On Sunday, British prime minister Keir Starmer announced that his country would recognize Palestinian statehood. In July, he had threatened such a move if Israel did not declare a ceasefire. This already told us that this was more about distancing himself from the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) onslaught than recognizing Palestinians’ inalienable right to self-determination.
Speaking on Sunday, Starmer again posed Palestinian statehood in vague, conditional terms. He said that recognition was about “acting to keep alive the possibility of peace and a two-state solution.” He went further than before in recognizing Israeli responsibility for mass starvation in Gaza. Yet while he commented that Israel deserved to be “safe and secure,” a future Palestinian state need only be “viable.”
For Starmer, this “two-state solution” meant that “Hamas can have no future, no role in government, no role in security.” It remained unclear how this version of self-determination is to be made a reality, and Starmer did not explain why Palestinians’ statehood alone depends on their form of government. Israel’s government is today led by a wanted war criminal, but few would suggest that Israeli statehood depends on Benjamin Netanyahu handing himself over for prosecution.
Britain was, from late in World War I, the main imperial power in historic Palestine. From then until the era of decolonization, it played a key role in shaping and imposing limits on the new states created across its former empire, in the Middle East and beyond. Starmer’s statement on Sunday thus referred to Britain’s long support for a “homeland for the Jewish people.” Yet he had nothing to say about what a peace process might look like in Palestine now — or what Britain would do to help the newly recognized Palestinian state stand on its own two feet.
Netanyahu damned even Starmer’s symbolic move, insisting that there will never be a Palestinian state
Auteur: David Broder
