The Israelis may bluster, but Keir Starmer’s promise to recognise a Palestinian state is exactly what he promised it should not be — “performative”. Set aside, for a moment, the hedging — the proviso that Britain would only welcome the Palestinians into the community of nations if Israel didn’t take “substantive steps” to end the nightmare in Gaza and commit to a two-state solution. The fact remains that some three quarters of UN member nations have already recognised a Palestinian state without, so far, bringing such a state into existence or softening Israel’s behaviour.
That said, recognition by Britain and France, which last week announced a similar if unconditional plan, means more than recognition by Brazil or even China. Come September’s UN General Assembly, and assuming that Benjamin Netanyahu doesn’t execute an implausible U-turn and embrace the two-state solution that he has rejected for years, two G7 members, among them the US’s closest ally, will have shoved Israel further towards pariah status. America is the only outside party able to influence Israeli policy in any meaningful way, and of US pressure there is little sign.
If Britain’s faltering journey towards recognition seems unlikely to alleviate the agony of Gaza’s civilians, Starmer’s announcement at least acknowledges the deeper, broader forces that have been unleashed by Israel’s actions since the October 7 attacks. Indeed, the agony of Gaza today may one day seem trivial compared to the slower but incomparably more destructive disorder that threatens the Middle East in years to come.
Few scholars have greater awareness of these forces than Fawaz Gerges, a professor at the LSE and a renowned expert on the Middle East. The Lebanese-American is usually a jovial, ebullient person but when we met shortly before the British announcement his smile was full of pain.
“I can see no obvious way out of the disaster that is heading for the Middle East,” he told me. “Egypt is waiting to implode and Jordan faces severe challenges.” The reason is the wave of popular hatred that has built up against Israel and threatens to overwhelm Arab regimes that are linked to the Jewish state through peace treaties or, in the case of Jordan, because they harbour millions of displaced Palestinians. “Of course, the ultimate casualty will be Israel itself,” Gerges concluded. “Living by the sword, Israel has turned itself into a fortress and history tells us that fortresses fall.”
Gerges isn’t alone. I also spoke to a senior Saudi official and confidant of Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and effective ruler. Before October 7, Saudi Arabia had been expected to join the Abraham Accords, under which the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco normalised relations with Israel in 2020. The prospect of Saudi adherence is distant now.
“Middle Eastern stability depends on the Gulf economies,” the official told me, “and we cannot prosper without peace. Sure, we can cope with a war in Yemen and a not-so-stable Iraq, but if Jordan and Egypt explode, the danger for us will be acute. Different groups will vie for control of our holy places, Mecca and Medina. And it won’t be like the Mamluk Empire in medieval times, with a single regime exercising hegemony over the whole region, but chaos and a free-for-all.”
A doomsday scenario may be sketched out as follows: recognition of a Palestinian state being dead on arrival, the Palestinians continue to be persecuted not only in Gaza but also the West Bank and Israel proper, while Israel engorges itself on militarism and nationalism that drive out the last vestiges of compassion and good sense. The Arab states, for their part, captured by groups that apply themselves to Israel’s destruction, in cahoots with a rejuvenated Islamic Republic of Iran and cheered on by antisemites in the West, are unable to provide basic services to their people. More and more brown people come out of the region and into the lands of white people who don’t want them. Pretty, isn’t it?
Nor does any part of this scenario require the various parties to do anything but continue down the path they are already on. Earlier this year, for instance, Donald Trump floated a plan to “clean out” Gaza and “resettle” its population of some two million people in neighbouring Arab countries. According to a recent poll commissioned by Pennsylvania State University, 82% of Israelis support the expulsion of Gaza’s residents, while 56% favour expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel. (Back in 2003 the figures were 45% and 31% respectively.) On Tuesday, Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, referred to Gaza as “an inseparable part of the Land of Israel”, also predicting that the West Bank, currently partly governed by the Palestinian Authority, would come under Israeli sovereignty.
