Recognising Palestine isn't a path to peace

Spectator

5 days ago

The children of Gaza are enduring horrendous suffering. The control of aid has been restricted. Innocent lives have been set at nothing. Ruthlessness well beyond the terms of realpolitik has put hundreds of thousands at risk. The people responsible deserve global condemnation. But instead it seems they are to be rewarded.
It is Hamas which is responsible for the suffering in Gaza. The terrorist organisation has, for years, used its thugs to control international development assistance to enrich its leaders and subdue the population. Its murderous – indeed, genocidal – intent was made manifest on 7 October 2023 when it unleashed an assault on innocent Israelis which resulted in the biggest single loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. In many cases, Hamas fighters sexually assaulted their victims and gleefully celebrated their deaths. The organisation's leadership exulted in the slaughter and declared that if they could, they would kill and kill again until they had eliminated the Zionist entity.
Since that attack, and the Israeli response, Hamas has demonstrated disdain not only for Jewish lives, but also Palestinian ones. By placing command posts in hospitals, putting children deliberately in harm's way and continuing to use food aid as a weapon against its own people, Hamas has shown they are not noble liberators but barbaric murderers.
And the West's response to this butcher's bill? To give Hamas the political victory of recognising a Palestinian state. This week the chair of parliament's foreign affairs select committee, Emily Thornberry, was the latest MP to call for British recognition of a Palestinian state. She reflects the views of dozens on the Labour benches – and, it is feared, even the instincts of the Prime Minister himself. Later this month, France and Saudi Arabia will co-chair a conference that aims to obtain recognition of a Palestinian state. Last year, Ireland, Norway and Spain joined more than 140 other members of the United Nations in formally recognising Palestine's statehood. According to Thornberry, it is 'just a question of when' Keir Starmer does so.
Before the Prime Minister contemplates any such step, he might do well to study the7 October Parliamentary Commission Report compiled by the UK-Israel All-Party Parliamentary Group chaired by Lord Roberts of Belgravia. To read it is to be reminded of who will cheer loudest if Hamas's atrocities are rewarded with diplomatic recognition. The people responsible for the indiscriminate massacre of 378 Israelis at the Nova musical festival, shot down as they were fleeing for their lives, will be jubilant once more. The terrorists who carried out the gang-rape and mutilation of female victims, filmed for the perpetrators' twisted glory, will rejoice again. The men who shot an unborn child in her mother's womb and murdered a 92-year-old Holocaust survivor before taking 250 men, women and children hostage will have new cause for celebration.
The answer to such evil should not be the granting of global respectability but a determination to prevent such atrocities from happening again. That is what Israel, almost alone, is seeking to achieve. Its military campaign is based on the far-from-unreasonable desire to liberate the hostages and permanently eliminate the death cult of Hamas. For its troubles, it enjoys not sympathy and support but a wilfully blind campaign of condemnation.
Recent reporting of Israel's continued distribution of food aid to Gaza has ignored the reality of aid distribution in the past, when Hamas would confiscate the support offered by the international community and use it to reward compliance and punish internal opponents. It is to the shame of some aid groups, and certainly of the United Nations' organisation UNRWA, that they made themselves the accomplices to this oppression. The reason Hamas has sought to disrupt, often violently, Israel's aid distribution is because it has been robbed of a tool of political control and a source of illicit finance.
Israel's defence forces have made errors in this conflict, sometimes grievous ones. But there is a world of difference between the citizen army of a rule-bound democracy fighting a counter-insurgency campaign while seeking to rescue hostages in urban settings and a terror group that regards every innocent life lost as another propaganda win.
Israel's actions in setting back Iran's nuclear weapons programme and obliterating Hezbollah's military structures have made the world safer. It has dismantled much, but not all, of the Hamas command structure. If it can further reduce the ability of Hamas to ever again conduct operations like 7 October, it will have also helped prepare the ground for a more sustainable future for the whole Middle East. A path to genuine peace relies not on the knee-jerk recognition of Palestine, but on the extension of the Abraham Accords. Saudi Arabian recognition of Israel and a broader partnership between pragmatic Arab states and Jerusalem would lay the ground for a future Palestinian state, guaranteed and supported by its Arab neighbours. If the leaders of the West truly want the best future for the Palestinian people, they will want Hamas defeated not garlanded. Choose the latter, and Islamists everywhere will know that in our hearts we are not prepared to defend democracy against barbarity.