Keir Starmer’s blackmailing of Israel is a depraved new low

With ‘allies’ like Keir Starmer, who needs enemies? Today the PM said Britain will recognise Palestine unless Israel agrees to a ceasefire in Gaza. This, truly, is a new low for this government. It is moral blackmail masquerading as diplomacy. It is a barely veiled threat against a supposed ally. Starmer is essentially telling Israel that unless it lays down its arms, Britain will reward its enemies. This will go down in history as one of the most scandalous betrayals of a ‘friend’ of modern times.

Starmer says he will recognise Palestine in September, ahead of the United Nations General Assembly, unless Israel bows to his demands. Israel, he says, must call a ceasefire in Gaza, end the ‘appalling’ suffering there, and commit to a ‘wider peace plan’ that delivers a ‘two-state solution’. And if it doesn’t, Britain will join the 147 other nations that recognise Palestine. Shorter version: do as I say, or suffer the consequences.

The imperial arrogance is off the scale. Maybe Starmer thinks it’s the 1920s and there’s still a British Mandate for Palestine that lets London boss around the Jews and Arabs of the Middle East. To make such haughty demands of any ally at war would be bad enough – to make them of an ally that is fighting a brutal battle against an army of anti-Semites that hates the West as much as it does Jews is flat-out psychotic.

Like President Macron before him – who announced last week that France would recognise Palestine in September – Starmer has clearly not thought through his imperious actions. Where would this State of Palestine be? Who would govern it: the corrupt Palestinian Authority or the demented Jew-killers of Hamas? Starmer paid lip service to the need to disarm Hamas, but he cannot escape the sick fact that he is rewarding terrorism. That he is gifting the Palestinian territories with statehood less than two years after a neo-fascist army from those territories launched a barbarous assault on the Jews of southern Israel.

Hamas won’t hear Starmer’s criticism of its actions or his demand that it release the remaining hostages. It will only hear that killing Jews has benefits. It will only hear that its pogrom of 7 October 2023 – the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust – did more to bring about a Palestinian state than anything else over the past four decades. Starmer and Macron are truly playing with fire. They are witlessly signalling to Islamists that if you rape and murder Jews, you might just get a nation.

In fact, what Starmer has done is worse than what Macron did. Using the recognition of Palestine as a stick with which to beat Israel into submission, to force it to call off its war against Hamas, is geopolitics at its most cynical and cowardly. It will isolate the Jewish State and embolden Hamas. Hamas now knows that Israel is on the backfoot. That even its old friends are refusing to stand by it. ‘One more push and Israel will be fucked and Palestine will be a state’ – that’s what these Jew-killers will glean from Starmer’s depraved blackmailing of their enemy.

And why is he doing this? To appease his backbenchers. To try to stave off a rebellion by his MPs. To hush the Israelophobic left. He is sacrificing an ally at the altar of narrow self-interest. He is heaping pressure on the Jewish State as it fights for its life against an army of anti-Semites in order that he might enjoy an easier ride in parliament. These are Chamberlain levels of spinelessness. Starmer has just announced to the world that Britain is an unreliable ally. Even if you’re invaded by an army of racists and your people are held hostage, we will turn on you eventually. For shame, Sir Keir.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy