Why the U.K. Must Not Recognize a State of Palestine

Keir Starmer is planning on sending his diplomats to join French and Saudi representatives in New York in mid-June, where they are planning to discuss the possible recognition of a “state of Palestine.” How, and who, will determine the borders of that state, who will rule it, and how the Israelis could possibly be persuaded to withdraw from Judea and Samaria, where for 3500 years Jewish history has been made, leaving them stripped of control of the Jordan Valley, so important to stopping a potential invasion force from the east, and left with a nine-mile-wide waist from Qalqilya to the sea, making them still more vulnerable to such an invader, is also not known. In the latest opinion poll, only 11% of Israeli Jews still support the creation of a Palestinian state.

But apparently what the Israelis want should not be decisive. The mantras of “two states for two peoples” or “the two-state solution” have now been imprinted on too many minds. Apparently France, Saudi Arabia, and now, possibly, the U.K. believe that the Israelis will agree to have 500,000 Israeli Jews now living in Judea and Samaria uprooted and moved back within the Green Line. But when, in 2005, only 8,000 Israelis were uprooted from their homes in Gaza, it created a national trauma. Imagine any Israeli government trying to uproot a half-million Jews, or even a twentieth of that number. The Israelis will tell us “just look how that withdrawal from Gaza worked out.”

British journalist Jake Wallis Simons pours cold water on Starmer’s decision to go along with the likes of anti-Israel Emmanuel Macron, president of France, and the smiling but sinister crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Muhammad bin Salman, at their upcoming meeting in New York, here: “Why Britain must not recognise Palestine,” by Jake Wallis Simons, Telegraph, June 7, 2025:

The West Bank was never taken from the Palestinians. When Israel conquered the territory in 1967 it was from the Jordanians, who had occupied it since 1948 before trying their luck at a genocide of the Jews….

Simons might also have noted that Judea and Samaria (renamed the “West Bank” by the Jordanians in 1950, so as to efface toponymically the Jewish connection to the land, as the Romans had done long before them, when they renamed the Kingdom of Judah as “Palestine,” were part of the territory that, according to the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine, was assigned to the Jewish National Home, which would then inexorably become the state of Israel.

…in nine days’ time, Britain will join France and the Saudis in New York in talks about recognising a state of Palestine. Far easier to gamble with the lives of someone else’s children than your own, I suppose.

This would form the natural culmination of Britain’s escalating hostility towards our ally, as it battles to defeat the jihadi group that carried out that orgy of butchery, mutilation and rape two years ago and has vowed to do the same again. Hostages are still in the catacombs. Yet Sir Keir dreams of a state of Palestine.

Starmer, Macron, and MBS are all deluding themselves. Nine out of ten Israelis are against a “state of Palestine.” They won’t allow it to happen. They won’t uproot 500,000 Israelis from Judea and Samaria, for 3500 years the heart of Jewish history. They will, however, allow the Palestinian Arabs in that territory to rule over themselves, consistent with Israeli security. As Prime Minister Netanyahu has said, in lapidary fashion, “my view of a potential agreement is that the Palestinians have all the powers to govern themselves but none of the powers to threaten us.”

War is hell. Israel – which neither wanted it nor started it – evacuates civilians before attacks and provides them with aid. Yet in Parliament last week, amid nods from MPs who have never known the inside of a bomb shelter, the Prime Minister branded Israel “appalling”….

Why is Israel “appalling”? Is it because it has made tremendous efforts to warn civilians in Gaza away from sites and buildings about to be targeted? To this end, after the first six months of the war the IDF had already dropped nine million leaflets, sent fifteen million text messages, and made sixteen million robocalls, all to warn civilians (but, of course, Hamas operatives were unavoidably warned as well). Is it because, in the words of West Point Professor of Urban Warfare John Spencer, “Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history—above and beyond what international law requires”? Does Keir Starmer really not know that Hamas tries always and everywhere to maximize civilian casualties, in order to use those casualties for propaganda purposes? And that Israel does its best always and everywhere to minimize them?

When Keir Starmer described Israel’s effort to deliver humanitarian aid “appalling,” he was apparently unaware that by the time he made that remark, the Israelis had already delivered millions of meals, and by now it has facilitated the delivery of close to ten million meals. And Hamas has been kept from stealing any of that aid.

And let’s not forget that after the Six-Day War, Israel offered to return territories it had won in that war in exchange for peace, but in August of 1967, at a meeting of the Arab League in Khartoum, the Arabs collectively delivered their answer, known as “The Three No’s”: “No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel.”

The continuing existence of Israel, the state of the despised Jews, is a constant humiliation to the Arabs. How can these Infidels, “the most vile of created beings,” manage to hold onto land which, as it was once possessed by Muslims, the “best of peoples,” must forever belong to them? And how can the Arabs allow the Jews to have a state smack in the middle of Arabdom, separating the Arab states of North Africa from the Arab states of the Middle East? Just look at a map, and imagine how the Arabs view the Jewish state as shaped like a dagger stabbing Arabdom in its heart or, to use another metaphor favored by the Arabs, Israel is a “cancer” that must be excised, not partly but completely, from the Arab body politic.

One of the chants favored by anti-Israel and pro-Hamas demonstrators in the West has been “from the river to the sea/Palestine will be free.” That is a call for the disappearance of the Jewish state in its entirety, the forced removal, or killing, of all of its Jewish inhabitants, and its replacement by a 23rd Arab state. Of course, any state of “Palestine,” if initially it was limited to Judea, Samaria, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, would be used by the Arabs as a jumping-off point for further aggression, further bloodshed, using what the Arabs call “salami tactics,” to whittle down the Jewish state before finally going in for the kill. Does Keir Starmer understand this? What would it take to convince him?