by Brendan O’Neill, spiked
The world leaders ‘recognising Palestine’ are betraying the Jewish nation and the West itself.
If you want a state, kill some Jews. That’s the sick message Sir Keir Starmer has just broadcast to the world. He says his recognition of a State of Palestine while Hamas continues to hold half-starved Jews in its dank tunnels and still dreams of annihilating the Jewish State is not a ‘reward for terror’. He isn’t fooling anyone, possibly not even himself. Somewhere in the recesses of what remains of his moral sensibility, even he must know that bestowing legitimacy on a ‘state’ part-ruled by a neo-fascist militia is an act of lethal cowardice that benefits no one but the neo-fascists.
Starmer made his Palestine statement in true neo-imperial style. In a glossy video message, he said his act of recognition is an attempt to counter the ‘growing horrors’ in Gaza and to ‘keep alive the possibility of peace and a two-state solution’. The Foreign Office has already updated its maps of Israel and the Palestinian Territories to reflect the PM’s decree that a State of Palestine should exist. Do these people think it’s still the 1920s and puffed-up ministers in London’s opulent offices of state have the ‘right’ to redraw the map of the Middle East as they see fit?
The most maddening part of Starmer’s Palestine posturing is his claim that this is about ‘keeping alive’ the hope of peace. That was also said by the other states that recognised Palestine yesterday: Australia, Canada and Portugal. Their imperious arrogance is outdone only by their geopolitical obliviousness. The idea that it assists peace to give an army of anti-Semites what it wants less than two years after it slaughtered more Jews in one day than anyone else since the Nazis is preposterous. In truth, it emboldens the enemies of humanity, the neo-medieval murderers of Hamas and their allies in the regressive Islamist project, by telling them that butchery works. Mass murder brings benefits. Rape a Jew, get a nation.