The problem for Israeli supremacists is that the Palestinians won’t disappear. They are too numerous to exterminate, and their Arab neighbours have said they won’t take them in, ostensibly for reasons of solidarity but in reality for fear of destabilising their own fragile societies. The last thing Egypt’s current strongman, Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, wants is an influx of Gazans clamouring for jobs, houses and a political voice — Jordan, whose indigenous population complains of being swamped by their Palestinian guests, being the example to avoid. Finally, the Palestinians possess a keen appreciation of the deadly intentions of their adversary and something approaching a relish for the fight to thwart them.
This is crucial; as a historian I have come across numerous communities that have lacked such attributes and disappeared as a result. The Jews of Lisbon, for instance, having converted to Catholicism, in most cases expediently, suffered a hideous massacre in 1506 before being driven into exile by the Inquisition. Or take the Armenians of what is now eastern Turkey, denigrated as fifth columnists by the Ottoman government during the First World War. In their villages of mud and straw in the valleys of the Anatolian plateau, they waited docilely to be sent on death marches that killed over a million. And, of course, there is the Holocaust itself, that supreme example of a nation unprepared for the fate in store for it — and for which unpreparedness Israel is the living, breathing refutation.
To cite a contemporary case, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which took up arms against the mighty Turkish state in 1984, avoided extirpation for all of 41 years in part by refusing to lay them down again. The PKK’s recent pledge to disarm, in return for integration into Turkish political life, would put the destiny of the Kurds in the hands of the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He is one of the world’s least trustworthy politicians and the PKK’s decision may prove unwise.
A movement of national liberation, rather than the bunch of jihadis Netanyahu depicts it as, Hamas has said that it will disarm once Israel retreats to its pre-1967 borders — which, given the political impossibility of that happening, means never. Besides, why would Hamas give up the main weapon it has against a much more powerful enemy: the ability to strike asymmetrically, causing maximum horror and distress?
“The Palestinians possess a keen appreciation of the deadly intentions of their adversary and something approaching a relish for the fight to thwart them.”
Hamas has lost support among ordinary Gazans: not because of popular revulsion at the October 7 attacks, widely regarded as nothing less than the Zionists deserved, but because of its callousness towards its own people’s suffering and its intransigence in negotiations with Israel. Yet, Hamas is wildly popular in the West Bank, and indeed elsewhere in the Arab world. Israel itself believes that terrorist networks are replacing dead Hamas fighters at a rate of five to one. “60% of Hamas fighters are the sons of martyrs,” I was told by Avi Shlaim, an emeritus professor at Oxford and a prominent Israeli critic of his homeland. “The easiest thing for Hamas is to recruit more fighters to replace the ones it has lost.”
As the saying goes, victory is survival for a guerrilla army. Anyone with a smartphone can watch films showing plucky Hamas warriors clambering onto Israeli armoured vehicles and taking them out using explosive devices recycled from captured ordinance and finessed on the kitchen table, before, presumably, the inevitable retaliatory execution by an Israeli drone. You don’t need to kill many Israeli soldiers to show your staying power, or to convince Israeli reservists of the advisability of dodging the draft — not that Netanyahu’s government is releasing figures on those who fail to present themselves.
No wonder the other Arab nations are so jittery. In Jordan the Muslim Brotherhood, which spawned Hamas, trounced pro-government parties in elections last September. In Egypt, the authorities announced earlier this month that they had thwarted terrorist attacks targeting prominent figures, apparently planned by the armed wing of the Brotherhood. Recall, too, that it was a Brotherhood government that al-Sisi toppled to seize power in 2013, and whose former cadres smoulder in the prison cells of Egypt’s police state. Not that the effects of Gaza will be confined to the Middle East or the Muslim world. According to a British security source, quoted by Reuters, the Gaza war is “likely to become the biggest recruiter for Islamist militants since [the Iraq invasion of] 2003”.
In the words of the Saudi official I spoke to, the Trump administration needs to take a long view that considers the law of cause and effect. Trump’s promise to settle the Gazans “in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region” proclaims his ignorance of this law. The want of long-term, morally coherent thinking among the political class is marginally less glaring in Britain than it is in Israel and the US. And, if the belated and conditional recognition of Palestine remains strategically open to doubt, Starmer’s government has at least won Trump’s trust. It must now team up with the Arab nations and focus America’s attention on preventing today’s Gazan catastrophe from becoming something worse.
