Following the publication of a letter to the Prime Minister from a number of Conservative MPs, including myself, which requested that the Government recognise a state of ‘Palestine’, I have a received a considerable correspondence.
I signed the letter with the following reservations (though, those reservations were not in the letter). First, that recognition would need to be finessed and presented in such a way as to ensure that it could not be seen as a triumph or reward for the terrorist outrage by Hamas. Second, I recognise the difficulty for UK government policy, when there is no government in Palestine, and our policy has always been to recognise legitimate governments rather than states. And, in any event, there is, as yet, no agreement as to where that Palestinian state would be. Nevertheless, I do not believe that these difficulties are insurmountable, given the urgency with which the issue needs to be pursued.
That urgency arises from the fact that recognition of a Palestinian state has been a longstanding objective of UK policy, but that the opportunity for delivering this objective is closing fast.
The rate of Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank Occupied Territories is such that, whatever land remains, will be insufficient to form the core of an economically viable Palestinian State.
Equally, the impunity with which aggressive settler violence has been tolerated over recent years, is merely one of a number of indications that the Government of Israel has no intention of allowing a Palestinian state in that territory and, on the contrary, that it may even be preparing to annex it.
Inevitably, the immediacy of war in Gaza clouds prospects for the survival of a policy to recognise a Palestinian state.
Prospects for peace have been missed in the past, when the leadership in Israel was so much more benign, but the Palestinians were divided and poorly led. The very existence of Hamas is an enduring element of that failed Palestinian leadership.
Gaza had so many prospects for a prosperous future had it not become an armed prison camp under Hamas’s the brutal and intolerant regime. When Hamas launched its attack on unsuspecting and peaceful Israeli citizens on 7th October 2023, the extremity of its barbarity can have left the Hamas leadership in no doubt that they would reap a whirlwind, bringing devastating suffering to their own people. But, as so often, they attached a higher priority to radicalizing a new generation.
As Golda Meir, the 4th Prime Minister of Israel (1969-74), once observed “We will only have peace when they love their children more than they hate us”
Nevertheless, we cannot be silent whilst ferocity of Israel’s war on Hamas defies all humanitarian norms in its impact on the Palestinian civilian population. It is for that reason the Commons gives a weekly drubbing to unfortunate Foreign Office ministers, as scapegoats, for our failure to restrain Israel.
Recognition of a Palestinian state, will not cerate one. It would be a gesture, but it would be an impottant one nevertheless