Britain’s pledge to recognise a Palestinian state by September is as empty and as dangerous as its recent commitment to air drop aid into Gaza. It makes Westminster’s mandarins and politicians feel better but it will kill more people that it saves.
Sir Keir Starmer has demanded that Israel’s prime minister end the “appalling” situation in Gaza and stop plans to annex the West Bank, currently occupied by Israel.
If Benjamin Netanyahu doesn’t do this then the UK will recognise a Palestinian State. Some 144 countries – including UN Security Council permanent members Russia and China – have already done that but Netanyahu has continued his onslaught on Gaza.
The UK can and should go much further.
Thirty one prominent Israelis have demanded, in a letter to the Guardian, that their own country be subjected to immediate economic sanctions.
Britain must rally to their side to save Israel and cauterize the infection of its relentless violence against Gaza before it spreads.
On Monday, the heads of five major Israeli universities called on Netanyahu to share the mortal imperative “shaped by the trauma of the Holocaust” to do “all we can to prevent cruel, indiscriminate harm to non-combat men, women and children” and warned that Israel risks being complicit in crimes against humanity.
Its targeting of the enclave leaves Israel charged with meeting all the definitions of ethic cleansing and multiple experts, including Israeli human rights groups, have accused the government of genocide. There would be a lot less parsing of the realities verses the interpretation of terms if any other nation was starving, bombing, shooting and shelling civilians in such quantities.
And this, for Starmer, is the issue. He appears worried that criticism of Israel is automatically antisemitic. But he is behind the ethical curve. Israel should not be being threatened with a meaningless recognition of a “Palestinian state” that Netanyahu has said he is opposed to anyway.
Israel must face immediate economic and cultural sanctions to show that the impunity which it has enjoyed so far on razing Gaza is over. Now is the time to end Israel’s preferential trade deals with Europe, to shut down its access to international banking systems, and cripple its economy.
It is a moral failure on a national scale to allow the UK to continue to export arms or parts of weapons and planes, for use by Israel.
Israel needs to be saved from the extremism that has captured the Netanyahu government. Failure to do so would be a betrayal, among other things, of the ethical nobility that has been the global legacy of Judaism over three millennia.
The UK sanctioned Israeli government ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich in response to their repeated incitements of violence against Palestinians. But Netanyahu, against whom the International Criminal Court has issues an arrest warrant for war crimes, has faced no UK sanctions at all.
The head of Israel’s air force, major general Tomer Bar, recently visited the UK and attended air displays and rubbed shoulders with RAF and other officers from around the world.
