What does Theresa May think she’s doing by backing Obama’s denunciation of Israel at the UN?

“Virtue-signalling” is a useful modern term to describe a modern mania. Its greatest practitioner on the international stage is the outgoing President of the United States. Barack Obama has elevated virtue-signalling into a strategy – or rather, his substitute for a strategy. He is a one-man version of Tom Lehrer’s satirical invention, the Folk Song Army: “We are the Folk Song Army./Every one of us cares./We all hate poverty, war and injustice,/Unlike the rest of you squares.”

This is how the United States’ decision to let through United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 just before Christmas should be seen. The resolution, which reverses decades of US policy, condemns Israeli settlements in Jerusalem and the West Bank.

It will do nothing to bring about peace. Indeed, it actually undermines existing peace processes, which insist on agreement between the parties rather than imposing a solution from outside. Peace depends on reciprocity and not prejudging the issues to be negotiated. Resolution 2334 acts as if with legal authority (which of course the UN Security Council does not have). It finds against Israel on land and settlements and invites the rest of the world to do its worst – by legal proceedings and what it calls “affirmative steps”, which mean the gamut of Boycott Disinvestment and Sanctions (BDS). Why would pumped-up Palestinians or outraged Israelis now feel any incentive to come to the table? For the former, a new intifada now looks much more fun; for the latter, a retreat to the bunker must feel tempting.

But none of this concerns Mr Obama. He is leaving office. He looks forward to his political afterlife touring the world as the saintly anti-American American, and he hates poverty, war and injustice. The resolution will make some neat paragraphs in the final chapter of his memoirs.

What is harder to understand is why Theresa May’s Britain is choosing to indulge him. Last Thursday, Egypt dropped the resolution, deciding it would damage its relations with Israel and the incoming Trump presidency. This would have been our moment to kick the whole idea into touch. Instead, British diplomats reportedly helped do the Obama ancien regime’s work for it and put pressure on New Zealand to push the resolution forward. Without, it would seem, serious Cabinet-level discussion at home, officials got the whole thing over by Christmas. It was not debated at our National Security Council.

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