Starmer recognizes fantasy, Israel reality

Sir Keir Starmer wants his Balfour moment. The man who can’t fix a Labour conference microphone thinks he can fix the Middle East.

In a bid to restore Britain’s lost imperial gravitas—or perhaps just to look marginally more relevant than Emmanuel Macron—Starmer has announced that the United Kingdom will recognize a Palestinian state this September at the United Nations General Assembly. Recognition, he insists, is an “inalienable right,” as if the problem were lack of paperwork rather than the bloodlust of Hamas and the failure of Palestinian leadership to build anything resembling a polity. What follows is not so much foreign policy as cosplay diplomacy, complete with empty gestures, performative progressivism, and a studied indifference to actual consequences.

The plan, of course, is conditional. Israel must agree to a ceasefire, allow full UN humanitarian access, halt all West Bank settlement activity, and commit to a two-state process. These are not unreasonable aspirations, though the UN has rarely proved a reliable distributor of aid when Hamas has a say in the matter. Still, one cannot help but notice the asymmetry: Israel must disarm, de-escalate, and deny its own citizens the right to build homes; Palestine need not renounce terrorism, reform its leadership, or even recognize Israel’s right to exist. So far, Starmer has demanded more of Netanyahu than of the terror regime the Israeli Prime Minister is still dismantling tunnel by tunnel.

This was never really about peace. It’s about timing. Starmer hopes that Britain and France can jointly recognize Palestine at the UN in September, giving the diplomatic equivalent of a group hug while Gaza lies in ruins. More than 140 UN member states already recognize a Palestinian state. But Britain and France, as permanent members of the Security Council, would give it symbolic weight. Think Versailles meets Ramallah. The idea is to inject new momentum into a stalled peace process, but without serious enforcement mechanisms or clarity on borders, governance, or disarmament, this is less a leap forward than a stumble into abstraction.

Back in Israel, the reaction is less than euphoric. Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel, in an interview with the Italian daily Il Corriere della Sera, warned that “unilateral actions may lead to unilateral actions on Israel’s part too.” She’s not bluffing. The Israeli right has long toyed with its own form of recognition: sovereignty. If Britain recognizes a fantasy Palestine, what’s to stop Israel from applying its full sovereignty to Judea and Samaria, in accordance with its historical and legal rights under the Mandate for Palestine and Article 80 of the UN Charter? Starmer wants to play the recognition game? Israel has a few moves of its own.

Families of Israeli hostages, still praying for the release of loved ones from Hamas captivity, have called Starmer’s plan a “reward for terror.” They’re right. Diplomatic recognition should follow state-building, not precede it. And state-building must begin with monopoly on the use of force, internal legitimacy, and peaceful foreign policy. None of these exist in the Palestinian territories. The Palestinian Authority is a corrupt kleptocracy that doesn’t hold elections; Hamas is a genocidal jihadist cult. What exactly are we recognizing here: a failed ideology or a future intifada?

The American response, now under the steady hand of President Donald Trump, has been icy. Trump made clear that he and Starmer “did not discuss” the Palestinian recognition plan during their recent meeting in Scotland, and noted with characteristic bluntness that “rewarding Hamas” is not a viable basis for diplomacy. Instead, Trump has focused on ensuring that humanitarian aid reaches actual civilians in Gaza, without enriching the terror infrastructure that turned hospitals into bunkers and schools into missile launchpads. In this, Trump is the pragmatist and Starmer the idealist, albeit one with a soft spot for fantasy cartography.

What makes Starmer’s approach particularly galling is its ahistoricism. It pretends the last thirty years didn’t happen. Oslo? Forgotten. Camp David? Inconvenient. Gaza withdrawal? Ignored. Each time Israel has made territorial concessions or engaged in diplomacy, it has been met with violence. The Palestinian leadership has never accepted partition. They rejected the UN plan in 1947, opposed the 1949 Armistice Lines as final borders, launched war in 1967, rejected autonomy under the 1978 Camp David Accords, walked away from a state on 97% of the West Bank in 2000 at Camp David, refused the Clinton Parameters in 2001, dismissed Olmert’s 2008 offer of a contiguous state with land swaps, and have boycotted direct negotiations since 2014. The pattern is consistent. If history is any guide, unilateral recognition will only incentivize more maximalist demands, more violence, and more despair.

Then again, perhaps that’s the point. For the Labour Party, recognition is a kind of political exorcism: an attempt to purge the lingering stench of Corbynism by taking an ostensibly “balanced” position. But symmetry is not justice. There is no moral equivalence between a democratic state defending itself from terrorism and a death cult that murders teenagers at a music festival. Pretending otherwise is not diplomacy. It’s moral illiteracy dressed in pinstripes.

Meanwhile, back in the Middle East, facts on the ground move faster than resolutions in Turtle Bay. If France and Britain go ahead with their September stunt, they will find themselves not ushering in a peace process, but formalizing a stalemate. Israel will not yield its security to the performative virtue of European politicians. It will not evacuate territories only to see Hamas fill the vacuum. And it will not tolerate lectures from nations that couldn’t protect their own Jewish populations during the last century, let alone in the streets of London and Paris today.

The ultimate irony is that the recognition of Palestine—done this way, at this time—doesn’t solve anything. It doesn’t free a single hostage, stop a single rocket, or bring a single Palestinian closer to prosperity. It’s a diplomatic selfie: a way for Starmer to look serious without doing anything serious. And like most selfies, it flatters the subject while blurring the truth.

In the end, there are only two states that matter: the State of Israel, and the state of denial in which much of the world continues to operate. Starmer can recognize whatever he likes. Israel, as ever, will recognize reality.