Starmer’s words on recognising Palestine are cynical but show the government is under pressure and that we can force retreats on its support for genocide, argues Kevin Ovenden

With one announcement on Tuesday, Keir Starmer underlined his cowardice, amorality, cynicism and political stupidity. Showing his weakness was Starmer’s statement following a snap cabinet meeting that Britain would vote to recognise the state of Palestine at the UN General Assembly in September unless Israel takes ‘substantive steps’ to end the situation in Gaza and to move to a peace plan.

He has resisted such a move since before taking office, always pushing recognition of some form of Palestinian statehood into a vague future as ‘part of a long-term solution’. Pressure has been mounting to follow French president Emmanuel Macron in promising recognition in September, although the France in Revolt party and other activists are demanding he does so now.

The Palestine coalition that organises the huge protests in Britain, Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens all rightly denounced Starmer’s cynicism in turning what is the inalienable right of the Palestinians to statehood into a bargaining chip to shore up the British government’s ailing position at home.

Reports are that Starmer was coming under increasing pressure from cabinet ministers to be seen to do something so as to assuage public anger. Health secretary Wes Streeting is reported to have been pressing hard for the move. He was within 600 votes at the last election of losing his seat to British-Palestinian Leanne Mohamad. Since then, feeling in Ilford over Palestine and Labour’s attacks on welfare has only grown.

This government is for turning on Palestine, overall and front by front. Starmer says he will allow into Britain a few children needing medical care. Why not all children requiring specialist care and a British medical mission organised by the government under military protection sent into Gaza – now?

The two-state solution is dead

The Palestinians were promised a state over thirty years ago with the Oslo Accords. Some 147 out of 193 UN member states have officially recognised a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

While there has been a forced retreat by Starmer, which brought condemnation from the US State Department and Israel, the reality is that it is window-dressing and aims to obscure Britain’s continuing role in the genocide and forced starvation. It is less than the minimum that is being demanded worldwide as images of famine spread to newspapers globally.

Western leaders have been playing a game of musical chairs during this genocide. Who will be the last standing when the music goes off and the rest of the world has moved to some kind of meaningful action to stop the slaughter and discipline Israel?

The bigger cynicism in the British government’s position is not only that it continues to arm Israel and maintain all links. It is that Starmer said that he is going to assess recognition in September because the ‘possibility of a two-state solution was receding’. The truth is that the two-state solution, in so far as it was ever a possibility, is dead. And Israel has killed it.

The Oslo Accords were meant to provide for a dismembered Palestinian ‘state’, banned from having an army or defence force, alongside nuclear-armed and expansionist Israel and wholly subordinate to it. Even that prospect was dead by the end of the decade. Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister who negotiated Oslo in 1993, was, two years later, assassinated by someone who was called an ‘Israeli fanatic’. Now that fanatic would be a moderate member of the current Israeli government.

The pace of illegal settlement building in the West Bank and of the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes has accelerated over the last twenty years. There was a record number of these last year, and two months ago, Israel announced a huge expansion in the seizure of land in East Jerusalem. There are over 700,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank with special Jewish-only roads crisscrossing the occupied territory so as to make any Palestinian statelet there impossible.

Gaza has been besieged for nearly twenty years, subjected to one Israeli military aggression after another until now there is a war which is aimed at eliminating the Palestinian people from the Strip, one way or another. Talk of preserving the idea of a two-state solution is a sick joke. Settler violence, which is inseparable from the violence of the Israeli occupation forces, is soaring on the West Bank. Only on Monday, settlers murdered Odeh Hathaleen, who helped make the Oscar-winning film ‘No Other Land’.

It is not just the current fascistic Israeli government. Most Israelis support the expulsion of the Palestinians from Gaza (82%), from within the Green Line of 1967 Israel, i.e. Palestinian citizens of Israel (56%), and for annexing at least the settlements in the West Bank to Israel.

Israel as a polity refuses to allow a Palestinian state and the Israel government, plus much of the opposition, has made that clear for years. To threaten what is little more than a gesture after another month of genocide in the name of a fiction is depraved.

No one in Britain standing with the Palestinians should give it any credence. Any gullible Labour MPs who do should face redoubled pressure and with it the promise that they will be challenged electorally.

Barack Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, spelled out the reality in his final speech in that role in 2015, as Donald Trump came in. He hadn’t said it while in office, of course. Kerry told Israel it could be a democratic state or a Jewish state, but ‘you cannot be both’. Since then, an apartheid nation-state law has come in and Israel has expanded domination over the Palestinians territorially and in every other way.

It is heading towards one state based upon Jewish supremacy with the Palestinians, as one settler leader puts it, expelled, dead, or subordinated like an ancient slave population. That is the reality behind the chimera of ‘two states’ that Western politicians cling to even as they know the truth.

Our protests are working

So what can be done? Israel could not do what it is doing without the continued support of the West, crucially the US. In addition to the resistance of the Palestinian people themselves and the potential for the mass of the populations of the Middle East to struggle and come to their aid, we in the West have a vital role to play in breaking that support and forcing our governments to shift. That can also impact upon developments in the US where the majority of people, including the majority of Republican voters, are against Israel’s conduct in this genocidal war.

We have to aim to isolate Israel, cut all links and impose sanctions on Israel: 31 prominent Israeli figures have caused a stir by calling for sanctions. This would all increase the vice of pressure on the Israeli state.

The solidarity movement in Greece has repeatedly either prevented Israeli cruise ships from landing on the Greek islands or opposing them with mass demonstrations. The psychological impact of these protests on Israeli society  is enormous.

Israeli citizens have become used over the decades to being treated like Europeans, including in the Eurovision song contest. An Israeli passport and nationality is worth that of a French, German, Irish or Italian.

Not now. The message this last week is that you cannot conduct and cheer on genocide and then take a break from it all with a tour of the Greek islands. Of course, there are beleaguered Israelis opposed to the genocide and who are bravely protesting against it. As a sign outside a jewellery shop  on Crete said, they are welcome: genocidal killers are not. It is a shock for average Israelis. It is a shock they need to feel though mass, democratic pressure and boycotts, sanctions and divestment. Along with the mass protests and actions of all kinds.

The British Medical Association cut relations with its Israeli counterpart on the grounds that it was failing in the fundamental ethics of the medical profession due to its refusal to act over the genocide. The Israeli association has now written to its government citing the BMA’s decision in asking for Israel to provide medical help to the Palestinians. In microcosm, this is how acts of solidarity in Britain and in Europe can have effect within Israel. The Israeli doctors say that censorship means that the British doctors ‘see things we do not’. Maybe. Or maybe it is trying to get the excuses in now in anticipation of the worldwide revulsion when images that even we have not yet seen come out and the pressure for trials at the Hague increases. 

Above all, every complicit government, authority and institution in Britain and the West has to feel increased pressure daily. That is the biggest contribution we can make to the existence and resistance of the Palestinian people. We don’t have a right to feel tired. In any case, despite appalling slaughter, we are having an impact. 

The morally depraved Starmer government’s shifting and turning is evidence of that. Now is the time to break them on this question over which they have already broken with the centre of gravity of British public opinion, all to stay aligned with Trump, who treated Starmer as a little caddy at his golf course.