The UK’s Israel policy ignores facts and history

An ally should be holding such accusations up to scrutiny, not echoing them – and certainly not compounding them with punitive measures such as the arms fair ban.

The stakes are high: the torrent of hostility directed at Israel is spilling into hostility against Jewish communities across the West, including here in the UK. All this was prelude to Lammy announcing that Britain will press ahead with recognition of a Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly session in New York, which opens next week. The Board of Deputies’ plea that such a step should at least be conditioned on Hamas releasing hostages will apparently be resolutely ignored. Lammy insisted this is neither a reward for Hamas nor a threat to Israel’s security.

Yet before October 7, no serious European diplomat was calling for Palestinian statehood – not even for relaunching the peace process. Even the most Israel-critical foreign ministries accepted the obvious: Palestinian politics is split between Hamas in Gaza and the PA in the West Bank; and even Israel’s supposed peace partner in Ramallah is too corrupt and authoritarian to govern, and not remotely capable of delivering peace.

Three days before Lammy’s speech, Simon Walters, Britain’s ambassador to Israel, offered Labour’s more detailed “strategic reasoning” for recognition in an op-ed for the Jerusalem Post. Yet the government’s reasoning ignores not only the consequences of October 7 but decades of Palestinian rejectionism. In this account, all obstacles to peace are on the Israeli side.

He recycled the tired mantra that “occupation is a recipe for cycles of violence”, inverting cause and effect. In truth, it is Palestinian violence – and the refusal to accept repeated Israeli offers of statehood – that perpetuate conflict.

It is unclear whether the ambassador’s reference to “cycles of violence” meant to cover the October 7 massacres themselves. But the entire logic of recognition after those atrocities, whether intended or not, suggests that the lack of a Palestinian state, for which supposedly Israel alone is responsible, somehow triggered the attacks.

Walters also boldly claimed that “most Palestinians want peace”. Reality, however, is far less convenient. According to polling from the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah – hardly an Israeli front organisation – 50 per cent of Palestinians believe Hamas was right to attack on October 7; 77 per cent oppose disarming Hamas; 65 per cent oppose expelling Hamas leaders to end the war; only 40 per cent support a two-state solution; and more favour “armed struggle” than talks.

This does not sound like a constituency ready for peaceful coexistence. If Labour truly wants to contribute to peace, its efforts should be focused here: ending Palestinian radicalisation and changing the culture of incitement. That is hard work. It requires persistence, pressure and unglamorous diplomacy – not a quick photo op, but the sort of long-term engagement that might actually make a difference.

Instead, the British government indulges in the fantasy that a Palestinian state would be safe for Israel so long as it is nominally “demilitarised”. What happens the moment weapons are smuggled into this new state? And even a so-called demilitarised Palestine would retain, for policing purposes, the very kind of light arms Hamas used in its devastating invasion. A mass incursion from the far larger West Bank border – much closer to Israel’s population centres than Gaza – could produce an even greater massacre.

Here lies the lesson Israelis have drawn: not only profound distrust – to put it mildly – of Palestinian readiness for peace, but also deep scepticism of allied assurances.

After the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, carried out from a territory Israel vacated, Israel’s self-defence is smeared as “genocide”. Why should Israelis trust that the outcome of another territorial withdrawal would be any different – and that next time, the West, including Britain, would stand by them?

Nor is the ambassador’s claim that “increasingly, Israel controls the lives of millions of Palestinians who have no political rights within the state that governs them” accurate.

Gaza was vacated 20 years ago and, since Oslo, most West Bank Palestinians have lived under full PA control. If they lack rights, it is because their rulers in Ramallah are a corrupt, dictatorial clique who jail dissenters – and because their president is in the 19th year of his four-year term.

Furthermore, Walters, drawing on his own experience in Northern Ireland, suggested parallels between that conflict and the Israeli–Palestinian. But these comparisons are badly misplaced.

Whatever the horrors of the IRA’s terror campaign and the deep-rooted sectarian conflict in Ulster, the IRA never advocated for Britain’s destruction. To equate the two struggles is not sophisticated diplomacy; it is a category error. And it points to the deeper problem with Britain’s so-called “strategic reasoning”: it misdiagnoses an existential conflict – one that cannot be solved so long as extremist ideas enjoy significant support among Palestinians – as if it were a mere territorial dispute, eminently solvable with a little goodwill and international support. This is not realism. It is wishful thinking dressed up as strategy.

Recognition now would not advance peace. It would reward Hamas, entrench terror as a viable strategy, and leave Israel more isolated – not by its enemies, but by its supposed allies.

And in doing so, this Labour government is not just abandoning Israel. It is abandoning Britain’s Jewish community, already under pressure; the hostages still in captivity, and its very own Zionist tradition.