Hamas could stop this war tomorrow and so end the horrendous suffering of the people of Gaza. Lest we forget: on October 7, following the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Hamas kidnapped 251 men, women and children and hid them away in tunnels as human bargaining chips. Some 50 of them are still being held in Gaza — though over half of these are probably now dead.
For Israelis, this war is about two things: destroying Hamas and returning the hostages. They won’t fully achieve the first objective because this most brutal of wars is only fuelling the kind of burning resentment against Israel that recruits for terrorism, for Hamas or its eventual successors. But until the hostages are released, Israel will continue to fight to get them back, and rightly so. Peace cannot come without the hostages being freed. And nothing Keir Starmer can do will change this logic. He can make things worse, though — and he just has.
Like Starmer, I support a two-state solution. And by the way, if you do too, that makes you a Zionist, because to be a Zionist is simply to believe in a state for the Jewish people in their historic homeland. But Hamas has never believed in a two-state solution. It wants to destroy Israel and eradicate it “from the river to the sea”. These are not just cheap words on a protest poster. In 2017, Hamas revised its original charter (though it did not revoke it) to take away references to the fight against Jews. Instead, it re-described the policy as a national liberation struggle to establish a state of Palestine “which extends from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean in the west and from Ras Al-Naquarah in the north to Umm al-Rashrash in the south”. That is: the entirety of Israel. This is a blueprint for the total annihilation of a country. And the reason Hamas may seek the temporary advantage of what we in the West think of as a two-state solution is simply because it serves as a bridgehead for the eventual destruction of Israel.
Into this mix, and following President Macron, comes Keir Starmer. The two men, safe behind their pontificating lecterns, are reminiscent of Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, those English and French diplomats who back in 1915/6 drew lines on the map of the Middle East with little concern for the reality of what was happening over there. If their moralising didn’t create such perverse incentives for Hamas, it would be laughably pompous — two former colonial powers pretending they still had the Imperial clout to impose their will on a part of the world that long since gave up caring about what the British and the French thought.
Except… in chosing this particular moment to announce the British commitment to recognising a Palestinian state, Starmer is willingly giving encouragement to Hamas, and to the very strategy that led to this desperate war. Trump says that Starmer is rewarding Hamas — and he’s right. Hamas is getting exactly what it wants. Why, now, would it give up hostages? What reason does it have to agree to a ceasefire? It only needs Israel to keep on fighting for a few more months to achieve its ultimate goal. The paradox is, if Hamas refuses peace, then the UK will recognise Palestine. This is batshit crazy: Starmer’s announcement will only prolong the agony of the Palestinian people. Whether the West wants to hear it or not, since October 7, Hamas has used the agony of its own people as a way of manipulating the rest of the world into supporting it. Whereas Israel is doing everything it can to bring its people home, Hamas uses the grotesque suffering of the people of Gaza as a means to its own end. And it will be done with renewed confidence now that this wicked strategy is so obviously working.
‘This war has been convenient for Benjamin Netanyahu’s electoral fortunes.”
What is particularly shabby about Starmer’s announcement is that he is playing with people’s lives — with Palestinian and Israeli ones — not because he believes recognising a state of Palestine is the right thing to do at this moment, but because of his own troubled domestic political situation. With Corbyn’s new party on his shoulder and a few hundred of his own MP’s lobbying him, Starmer has caved.
What is happening in Gaza is unbearable, no one disputes that. The place has become hell on earth, a sulphurous dead-land of corpses and starvation. And I have little doubt that war crimes have been conducted on both sides. Personally, I wouldn’t use the word genocide to describe it because in law genocide requires genocidal intention and that is almost impossible clearly to establish. As Philippe Sands KC explains it: “the case law requires you to show pretty much that it is the only intent, if it is coupled with another intent, for example, the intent to act in self-defence… it’s going to be very hard, if not impossible, to prove genocide.” In a sense, that word has become a distraction. You don’t need a narrowly defined legal term to understand the depths of depravity and inhumanity of the situation.
Of course, there are some on the hard Right in Israel who really do want to ethnically cleanse Arabs from the Gaza strip. Some are even in government. But most ordinary Israelis want to be left alone and to have their hostages back. They, too, are sick of war and the killing. But thinking this war grotesque, and knowing the right way to end it are two different things — as Starmer has just ably demonstrated.
Apart from emboldening Hamas, and buying himself a little time with his backbenchers, what can Starmer possibly hope to achieve by this announcement? A state requires a legitimate government, it requires settled borders. Palestine has neither. Starmer insists that Hamas can have no role in the future governance of a Palestinian state, but if that is what many Palestinians want, and that is what they vote for — as they did back in 2006 — what possible leverage can he have over any of this? What difference would calling Palestine a state have if Hamas were still in charge and the Israelis were still bombing. This is not a peace plan, it’s a more war plan. Hamas needs to surrender before peace is even a possibility. And Starmer has nothing to say about how he thinks that might be achieved.
It is, of course, not just Hamas standing in the way of a two-state solution. Unfortunately, this war has been convenient for Benjamin Netanyahu’s electoral fortunes. Before the war, he was in court for corruption, and it was on his watch that Israel was so ill prepared for the October 7 attack. He should be toast. But no one wants to change a leader during wartime, and the longer this conflict continues, the more he gets to cast himself as a shield against harm — rather than one of its catalysts.
And Netanyahu hates the idea of a two-state solution, having done his utmost to fill the West Bank with over half a million ideological settlers who won’t be moved. Is it really credible that a future prime minister of Israel would send in the army to tear down the settlements and forcibly remove their occupants? That would be the beginnings of civil war. For despite the fact that it was a Right-wing leader, Ariel Sharon, who pushed through the Israeli settler withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, that was a doddle compared with what a withdrawal from the West Bank would look like today.
The baffling thing is that Starmer knows all this. He knows he is committing himself to something that cannot be done, at least not now. This is surely a grotesque form of showboating. For the future stability of Palestine, Israel and the Middle East, there’s only one way forward. Hamas must release the hostages. Hamas must surrender. What remains of Hamas must commit itself to a genuine peace process. Once this happens, and only then, should the West lean on Israel to make plans for a future Palestinian state.
Starmer has always said that he would recognise a Palestinian state when the time was right. That was a good policy. What he has just announced is the very opposite. In the end, the Palestinians won’t thank him.
