Yvette Cooper’s ahistorical assertions expose the fatuity behind recognising Palestine

So it was hardly surprising that Cooper should seek in her speech to present the government’s decision as some sort of Solomon-like act of wisdom, rather than a craven capitulation to Labour’s fear of the Muslim vote.

But what was surprising was just how shoddy and misleading her speech was. Not so much full of holes as a series of cynical distortions and ahistorical assertions which expose the fatuity of the thinking behind recognition.

“Recognition is about the future, but it is rooted in our past”, Cooper asserted. “75 years ago, Britain was rightly proud to recognise the State of Israel. But the promise of upholding Palestinian rights has gone unfulfilled. For decades, my country supported a two-state solution but only recognised one state.”

Britain did indeed recognise the State of Israel, but there was nothing proud about how and why – and it only did so grudgingly, two years after independence, on 28 April 1950, when antisemitic foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, had no real choice other than to recognise Israel.

As for the second part of Cooper’s assertion – “For decades, my country supported a two-state solution but only recognised one state” – I wonder why that might have been. Might it, do you think, have anything, just possibly, perhaps, on reflection, who knows, have anything to do with the fact that the Arabs (as they were then known) refused the UN offer of a state via partition? Or that they then launched a war to annihilate the nascent State of Israel and destroy it at birth?

Or that at the end of that war, the areas Cooper and Starmer say should now form part of a Palestinian state were occupied by Egypt and Jordan, neither of which had any intention of using them to constitute a Palestinian state (Jordan occupied Jerusalem and annexed the West Bank).

Or that at every point subsequent to that, when Israel has been engaged in serious negotiations and offered to accept a state, the Arabs/Palestinians have rejected everything?

If Cooper wants to avoid further distortions over the basics of the history of a putative Palestinian state, she might consider what President Clinton says about it. Talking recently about Camp David in 2000, he said the Palestinians rejected a “once in a lifetime” peace opportunity. “You can’t complain 25 years later when the doors weren’t all still open, and all the possibilities weren’t still there…All [young people in America] know that a lot more Palestinians have been killed than Israelis. And I tell them what Arafat walked away from, and they, like, can’t believe it”.

That deal offered by Israel would have meant a capital in East Jerusalem, 96 per cent of the West Bank and 4 per cent of Israel to make up for the 4 per cent of the West Bank to be annexed for Israeli settlements. “I go through all the stuff that was in the deal, and they, like – it’s not on their radar screen, they can’t even imagine that happened,” Clinton said.

But it’s not just young Americans who are unaware of history.

Cooper is 56 years old and British.

The Foreign Secretary’s deeply misleading UN speech was not, however, the only issue this week for anyone concerned with what is happening to British policy. With typical sensitivity, on Rosh Hashanah the British Consulate General in Jerusalem decided to erase the capital of Israel, changing the consulate’s address on its website from simply East Jerusalem to "Jerusalem, Palestine". And it added a “location” section, also listing it as Palestine.

After an almighty fuss online – and, one imagines, from the US – the entire address was removed from the site. The implication of this, rather than merely correcting it as if it had been the work of one over-eager website manager, is that a discussion is now under way in the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office as to how the address should be styled. How Jerusalem, in fact, should be styled.

Whether, in other words, the UK government lives in the real world, in which Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, or in its own fantasy world, in which Jerusalem is the capital of a state, Palestine, which does not exist. Given the past year of Labour policy towards Israel, I have little doubt as to which it will be.