Recognising Palestine would be a huge mistake for Labour
There is a distasteful irony in the attitude that those on the progressive Left have towards Britain.
On the one hand, they delight in the fact that in our post-empire decline, we have significantly less influence on world events than was the case even a few decades ago. On the other hand, they frequently indulge in the fallacy that policy decisions taken by the British government will have significant repercussions on conflicts thousands of miles away.
Palestine is a good example of this Janus-like approach to diplomacy. Emily Thornberry, the Labour chair of the House of Commons foreign affairs select committee, has called on the Government officially to recognise Palestine as a state, a position that Labour held for a time in opposition.
The idea of unilaterally recognising a hypothetical state with no borders, no capital and no president or prime minister and governed by actual terrorists was always a poor one, based – as are so many such gestures – on virtue signalling to a particular section of the domestic electorate. But to press ahead with recognition now, following the violence triggered by Hamas's terrorist atrocities against Israeli citizens, would be political perversion.
Let us be clear what Thornberry – and, reportedly, French president Emmanuel Macron – wants: international recognition for a group of people led by an Islamist death cult that refuses to recognise its next-door neighbour, Israel, and in fact wants its complete destruction, to be rewarded for their blood-curdling, armed belligerence.
In their naiveté, Thornberry and a number of her Labour colleagues believe that the priority of Arab nations is to create an independent Palestinian state and that recognising one, however amorphous its borders and however contestable its choice of capital, will somehow, by a mysterious process of osmosis, result in a peaceful Middle East. Once you give the Palestinians their own homeland, they will stop campaigning to kill all the Jews, goes the optimistic theory.
But this misunderstands Arab opinion in the Middle East. Israel's neighbours have not repeatedly tried to destroy it because they feel aggrieved about the plight of the Palestinians: they want Israel gone because it is a Jewish state. Their priority is Israel's destruction, not Palestinian statehood.
As Lord Austin, formerly the Labour MP, Ian Austin, now an independent cross-bencher in the Lords, has pointed out, Britain doesn't have enough influence to wield as far as the Middle East Peace Process is concerned, but it has enough influence to help make things worse. With absolutely no agreement on how a new Palestine-Israel border would be secured and policed, no agreement on the future of the settlements on the West Bank, no agreement on the status of Jerusalem or the Temple Mount, granting recognition of Palestine would be like selling plots of land on the Moon to gullible buyers: a nice idea but of no practical value whatever.
There is another, even more egregious hypocrisy in the Left's support for Palestinian recognition: how dare developed, mainly white, Christian countries with their own histories of colonialism, decree from afar, and without consulting the people directly involved, that they will officially recognise a country with no borders and led by a gang of racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic thugs? Colonialism for the internet age, perhaps.
Palestine is becoming the trigger point for British Muslims. Labour since the 1950s has been reliably pro-Zionist, especially in government. But the severing of the link between the party and the Muslim community began in 2003, with the decision by Tony Blair to join the US-led invasion of Iraq. Two years later, former Labour MP George Galloway won the formerly safe Labour seat of Bethnal Green for his Respect Party, then went on to win two spectacular by-election victories in previously safe Labour seats.
In 2024, Labour was shocked by the loss of four seats to independent 'pro-Gaza' candidates and many others with large Muslim populations saw their majorities stripped to the bone. Acceding to Thornberry's request to recognise Palestine, therefore, will seem an attractive proposal to many MPs and ministers if they think it will reverse the flow of support currently heading away from the party.
And what real difference would it make, after all? It's such a small housekeeping detail with no real-world impact, so why not? The simple answer is that Palestinian recognition would change nothing as far as the plight of ordinary Palestinians are concerned. But as for their leadership, as for Hamas and its fellow Islamist terror organisations Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, as for those groups' paymasters in Iran, it would be seen as confirmation that ruthless, cold-blooded slaughter can be used to lever concessions from gullible Western states led by gullible elected representatives and gullible select committee chairs.
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