to recognise a Palestinian state now. There are several strong arguments against doing so. The strongest of them all is that the President of the United States is adamantly opposed. We may not like it, but the truth is that Britain has minimal direct influence over the Israeli government despite having ruled Palestine from 1917 to 1947, and paved the way for the creation of the state of Israel through the Balfour Declaration.
The only government in the world that has appreciable influence over Israel is that of the United States. The only foreign leader to whom the belligerent, hard-hearted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will listen is President Donald Trump. President Macron may have got a kick out of recognising a Palestinian state, but it was classic virtue signalling that will change nothing on the ground and deprive France of any slight influence it might otherwise have enjoyed. Almost the only way Starmer can apply pressure on Israel is through the good offices of Trump. The American President alone is capable of encouraging Netanyahu to resume ceasefire talks with Hamas.
Far more than any other leader, Trump may be able to persuade the Israelis to show mercy towards starving civilians in Gaza. You may say he doesn't care but I doubt that. He sees himself as a man of peace. He is often glued to television news, and has probably been as appalled as the rest of us by pictures of emaciated children. It's also increasingly clear that the Trump administration doesn't have a starry-eyed view of the Israeli government.
For example, it has demanded an explanation for the recent killing of a Palestinian-American by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. The US ambassador to Jerusalem, Mike Huckabee, who is no liberal, called it a 'criminal and terrorist act'. There's a chance that Sir Keir can persuade Donald Trump that he should be a more critical friend of Israel than he has been. Events may already be pushing him in that direction. We should remember too – and here we must suppress all astonishment – that Trump seems genuinely to like the British Prime Minister. On arriving in Scotland on Friday, he actually said as much.
Starmer knows that the one thing that would destroy such sway as he may hold over Trump's mercurial mind would be recognition by Britain of a Palestinian state. That remains a red line for the President, and rightly so. His grasp of Middle Eastern politics may not be enormous but it extends to a realisation that Israel can't be expected to recognise a state whose rulers might include Hamas. Until or unless Hamas is extirpated, the group remains in charge of what remains of Gaza, which would form part of any future Palestinian state.
After the barbarities of October 7, 2023, when some 1,200 Israelis were butchered by terrorists, no Israeli government will countenance Hamas continuing in power. That would rightly be seen as a reward for its atrocities. Perhaps some time in the future – if Hamas no longer exists – there will be a Palestinian state living peaceably alongside Israel. I certainly hope so. It is a dream that several Israeli leaders have shared in the recent past. Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert reiterated his support for a Palestinian state on Radio 4 yesterday morning.
He has recently accused Netanyahu's government of committing war crimes, and said yesterday that it should have acted sooner to alleviate famine in Gaza. Not all Israeli politicians are monsters. Believe it or not, Netanyahu himself, although historically opposed to a Palestinian state, made a speech in 2009 that conceived of such an entity so long as it was demilitarised and restricted in size, though admittedly he said this under pressure from President Obama's liberal administration.
Even former prime minister Ariel Sharon, who was a pretty rough diamond to put it mildly, in 2003 accepted in principle the idea of a demilitarised Palestinian state. It was he, of course, who forced Israeli settlers to leave Gaza in 2005. Two years later, Hamas was firing rockets and mortar shells into southern Israel. It is by no means inconceivable that a future Israeli government will acknowledge a Palestinian state. It is just more difficult to imagine after what happened on October 7 – and impossible to envisage as long as Hamas remains part of the equation.
So Sir Keir Starmer is absolutely right not to cave into Labour demands for instant recognition. He will be able to work on Donald Trump today, and when they meet again during the President's state visit in September, and try to persuade him to exert more pressure on the obdurate Netanyahu. Whether the Prime Minister will hold the line for long is much less certain. After all, he is a master of the U-turn, having changed his mind over the winter fuel allowance, welfare reform and a string of other policies.
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