Following Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s announcement that Britain would join France in recognising a Palestinian state in September, France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot exulted that “together through this pivotal decision and our combined efforts we break the endless cycle of violence and reopen the prospect of peace in the region.”
Maybe. Only time will tell.
But I’m sceptical.
Because cycles of violence aren’t normally broken by actions that incentivise more violence, and this symbolic action does little except that.
It might help to critically examine the results of a less bombastic but fateful diplomatic intervention that seems like it was in the distant past, but actually only took place less than two weeks ago, to see another example of just how this works.
In May, two months after the second ceasefire in the current war broke down, US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff’s detailed plan for a hostage release and ceasefire designed to lead eventually to a full end of the war, was tabled in indirect talks mediated by Qatar, Egypt, and the US. For two months the two sides conducted proximity talks over each macabre detail. How many living hostages and how many dead ones. Where Israeli forces would withdraw to. What guarantees the US would grant to advance to the next stage. On which day would Hamas release health details of the living hostages it would still keep even under the new deal. When and in what order bodies of those Israeli hostages killed in captivity would be handed over.
By the end of July, the deal was nearly done. Witkoff himself was due to fly to Doha for the signing on July 23.
And then something happened. On July 21, Foreign Secretary David Lammy issued a joint statement together with the Foreign Ministers of two dozen European states as well as New Zealand, Japan, and Australia, demanding an immediate end to the war in Gaza and condemning Israel for a host of actions in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The statement included a rote call for the release of Israeli hostages followed by the sentence, “A negotiated ceasefire offers the best hope of bringing them home and ending the agony of their families.” In the next paragraph there was a demand for Israel to immediately lift all restrictions on aid coming into Gaza and to enable UN and NGOs, including those that had earlier been found collaborating with Hamas, to distribute aid. This call was not followed by a sentence about how negotiations were the best way to secure aid.
The formulation was clear: hostages could be released only with the agreement of Hamas, but Israel, unique among the countries of the world who have ever fought a war, needed to ensure supplies to its enemies right away, without conditions, while a war was still being fought – and without any need for negotiations or agreement of any kind.
Rather than encourage negotiations, the statement, and the swirl of critical pronouncements and policy statements from individual capitals on the day of the joint statement and the following morning from various western capitals, killed the very negotiations that had been ongoing for two months and had nearly succeeded in bringing a ceasefire, partial hostage release, and pathway to ending the war.
Hamas concluded, very reasonably, that it was getting for free what it nearly paid for with ten hostages, and it scuppered the entire negotiating process. By July 22, it raised new and unrealistic demands on issues that had already been agreed on in talks (for example on the ratio of prisoners to hostages that would be released and on where the IDF buffer zones would be during the 60 days of ceasefire), and the talks fell apart.
And the hostages stayed in the tunnels.
And the deaths in Gaza continued.
It was a stunning diplomatic failure, that then got lost in the media storm surrounding hunger in Gaza. By July 25, four days after the statement and two days after talks broke down, major media outlets were publishing pictures of emaciated children, in nearly all cases children ill with other conditions, and Israel was being blamed for creating a famine in Gaza, all while UN agencies were refusing to distribute the hundreds of trucks of aid which Israel had already cleared into Gaza and refusing to cooperate with the non-Hamas affiliated Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
Under mounting international pressure, Israel began to airdrop aid into Gaza. It also agreed to humanitarian pauses in some areas and to open more passages into the Strip for a stepped-up aid delivery, including to organisations that Israel has long suspected collaborate with Hamas or look the other way as Hamas profits from their supplies.
In less than a week, Hamas went from agreeing to release ten out of the twenty living hostages it still holds in tunnels under Gaza for nearly two years in order to get a 60-day ceasefire and a surge of supplies into Gaza – to getting an effective ceasefire and even more supplies without having to give up even one of its human bargaining chips.
We can express revulsion at Hamas’ cruelty all we want, and there is no doubt it is justified, but Hamas behaved perfectly rationally. Western diplomacy had intervened, demanded negotiations where negotiations were already happening, and handed Hamas for free the very benefits it almost gave up some, but far from all, of the hostages it had abducted, to obtain.
Without a doubt, Lammy and the other Foreign Ministers, who are under a tremendous amount of pressure domestically from self-appointed guardians of humanity and righteousness to do something to punish Israel, thought they were taking a brave stand for the weak against the strong and endeavouring to save both peoples from the ravages of war. But all they accomplished was a tactical gain for the terrorist group that launched the war, and an indefinite extension of the war itself, the plight of the hostages, and the suffering of all sides.
The Starmer team was insulted when its declaration this week that it would recognise a Palestinian state was criticised as a reward for Hamas terror. But that was an abstract and symbolic prize, albeit one conditioned in the most absurd of manners which incentivised all the worst possible behaviours on all sides.
In this case, already a week before the recognition declaration, Starmer and Lammy together with their ostensibly well-intentioned allies gave Hamas a direct win, removing its last incentive to release the men it grabbed from their homes on a Saturday morning nearly two years ago after murdering their friends and family in front of them.
What’s even worse than that is that they seemed genuinely surprised at how Hamas reacted to the very obvious incentives their diplomacy created. What’s worse even than that is that no one back home seemed to care.
Shany Mor is a lecturer in political thought at Reichman University and a senior research associate at Bicom
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